Discover why the first thing you need to change is your workforce

A not-very-helping hand

I recently caught up with a progressive Client Relationship Manager who had just come from a meeting with Noall (not his real name), one of her customer CEOs. Knowing that she was meeting me next, she thought to ask him one of my favourite questions: ‘How do you prepare your people for change?’ Without hesitation, Noall reportedly clicked his fingers and waved his hand dismissively in the air. And that, apparently, was the extent of his plan for mobilising and nurturing his organisation’s most strategic asset in the execution of its most risky and disruptive activity.

And yet, despite Noall’s hopelessly naïve and/or unempathetic approach, he is still the CEO, and his organisation is still trading. However, in a world that is increasingly complex and uncertain, the only advantage of having such a lack of focus on preparing people for change is that for weeks months and even years, Noall will have no idea his organisation is falling behind until it falls over.

Not exceptional leadership

His response (although extreme) is not dissimilar to that of many leaders I’ve met. They – subconsciously perhaps – believe that employees are lucky to work there and should just accept any and all change that the organisation’s brightest minds have formulated, without the need to question or resist. This is a triumph of IQ over EQ, an all too common result despite the fact that’s it’s now 20 years since Daniel Goleman brought the latter to prominence. What he gave us was the understanding that it’s important to manage people’s emotions in order to maximise their performance – and nowhere is that truer than in the field of change.

Bad medicine

Leaders like Noall default to the (not so) rallying cry of ‘we need change now, and our people are either going to have to get on the bus or off it’. Well, it certainly has a digital element to it, but it’s hardly 21st century leadership. They might as well put a line in the people section of their strategy that states ‘to prepare for change, all employees will be prescribed a concrete pill and told to harden up’. That got us through the first industrial revolution, but now we’re onto our fourth one, we’ve become resistant to that change medicine. These days, we expect leaders who could not care more.

Here’s the bottom line:

People resist change. We’ve been genetically modified over tens of thousands of years to knee-jerk respond to it as a threat to our security. It takes time and effort for most people to learn the counter-intuitive skills needed to raise their adaptability intelligence. And once they can embrace change itself, they can change anything on the strategic ‘to do’ list.

The only organisations that will survive will be the ones that can keep up with, or ahead of their external environment. And to do that they will require an adaptive workforce. Building such a force will require quite a bit more thought, preparation, and care than a hand gesture.

Please feel free to get in touch, and I look forward to connecting with you soon!