Change: Thrive On It Or Put It In The Tip Jar - Leadership Qualities Required To Foster A Culture That Embraces Change (Part III)

Creating A Culture That Embraces Change Starts with Its Leaders.

This shouldn’t be a because you set the tone, the tempo, and the mood for the team you lead. But man it’s hard. You need to in some honest introspection to fully understand what is driving you and how you want to hone that focus. You need to interrogate your motives and your actions and do so on a regular basis. To get there, here are the key questions I ask myself …

• Are you passionate about your business? Do you love what you do and do you make it known? If you don’t truly about the work you do and the enterprise you work for then it will be virtually impossible to give it your all and be open to he whole idea of evolving both yourself and your business. When you love what you do it shows, it is so others want to work with and for you.
• Do you have a clear of where you want to go with your business? Are you passionate about that vision? Are you willing to change, to develop yourself as well as the organization to make that happen? Collin Powell said it right, “If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they will start to fall down and get .” Worse I think you will have high employee turnover. 
• Do you want to manage your organization or develop it? Notice, I said develop not grow. Everyone wants to grow his/her business. The question is how. Do you prefer doing what you already do better or do you prefer doing new things? Do you get more satisfaction learning about successful cost containment initiatives or initiatives? 
• Are you innately curious? Directly related to the whole notion of being a developer vs. a manager is curiosity. Here’s where that old saying “What if?” comes into . How much time do you spend thinking “What If?” vs. ’What now?” Does “What if?” excite you or does it just feel like more work coming your way? 
• Do you put the customer in the center of all your decision-making? Do you start meetings with how the customer thinks, feels and acts related to the issue at hand? Do you end meetings asking whether decisions made today will positively impact the customer? Do you prioritize initiatives based on the impact they will have on your customers? Is your customer feedback loop robust enough to provide the detailed information necessary to fuel these decisions? 
• Are you self-reflective? Can you look at yourself, your attitude and your behavior and be honest about what’s working and what’s not? To be a great leader you need to be honest about who you are, what you are good at and what you are not, what you can change and what you can’t. 
• Do you exercise self-control and stamina to persevere against naysayers, inspiring them to come along with you? This is hard work and it requires you to “Keep on Keepin on” even when you feel deflated by obstacles to change. 
• Are you flexible? How easily do you adapt to changing conditions? “The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails”. (John Maxwell) Which one are you? As Dick Karp, longtime creative director at Grey Global once more simply said to me, “Champions adjust”. This is a mantra I share with anyone who will listen. 
• Is your management style command & or inspire & influence? To get the best out of the people who work for you, (as well as the people you work with and you work for) you must lead by example. Business developers inspire and influence because they embrace change and “What if” excites them, business managers because they want to maintain the status quo; “It got me this far so why change now”. 
• Do you have good people skills? “You have to like people to be a good Leader” (Richard Branston). You need to be able to inspire people to want to come with you vs. just make them come along because they work for you. If you don’t have these skills already, then consider getting a really good coach, ideally one that has some acting experience to help you develop them. (I once hired a coach for a team member who made that guy try to get her excited about an idea he had through a glass wall!)
• How much emotional intelligence do you have? According to Psychology Today emotional intelligence is generally said to include two skills: emotional awareness; the ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problem solving;; the ability to manage emotions, which includes regulating your own emotions and those of others. While identified in the early 1990s it has fueled current leadership theories that define great leaders as ones who show “transformative qualities”. Transformative leaders can act as models that inspire other people by their of change. They have charisma, promote creativity and innovation, develop an environment in which their workers feel supported, and convey ambitious goals to their workers (Cavazotte et al., 2012). “When emotional intelligence (EQ) first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into the broadly held that EQ was the sole source of success.” (Travis Bradberry). Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. The connection is so strong that 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence. “No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it.” (Jack Welch.). Emotional intelligence is that “something” in each of us that affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results.

These are all really tough questions. But the answers will help you figure out how you need to evolve your orientation to embrace change. So, now let’s get into it … Let’s talk specifics about the leadership actions that fuel an environment where change is embraced. 

What organizational developers do that organizational managers don’t

First, hire smarter people – not smart, but smarter, people who know something / have skills you don’t. This is one of the biggest tests of leadership. For many it is so difficult because they were always taught that leaders are supposed to know more than their subordinates. This is scary stuff. It takes real confidence in yourself and the people you hire to surround yourself with people who know things you don’t and then trust them to do the right thing. You don’t have to have all the answers you just have to ask the right questions and provide the right framework.Most people want to hire people who do the same thing they do because 

1. They already know what they know (much easier and safer to judge performance). 
2. And because, yes, it’s scary – you don’t know what they know.

Well perhaps you should hire one or two people who will do what you do to insure specific task bench strength but the majority of your hires should be people who know things and can do things you can’t – in my experience these are the people who are most likely to bring you break through new ideas to evolve your business (the ones who you hire to do what you do/did will likely be the ones who bring you ways of doing what you already do more efficiently). 

Think about it, if you want to do what you have always done better, then hire an optimizer, and be sure he/she spends the first period at their new post learning all the what’s and how’s of your business and help accelerate their learning by guiding them through it all. If you want to do different things, then hire people who know how to do things you don’t, have smarts in areas you don’t. Inform them but don’t guide them, let them guide you. (Conductors can’t play every instrument in the orchestra but they do know how to inspire their musicians to do what they do best). But, it is also a lot more interesting because your team can teach you things. 

It’s here we might get into a discussion about whether I mean smarter or more knowledgeable. Well, to be sure I mean smarter. As my colleague at Macy’s used to remind me, “Knowledge is frequency over time”. I don’t think that’s enough, I mean people who are smarter, they have expertise you don’t have. They will teach you and challenge you and the other members of your team to up their game. 

This is a big leap the first time you do it but I promise you it is wildly stimulating from then on.

And, second, when you do hire great people, adopt the right management style to set the tone for the kind of culture you want and to keep them motivated to go the extra mile.

How does your team feel?

Managing to Inspire Change

The way you manage has everything to do with creating an environment that encourages fresh thinking, a culture that thrives on change. So,

• Listen to them. Too often we spend most of the time with our teams trying to impart to them what we know so they can do their job better, right? But hey, didn’t you hire smart people? Spend more time listening and inspiring and less time guiding and you will get better ideas. Sure you ought to be sure they are informed but that’s different from guiding them based on the past. And, when I say listen to them, I mean all of them. Often some of the best new ideas for change can come from the youngest and least experienced on your team. It’s about asking the right questions and really listening to what you hear in response. Encourage them to speak up and let their opinions be known; create a place on your internal web where they can share ideas and build off each others’ ideas; have breakfast with them once in a while to draw them out.
• Trust them to do the right thing even if it isn’t what would you have done Most leaders would say yes to the first part of this but that’s the easy part. The hard part is believing in your people even when they want to do something you wouldn’t do. Now I am not suggesting you turn a blind eye to what they want to do. But, I am saying …
• Let them do their jobs. Micromanagement is a telltale sign of being a business manager not a business developer. You said you were ready or you wouldn’t be reading this. So, LET GO. Sure, you must give them support and guidance but never command and control. Steve Jobs was a big proponent of this, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people and let them tell us what to do.” So, what are you waiting for? You hired smart people, you are listening to them, now let them fly and be sure to remind them that they are doing what you want them to.
• Encourage them to take risks and work with them when they make mistakes: the CEO of Citigroup’s Global Consumer Group used to say in front of the entire management team, “Make mistakes just don’t make the same one twice”. The CEO of Macy’s, used to try and encourage risk taking by publicly recognizing “Noble Failures” and what we learned from them. This is critical to creating an environment where people feel appreciated for sharing new thinking/trying new things and recognize that there will be risks as well as rewards for that thinking. To encourage their executives to step out of their comfort zone, some companies make part of year-end bonuses dependent upon their executives trying something meaningfully different – most don’t. But don’t wait until the end of the year to reward them and don’t rely on money alone. Unleash “compliment power”. “Ata boy/girl” is more powerful than most think. People want to know how they are doing, they want to hear when they are doing great and they want to know when and how they can do better. So that whole notion of “fast feedback” is critical – which brings me to …
• Reward them emotionally: financial compensation is important but building a cohesive team that wants to constantly strive for excellence requires letting them know how much they mean to you on a regular basis. You need to do so frequently and publicly. So, get out from behind your desk, wander down the hall and let someone know how good a job they are doing – and do it so others can hear you. Use your staff meetings to do it. Staff meetings are probably the most underutilized meetings in business. . Typical staff meetings are an hour, focusing on financial and sales reports and your update on what your bosses are thinking, doing and asking with 5 minutes at the end for going around the table asking what if anything else people want “to share”. Well that’s just not maximizing their potential. The more senior you become the more senior your team will become and the more your team members will have jobs that don’t involve working with other team members all the time – they will be running different functions in the company that don’t interact all that often – they don’t always know what he others are doing. So, use those staff meetings to encourage interaction. If all that financial and sales reporting does take that much time then make your staff meetings 90 minutes long and dedicate the last 30 minutes to meaningful sharing. Each meeting have one of your team members update the group on one of the initiatives they are working on that other team members might not be fully versed in. And be sure that these updates include successes as well as failures and the learning that comes out of them. This will help people feel comfortable taking risks. This will reap great rewards. It will provide meaningfully public recognition for that team member and make the whole team feel that much more connected. It will also turn your team members into advocates for their colleagues’ work – apostles who spread the word about their new initiatives throughout the organization.
• Reframe your role, from specialist to salesman: you heard that right. You hired a bunch of brilliant Subject Matter Experts (SMEs as consultants like to call them). Your job now is to help package their ideas and sell them in to the organization. Your job is to “walk the halls” of senior management letting them know what your team is up to. I will never forget when Anne MacDonald, the then CMO of Citigroup’s Consumer Group, said that to me. I can tell you it completely changed my approach to leadership and the role I had to play with senior management for the rest of my career.
• And finally evolve your team -- know when to motivate and when to reshape your team: this is often the most rewarding but arguably the hardest part. But it is critical that you be honest about the team you have vs. the team you need, always looking for ways to strengthen it. In you gut you know those folks who are rock stars and those who are not. You know who is amazing and who is a journeyman. You know who is there because they really blow your mind and who is there just because he/she is a friend or someone you’ve worked with a longtime or is an organizational lifer. A passionate contributor or just someone you like. Well as someone once said to me, “If you don’t have enough friends go get some, this is about the work.” This is about building your team of rock stars. So you need to take the tough steps; try to motivate the ones you think you can and let go of the people you can’t.
• First, the easier part, how do you motivate the folks who have the skills but are not living up to their potential? Now there will be a range here from those who are just going through the motions but could work harder to those who are really working hard but need your help to go the next step.
• For those just going through the motions; My suggestion, meet with them, get them to tell you how they feel it is going, hear them out and take note of where their may be misalignment. Try to show them where that misalignment and ultimately get to a point where you can tell them you feel like you are failing them because you are not motivating them to do their best and ask them what you could be doing differently you help them. Humbling but honest. I promise you that even if they have no ideas and they say they will go away and think about it, you will see dramatic differences in their work almost immediately. If they do have thoughts even better, you have some tangible things to work with and work on with them.
• For those working really hard but need your guidance and inspiration to go further, this is where some fun coaching comes in – arguably one of the most satisfying coaching experiences you will have. For these folks, when they came to you with their ideas, when you discuss them in team meetings, you need to ask and guide them in answering

1. Now that you know this, if it were your business, what would you do (differently)?
2. How would you make that happen/ what would be you plan? How long would it take? How much would it cost? How will we know if it is working and what changes we need to make to fine-tune it?

This will have at least three major benefits;

1. It will make them feel rightfully respected – you care what they think, you believe in them,
2. It will give them the feeling of ownership, you are making them feel that they can make a difference and
3. They will work that much harder and their work will be that much better.

Now for the really hard part – letting go of someone who is truly amazing but he/she is not doing work that is aligned with your vision for the way forward. Difficult and uncomfortable as it is you have to be prepared to make these kinds of decisions and own them.

A manager I once knew (and she was a manager not a business developer) had to let some very talented people go but blamed it on the consultant the company had hired to help them rethink their business strategy. “You know we are evolving and have hired X Consultancy to help us. They feel there is no role for you going forward. So, …” Doesn’t that just make your blood boil? Those are not the words of a strong leader; they are the words of a big mealy-mouthed weanie. Man up or woman up and do the right thing. This is your group, your decision and your future; so own it.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, in this instance, what goes around came around – a year later the CEO informed this manager that there was no role for her in the company going forward.

Putting It All Together

There have been many analogies about what leadership is and what makes for a great leader. Sports and coaching are the most common but not my favorite. Although not new and cited by others, the notion of conducting an orchestra rings most true to me. Some years back at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Italy, Talgam, the authority on orchestral leadership, put forth the idea that through understanding the working methods of great conductors, you can learn leadership principles – I told you this is all learned behavior.

Talgam notes, “A conductor out of the chaos can create order. Noise becomes music.” An orchestra conductor faces the ultimate leadership challenge: to create pure harmony without muttering a word. A business leader has a similar job -- to create perfect “harmony” in his/her business. In a TEDTalk, Talgam tells the story of different conductors and their different styles.

There is the command and control conductor (Riccardo Muti), who led through authority that resulted in disgruntled employees. In fact, he received a letter signed by all 700 musicians of La Scala asking him to resign. Why? Because he didn't let his musicians develop. They felt they were being treated as instruments, not as partners. You know the type -- authoritative bosses, who lead by command and control but have extremely unhappy employees. Remember you now have the guts to hire people who have skills you don’t – in some areas they are smarter than you. Let them do their thing.

Talgam goes on to describe a few more “types” of conductors until he showcases the “perfect” conductor someone who allows each musician to express himself freely, yet takes full control to ensure nothing goes wrong. Talgam even shows a clip when things go wrong for this “perfect” conductor his trombonist goes off. He doesn't panic but gently re-directs him back to the right path, ensuring harmony prevails in his orchestra. (This is his patience and self control kicking in.

An orchestra conductor bears the same challenges as a leader of an organization -- trying to create perfect harmony among the different forces in your business to ensure your organization doesn’t just creates “beautiful” products and profits but emotionally charged experiences for your customers, experiences they will recommend to others.. According to Talgam, the best orchestra conductor understands his people, allows them to develop, treats them with respect, and yet gently nudges them towards the goal of making beautiful music.

As a leader, you might have a strategy as well written as Beethoven’s 5th, but if your orchestra is not well conducted, then the execution will be more noise than music. Here are the Top 10 lessons of leadership from an orchestra conductor (from Talgam and Michael Hyatt's piece on the Symphony Conductor):

1. Great conductors always start with a musical score and a clear musical “vision” of how it should sound. Do you have a clear vision of where you want to take your business? Do you have a plan (musical score) that will help you achieve your vision
2. Practice. The best conductors constantly rehearse no matter how great the conductor is –they do it alone as well as with the orchestra. Are you practicing your leadership? Are you working with your team to practice their presentations until they produce beautiful, unforgettable music or are you just doing technical run-throughs”? Do you assume that you can just produce great compelling and inspiring presentations that everyone wants to get behind (“music”) without practice? Even Einstein would say, “Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
3. Great conductors get the best out of their people. They ensure their musicians feel important, accepted and secure. A conductor needs his musicians. Likewise, a leader needs his followers and needs to take time to develop his following. Your employees need to know they matter and they make a difference, not just at their yearly reviews but also on a regular basis. They need and want ongoing feedback to continue to feel like they are making progress and to continually improve their game. Do you regularly let your team members know how much you appreciate them?
4. Great conductors lead with their heart and are passionate about their work. Are you passionate about the vision and mission of your organization? Do you lead with passion and conviction? A leaders' passion is infectious and generally ripples through their organization.
5. Great conductors are aware of their every gesture and its impact. They have to be precise or their musicians will not be able to follow. Everything they do is intentional. Are you an intentional leader? Remember your employees are looking to you for direction and so they scrutinize everything they hear and see you do.
6.  Great conductors share the spotlight. When the concert is over, and the audience is clapping, the conductor turns to the audience and takes a bow. Great conductors immediately turn to their orchestra, inviting them to take the limelight. Without his orchestra, the conductor is nothing. Without a following a leader is nothing. Do you share your leadership glory with your team? Are you a leader that gives credit back to the team?
7. Great conductors are not super-humans. They don't do everything. In fact, they delegate everything to others who are better and more skilled. The concertmaster usually does the pre-concert tuning and others do other jobs that require skills the conductor doesn’t have. The conductor only appears on stage when it is time for him to lead. Great leaders know when to lead and when to let others lead. They delegate accordingly. Do you know when and more importantly when not to take the lead?
8. The conductor focuses on his task and keeps his back to the audience. Great leaders similarly keep their mind's eye on things they are facing rather than worry about what is being said or done behind them. This is about having the focus and the stamina to stay the course. Do you have laser-like focus?
9. The conductor usually stands on a platform and is visible to every single member of his orchestra. This is to ensure the orchestra stays in alignment. Are you a leader who is visible to your employees and your teams? Or are you just spending time with your team and causing misalignment across the business?
10. Great conductors lead. Most musicians in the orchestra are much more talented than the conductor. They are experts in their musical instruments – subject matter experts as we would call people with specialized skills in business. They look to their conductor not for technical advice but for leadership. The same happens in organizations. Most leaders are NOT subject matter experts. What they do have is a clear and passionate vision; they inspire, create excitement and lead. Most employees look up to them for leadership. Are you that kind of leader?

All of this is hard work but the benefits far exceed the work required. Part 4 of this series '' Successful Change Agent Team members" will be published in the coming months.

Read more at https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2013/03/30/leadership-lessons-from-an-orchestra-conductor/#hwlTefb7zQ1DPe03.99