Compliance And Coercion Are Inferior Implementation Strategies

Overview: Building on the previous d3&t ("drop everything & train") blog posts and webinars, this article focuses on the mindsets and competencies of business leaders driving transformation. Everybody already knows that command and control leaders fail miserably when it comes to building sustainable companies with cultures of empowerment, collaboration, inclusion, creativity, innovation, smart-risk taking, etc...and yet the status quo of directive leadership continues to be the protected and preferred corporate norm - the dominant power structure from the "empire era" remains. This post offers insight, frameworks, questions and resources to explore, that can help re-orient and re-focus our attention on the things that matter most when dealing with change and driving better change outcomes.

Compliance and coercion are inferior implementation strategies when it comes to transformation and dealing with complexity; they are counterproductive and deliver suboptimal results. The default (reactive) old way doesn't work anymore. Not transforming, is a result of a series of choices that delay our ability to make progress in capability building, culture changing and getting to the complex problem-solving. The old way is not the best way forward. Choices that privilege the default old way or protect the old system, undermine the new strategy. Not transforming is a choice - not an accident (just ask Nokia and the others on that growing list).

"I'm actually really good at having all the answers myself and telling other people what to do...I've built a pretty good career that way...I'm doing just fine leading the old way...I got this...(besides, the new way makes me uncomfortable)."

Transformation leadership isn't about you -its about the people watching you.

Some company leaders are overt (and some are more subtle, perhaps unaware) about their intentions to drive transformation with their compliance-based leadership style and stand behind their command and control intentions to force the company to transform, despite the contrary advice from learning and development (L&D) and culture experts. And why not? “Compliance works for most other things in our culture — it always has,” says the fixed mindset. But doing it the old way, just doing it “harder” isn’t working.

According to most CEOs, their leaders are still not equipped and not shifting quickly enough to effectively respond to the world’s sweeping changes in the market, the workplace and the workforce.

Compliance only gets you about 15% of the people’s engagement and energy that is necessary to transform and differentiate in a way that’s meaningful to the market. To truly transform and deliver on the new corporate strategy+purpose+values - we need 115% of people’s intelligence, creativity, courage and commitment.

Leaders today have to be able to create the environment where the transformation (strategy) can BE more empowering, more real (more operationalized) and therefore more effective (sooner) than the competitors. Whether getting there makes us uncomfortable or not.

The leader’s job is to facilitate the transformation energy of the team to focus and operate with greater levels of creativity, collaboration, courage, empowerment, emotional intelligence, shared values, commitment to each other and to a purpose they believe in.

We need to know how to facilitate, convene and build environments that are safe enough and challenging enough to cultivate change.

Leaders today need to become transformation leadership experts themselves (with strengthened transformation muscles). We can’t delegate that to L&D or anyone else. We have to become experts at learning to learn, WITH our teams. "Don’t just be a better leader; be a transformation leader," I always tell myself and my fellow travelers.

Compliance to a strategy (to a mission/purpose) isn’t going to be enough, no matter how awesome your next level growth strategy is. But most of us will choose to learn this the hard way. Save the company from getting too far into the “Oh, crap! We waited too long to do the deep work of transformation”which happens far too often with strategic implementation efforts that involve service delivery business models (where people are the differentiators). Many companies will find themselves dropping down the backside of the sigmoid curve into the “Inverted A,” (Oh, crap!” strategy) as the competition pulls further and further ahead. Many will recognize too late that they need to drastically change their corporate lifestyle habits in service of shifting the system to support the new master plan, next level "B.” But until transformation is adopted as an enterprisewide cultural endeavor, we will find that the roots of the old system always win. The system always wins. Until we choose to change the system.

A command-and-control culture change effort won’t help most people see or buy into your next level strategy “B" as a viable solution. Even most senior leaders themselves won’t necessarily believe the new strategy will really work let alone fully participate in it evidenced by their minimal level of commitment to training and transforming their own behavior or building new capabilities of their own to align with the new plan. They typically are too attached to the current level "Plan A" and the comfort of the known/old success formula. According to most CEOs, their leadership teams are struggling leading the change - showing up unconsciously incompetent (and/or consciously incompetent) when it comes to leading through the transition. Thus their current system inertia will make it difficult to mobilize the resources toward an optimal (adequate) implementation of the new strategy. 

According to most CEOs, their very own population of leaders is still not equipped and not shifting quickly enough to effectively respond to the world’s sweeping changes in the workplace and the workforce.

It is evident in the repeated internal difficulties faced when implementing even the most fundamental growth strategies connected to innovation, customer centricity, customer experience (CX) and value chain (stakeholder/partnership) reconfiguration.

At the “Inverted A,” stage, the window of healthy transformation has closed. These companies will eventually transform (or die), but here the transformation will be more costly and include additional (unnecessary) suffering and permanent damage to parts of the system, because the leaders waited too long to train and properly transform the system they were in charge of.    

Consider Changing Your Implementation Strategy Answers...by Asking Yourself Better Questions

If you are responsible for business strategy implementation and the transformation initiatives designed to support it, ask yourself these questions:

1)   Do you believe your winning transformation strategy (your three- to five-year next level vision) will work? Do you believe it is market ready, market leading and awesome? Of course. You and your team designed it, so lets go with "yes" - if executed well, it will deliver the business results you want.

2)   How different is this new strategy from what you’re doing now? How different do your organizational capabilities (cultural competencies) have to be to deliver on this?

• If you answer, “it’s not that different,” then the question is, why do you think it’s transformational let alone expect it to deliver different results?
• If you answer, “it’s very different,” then it exposes the transformation gap. Exactly how far away are you from being able to deliver on it? If delivering that would be a metaphorical “home run,” what base are you and your culture on now? Or find any metaphor to help express the gap.

3)   How soon do you need to be in market delivering this transformation to realize a return? How many years of fulfilling this position will it take to generate advantage in the market? That answer will tell you how soon you need to be consciously competent and running on all next-level cylinders.

4)   How dissatisfied are you with your current-level results compared to the potential desired next-level results? That answer will tell you how hard you need to train to close the lifestyle gap and to deliver on timing.

How much training and how soon we need to train varies, depending on your context, your priorities, your desired results and, of course, your level of dissatisfaction with your current-level results.

One thing doesn’t vary: the longer you wait to start the change, the harder and more costly that change gets. That's why d3&t is the name of this series of posts - "drop everything and train!"

How Leading Companies Are Training For Transformation

The questions we're asking: “How do I change my culture?” and “How do I train for transformation?” are often a disguise for “Should I train?” It’s often a stalling technique for “Do I really have to change that much? I’m all for change, but does it have to disrupt my day? Do I really have to admit that I don’t know how to lead transformation effectively, in order to learn it?"

Better questions to ask ourselves: "What am I willing to do to be a more effective leader today, in the face of complexity? Am I willing to be a transformation myself?

The path to adult development and transformation is not a “black box”; we know what to do and how to do it. How can we help each other be more ready to do it? I’m not suggesting anyone should do anything they don’t want to do. But we all should consciously make the choice to do what’s necessary to transform (or not) — and we should consciously realize and accept that if we don’t do the deep, long-term work, we are not going to progress to the next level.

NOT transforming is a choice, NOT an accident.

See NOKIA case study and now famous CEO quote "we didn't do anything wrong but somehow we lost." Ziyad Jawabra writes, “They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival.”

There is no shortage of real-world proof and examples of ways to do it successfully. There are tons of documented, detailed company examples to learn from and observe in person, or online Wikis/communities, on YouTube, in podcasts, in articles and in books:

• “An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization” by Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, Matthew L. Miller, Andy Fleming and Deborah Helsing
• “Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness” by Frederic Laloux
• “Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results” by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams
• “Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business” by John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia
• “Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values” by Fred Kofman/Axialent
• “The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks” by Joshua Cooper Ramo
• “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World” by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
• “Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty” by Nick Obolensky
• “The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance” by Steven Kotler
• “Leading Well From Within: A Neuroscience and Mindfulness-Based Framework for Conscious Leadership” by Daniel Friedland MD
• “Learning in Landscapes of Practice” edited by Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Mark Fenton-O’Creevy, Steven Hutchinson, Chris Kubiak and Beverly Wenger-Trayner
• “Next-Level Leadership” whitepaper by Rand Stagen and Brett Thomas
• “The Way of the SEAL: Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed” by Mark Divine with Allyson Edelhertz Machate
• “The Power of TED” by David Emerald
• “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport

The leaders of these sample companies are working on individual and collective de/reprogramming (not for everything — just some things). They are working on upgrading the operating system. When they do both of these “simple but not easy” things, everything works better and can more freely shift toward supporting the new strategy in ways that will matter most — in ways that are beyond what leaders can envision at the onset.

They are making it a very tangible, quantified, measured endeavor. But the measurements will mostly be grounded in leading indicators that illuminate what’s working in their training regimen, what’s not working, what wants to adapt into something different, and what might help course correct. It won’t usually help measure ROI in the short term or help you justify the early years of investment in transformation. These companies know they’re playing the long game when it comes to transformation. There’s no doubt you’ll keep some of your standard KPIs and performance baselines as well, but the outcome-based impact will only come from realizing the value of actually operationalizing the transformed lifestyle in market.

The majority of its impact on the strategy itself comes to bear in the maintenance stage of Prochaska’s “Stages of Change” model…after the community is already operating from a consciously competent stage, delivering on the elevated attributes of the desired next level.

These companies are focused on the individual, the team/culture, along with the story/purpose of the organization, in order to deliver it in the market in a way that the customer consistently experiences it. If the individual or the team doesn’t buy in, believe it and wholeheartedly work on transforming default habits into new ones, the customer won’t experience any change.

You can’t give to others what you don’t have to give yourself.

Transformation happens in community. Transforming companies do it together, across the I/WE/IT dimensions — not just the IT. They focus on all four of Ken Wilber quadrants, not just policy, procedure, tools and structure.

Information in this series of articles is influenced by a mash-up of communities, friends, colleagues, clients, authors, teachers, "next level" experts and fellow journeypeople whom I love to train with in person or virtually including: complex adaptive leadership expert Nick Obolensky, vertical learning experts at the Stagen Integral Leadership Academy, David Emerald and Donna Zajonc, Bob Anderson at the Leadership Circle, Peter Block, IRONMAN & Pastor Steve Troglio from Teen Reach Inc & the Firehouse Chapel, Dr. Daniel Friedland, all of the conscious business/transformation experts at Axialent, immunity to change experts Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey from the Harvard Graduate School, Colonel Bernard Banks from West Point (now Kellogg), Michael Novak at CEDIM & Idea Couture Latam, Trudy Bourgeois & Greg Magennis at the Center for Workforce Excellence, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal from the Flow Genome Project, Michael Ostrolenk & Mark Divine at SEALFIT.com, BarbellShrugged.com, innovation experts at Maddock Douglas, leaders within the Conscious Capitalism community, "communities of practice" experts Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, and the research of complexity gap specialist Dr. Aidan Thorton…etc.