Human Resource

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JWI 556 (1196) Page 1 of 7

JWI 556 Leading Change by Putting People First

Week Ten Lecture Notes

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JWI 556 (1196) Page 2 of 7

SUSTAINING THE CHANGE AND KEEPING PEOPLE FIRST

What It Means Change is about innovation and growth, and if you’re going to keep on winning, it’s never done. Successful change leaders are those who can build a culture that embraces change as a way of life rather than viewing it as an ordeal that has to be survived. If you truly believe that people are the most important part of any organization, then you should welcome your role as a leader who helps to build an organization committed to putting people first. Why It Matters

• If you lose sight of the forces that undermine a people first approach to change, you undermine your organization’s ability to attract, develop, and retain the best and brightest.

• Committing to finding a better way every day is the only path to building a sustainable competitive advantage.

• Continuing your own professional growth is the best move you can make to help others and to build the HR leadership role you and your employer deserve.

“If you’re going to win, and keep on winning, you have to recognize that change is continuous and is never done.”

Jack Welch

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FORCES THAT UNDERMINE A “PEOPLE FIRST” APPROACH TO LEADING CHANGE

As noted in a previous course, “building a powerful workforce of smart, talented, and engaged people is a never-ending journey. You don’t get to sit back (at least not for long) and bask in the glory of what you have done” (JWI 522). To keep up with the transformations that organizations need to undergo, we must develop leaders who embrace change AND understand that the only way to lead meaningful change is through putting people first. This is a point that draws us back to Kotter’s distinction between management and leadership:

“Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we will have to become much more skilled at creating leaders. Without enough leaders, the vision, communication, and empowerment that are at the heart of transformation will simply not happen well enough or fast enough to satisfy our needs and expectations.”

Leading Change, p. 173 These new change leaders must have a vision and the ability to predict the future; they must have a special capacity to anticipate the radically unexpected. They must be driven to empower their people to do more and be their best.

“Many of the same kinds of organizational attributes required to develop leadership are also needed to empower employees. Those facilitating factors would include flatter hierarchies, less bureaucracy, and a greater willingness to take risks. In addition, constant empowerment for a constantly changing world works best in organizations in which senior managers focus on leadership and in which they delegate most managerial responsibilities to lower levels.”

Leading Change, p. 175 While doing this, however, change leaders can’t be blind to the forces that undermine a “people first” approach. These forces include, but are not limited to:

• Greed – not paying people what they are worth or giving them opportunities to grow • Being more comfortable in the role of a manager barking orders than in leadership inviting others

to forge the future with you • Lack of vision – inability to see what’s coming and to inspire others to meet the future head on • Failure to elevate HR to a position of prominence in the C-Suite • Not understanding that people are the most important part of any organization and not getting

every brain in the game • Hiding behind complex org charts and bureaucracies that impede communication and the free

flow of ideas • Being too busy managing the day-to-day grind to engage others in the joy of building a winning

organization

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BUILDING A CULTURE THAT EMBRACES FINDING A BETTER WAY EVERY DAY

“Truly adaptive firms with adaptive cultures are awesome competitive machines. They produce superb products and services faster and better. They run circles around bloated bureaucracies. Even when they have far fewer resources and patents or less market share, they compete and win again and again.”

Leading Change, p. 180 As an HR leader, you and your team have a critical role to play in developing this culture. You can work with business-unit leaders to help them set up Work-Out sessions to find better ways to get business done. You can work with finance departments to find better ways to reward people who deliver cost saving and revenue increasing wins. You can help all managers and leaders deliver more effective performance feedback and talent development to their teams. You can help those leaders define the winning behaviors that can be observed, communicated, taught, measured, and rewarded. While an organization can learn and accomplish a lot over the course of a single major change effort, one-off events are rarely enough for new behaviors to take hold in a sustainable way. It’s just not enough for people throughout the organization to deeply learn the skills and mindsets needed to drive change. And it is certainly not enough to keep up in today’s rapidly shifting business environment. The work of change leaders is not just to navigate their organizations through a major change. It is also to identify, lead, and embed change after change after change to create an organization that is innovative, flexible, and forward-looking – one that never stops learning. Kotter says that if the rate of external change continues to climb, then the urgency rate of the winning twenty-first-century organization will have to be medium to high all the time. The twentieth-century model of lengthy periods of calm or complacency being punctuated by shorter periods of hectic activity will not work. A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent, in which people are always looking for both problems and opportunities, and in which the norm is “do it now.”

“Typical employees in typical firms today still receive little data on their performance, the performance of their group or department, and the performance of the firm. To both create these systems and use their output productively, corporate cultures in the twenty-first century will have to value candid discussions far more than they do today. Norms associated with political politeness, with nonconformational diplomaticese, and with killing-the-messenger-of bad-news will have to change. The volume knob on the dishonest dialog channel will have to be turned way down.” “The combination of valid data from a number of external sources, broad communication of that information inside an organization, and a willingness to deal honestly with the feedback will go a long way toward squashing complacency.”

Leading Change, pp. 170-171

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LEVERAGING WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED ABOUT LEADING CHANGE TO CONTINUE GROWING IN YOUR CAREER

Kotter asserts that lifelong learning, a trait once seen in relatively few people, is the hallmark of the most successful leaders. “Instead of slowing down and peaking at age thirty-five or forty-five, they keep learning at a rate we normally associate only with children and young adults,” he writes (p. 185). It used to be that most people learned all they needed to know by the time they were fifteen. Today, not only does it take longer, but the realities are changing so quickly that many of our old behaviors and assumptions become outdated.

“As the rate of change increases, the willingness and ability to keep developing become central to career success for individuals and to economic success for organizations. [People] win…because they outgrow their rivals. They develop the capacity to handle a complex and changing business environment. They grow to become unusually competent in advancing organizational transformation. They learn to be leaders.”

Leading Change, p. 186 The world’s increasing complexity calls for multifaceted change leaders with a variety of experiences and a depth of judgment. This richness takes time to develop. People who prioritize learning and growth have more to bring to the table at age 50 or 70 than they had at 30. Kotter encourages us to understand that the power of compounded growth applies just as surely to people as it does to money. Looking at two people – one who grows by 1% every year and the other who grows by 6% - he concluded that “[p]eers at age thirty…will be in totally different leagues at age fifty” (p. 190). One will be gathering strength, experience, power, and depth. The other risks becoming increasingly irrelevant, at least as a change leader. One of the keys to such continuous learning that he doesn’t mention is following your interests and passions to find, in Jack’s terms, your Area of Destiny. Even passions that seem unrelated to your job are valuable to the lifelong learner. They offer new avenues for development and mastery, and they often provide a lens for seeing business challenges and opportunities in new and creative ways.

“People who learn to master more volatile career paths also usually become more comfortable with change generally and thus better able to play more useful roles in organizational transformations. They more easily develop whatever leadership potential they have. With more leadership, they are in a better position to help their employers advance the transformation process so as to significantly improve meaningful results while minimizing the painful effects of change.”

Leading Change, p. 193 THE PERSONAL QUALITIES OF CHANGE LEADERS Strong HR leaders can step up when required and help bring an organization through a big change event like a restructuring or an acquisition integration. It will take all their best efforts, perhaps over a period of years, but they can do it. Fewer, however, are comfortable in the world of continuous transformation where one major change initiative succeeds another.

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JWI 556 (1196) Page 6 of 7

These rare change agents are restless and curious, always looking for ways to get better. They love a good challenge. They are at home with high levels of uncertainty. Their passion, enthusiasm, and conviction are infectious. They are true lifelong learners who possess the following characteristics:

1. Risk Taking: a willingness to push oneself out of comfort zones 2. Humble Self-Reflection: honest assessment of successes and failures, especially the latter 3. Solicitation of Opinions: aggressive collection of information and ideas from others 4. Careful Listening: propensity to listen to others 5. Openness to New Ideas: willingness to view life with an open mind

Leading Change, p. 191 When organizations improve, many people win. Employees enjoy the intrinsic satisfactions of success, productivity, and creativity, as well as a better reputation and greater compensation. Consumers get more innovative products and services at better prices. Communities prosper. Many of these benefits come thanks to change agents – those people with the vision and courage to improve business and the skills to see their vision through.

“A strategy of embracing the past will probably become increasingly ineffective over the next few decades. Better for most of us to start learning now how to cope with change, to develop whatever leadership potential we have, and to help our organizations in the transformation process. Better for most of us, despite the risks, to leap into the future. And to do so sooner rather than later.”

Leading Change, p. 194 It is our hope that through taking this course, you have strengthened your understanding of what it takes to lead meaningful change, and that you have come away with a new set of tools you can put to work as you lead your next change initiative. We wish you all the best in continuing your career growth to become a truly great agent of change who puts people first.

“Good people never think they’ve reached the top of their game… but they’re dying to get there.”

Jack Welch

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JWI 556 (1196) Page 7 of 7

GETTING THE MOST OUT OF THIS WEEK’S CLASS

As you read the materials and participate in class activities, stay focused on the key learning outcomes for the week:

• Review the forces that undermine a "people first" approach to leading change Based on everything we have covered in this course, take time to reflect on the extent to which your organization demonstrates a commitment to putting people first. If they do, that’s great. If not, then you have opportunities to guide the steps that can lead to change. That change is not going to happen overnight, and without the support of senior leadership, it may never happen across the entire organization. But that shouldn’t stop you from making things better in the areas where you can. This may be only in your team at first, but if you can create the kind of culture within that team that empowers people to be their best, others will see what you’re doing and will want to emulate it. Pretty soon, you just may find yourself starting a movement.

• Examine ways to build a culture that embraces finding a better way every day Look for tensions that exist between the desire to drive innovation and change, and the desire for stability and predictability in the operation of the business. Address these through the regular sharing of economic, technical, and market information. Engage your teams(s) in keeping their eyes and ears open for threats and opportunities that could impact the business. Build a level of heathy anxiety that encourages everyone to ask, “What’s next?” Done in the right way, this will foster a culture where people are more engaged in the business and welcome the challenge to do bigger and better things that keep the company winning.

• Leverage what you have learned about leading change to continue growing in your career

Find your Area of Destiny, and never stop learning and growing. Turn your job into something that energizes you and fulfills your passions, and you’ll never “work” another day in your life!