Change leader, change thyself
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of
changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy
Using this idiom would be a great starting point for this
article as it hits on the fact that a leader must change within themselves as
an individual change before it can engage in on organizational change. Changing
cultures or the way you do business takes self-understanding and then put the
values into an organizational context.
Most of the time, we rarely see organizations change
drastically but their people do. It is the right move to change performance
strategies and inner structures to accomplish their revised goals with new
policies and procedures.
Change takes time and in
order to make successful change there must be sufficient time allotted for the
process to work. One needs to assess when something fails, it must also address
the mindsets and skill sets of those that executed the change. It is suggested
that 50 percent of change fails because of senior staff failing to adjust their
own behaviors to meet the organizational needs.
Many resort to a passive status quo that hampers or
sabotages the attempts for change thus there must be change in people to make
the change happen. It has been suggested that this will create a success rate
four times more likely to succeed due to having the right people in the right
places.
A common mistake, made even by companies that recognize the
need for new learning, is to focus too much on developing skills. Training that
only emphasizes new behavior rarely translates into profoundly different
performance outside the sterile career developing seminars.
Individuals have their own inner lives, populated by their
beliefs, priorities, aspirations, values, and fears. These interior elements
vary from one person to the next, directing people to take different actions.
This profile is a combination of his or her habits of thought, emotions, hopes,
and behavior in various circumstances.
Profile awareness is therefore a recognition of these common
tendencies or traits and the impact they have on others. Therefore, a careful
selection of those that meet the criteria for change must be given a chance to
become change leaders from the start of the project and endure the entire
journey with consistency.
Organizational awareness involves the real-time perception
of a wide range of inner experiences and their impact on your behavior. These
include your current mind-set and beliefs, fears and hopes, desires and
defenses, and impulses to take action.
This type of awareness is harder to master than profile
awareness. While many senior executives recognize their tendency to exhibit
negative behavior under pressure, they often don’t realize they’re exhibiting
that behavior until well after they’ve started to do so. At that point, the
damage is already done.
Therefore the message is to simply balance the change
between people and the organizational awareness around them. Having the right
people in the right places enhances success and instrumental in changing
organizational cultures made up of mindsets, beliefs, fears and hopes as well
as desires and naturally spent energies to take the right kind of action as the
development of a new journey takes its course.
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