Welcome to the final post in a 5 Part Series sharing the powerful reasons to Let Go of Change Management. If you missed the first posts, you may want to circle back and go there first. We invite your comments, feedback, and insights as we explore the topic of transforming culture and business.
Why Let Go of Change Management - Top 10 - #9: The Reverse Breakup – OR - “It’s not me. It’s you.”
Gandhi said and modeled the words, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
In almost every Change Management protocol, being the change is represented by a principle called "role model the new behavior". This is also what Kouzes and Posner elaborate on as Model the Way in The Leadership Challenge. It sounds good, and it would be good, except for one little thing: almost every executive, manager, and supervisor already thinks they are being the change and that they always have been. Ergo, no need for those leaders to be anything than what they already are.
The inner dialogue for almost every human being, executives included, is something like, “They are the problem not me. Oh no, not me. I am already enlightened. Please let me know when everyone else catches up”. Very few executives escape this view of themselves as “different” from the rest of the organization. And it’s not because leaders are willfully blind, or that they are any more or any less enlightened than anyone else. So, then why do leaders fall into the trap of thinking they’ve already got it all figured out?
Almost all leaders are committed to making a difference. And almost all leaders concurrently see themselves on the “right” side of the solution. The problem with that is…they don’t see themselves as part of the problem.
This is a cognitive phenomenon called Self-Serving Bias: people's tendency to attribute positive events to their own character, while they attribute negative events to external factors. No human being can escape this powerful and inescapable heuristic (see our previous blog Part 4 of 5) that kills almost all 'Change' efforts because change management has neither the desire nor capacity to actually deal with this most fundamental human attribute of the self-serving bias.
Almost no executive would be willing to say, “I am culpable for perpetuating parts of our culture that don’t work. I sometimes operates in a silo. I’m sometimes scared to tell the truth to my boss. I’m often ineffective in conflict. I have a tendency to blame others, or circumstances, for my lack of performance.” It is almost always “the other guy.” The only problem is that the other guy is saying the exact same thing. Change management has no capacity to disrupt this condition and create a culture of responsibility. Let it go.
Why Let Go of Change Management - Top 10 - #10: The so-called, “Vision for Change” is Ultimately... Uninspiring.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The power of this quote is missing from all the standard practices of change management. The goal of change management is management: to organize, direct, and ensure that certain things are done by a particular time, mostly through telling, convincing, and marketing. People and their innate motivations take a back seat to systems, processes, and the “messaging” they are bombarded with.
Communication strategies in Change Management are NOT intended to have people move toward a future that inspires them. It is more often fear based than possibility based – i.e., burning platforms. The strategies are not designed to have employees discover an increased ability for them to contribute, for the long-waited opportunity to increase their fulfillment or, for a new possibility for their work and career. In fact, the vision of the future state is said in such a non compelling way that people would rather stick with what they already have (no matter how limited that is) rather than join in creating a new future. Ironically, it’s a future that everyone wants, but most are too resigned to trust that this time is any different, or that anything new will be realized.
In other words change management does NOTHING to address the past broken, but not forgotten, promises made to them by the last management team. And they are still holding on to pain and disappointment of those broken promises. Meanwhile, change management just keeps rolling along like nothing ever happened.
This is why no new future is credible. This is why new leaders are not credible. They are painted with the brush of the past, as “one of them.” And few leaders have the guts to account for what did and didn’t happen prior their tenure and only then to ask again for employees’ support and trust.
Change management does NOT develop leaders to create a compelling future. If it did, we would hear more words like Kennedy’s Moon speech: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…” Compare this to the scripted, well manicured, and company-centered rhetoric that you have heard in every change you’ve been part of. The only thing change management inspires is to make a slightly better yesterday.
Let. It. Go.
By Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel - Co-founders of Unstoppable Conversations
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As always, we encourage comments, feedback and welcome all, whether for or against. Our goal is to share new studies, results and perspectives for all to thrive.
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Unstoppable Conversations and the team of Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel, are a unique consulting firm which produces radical shifts in the capacity of an organization’s leaders to realize extra-ordinary results within a surprisingly short time. Their work demystifies the world of change and simplifies everything to ONE key driver. Leaders discover that their organization’s culture shapes and limits all of their well laid plans and they discover how to practically address their culture with real-time actions that produce immediately obvious benefits.
