As a Change Manager I realised ‘Change’ was a redundant qualifier.
If you are managing or leading, even a conservative role, you must constantly be looking for what needs to change.
Be nimble: change-ready and active.
Sadly however the number of leaders and managers I seeing being nimble are too few, even fewer if you required them to be pro-actively nimble.
You need to be changing yourself, changing the organisation and encouraging, supporting and cheering on everyone else to do the same.
If someone in your organisation is not changing you need to rethink your strategy, make some decisions and kick things into action.
Stuck in the mud is dead in the water.
Ideas to promote change:
Celebrate failure. You want change to be guaranteed? Sorry you won’t be nimble enough often enough.
Crash the car. Put a team on dismantling a service or product and seeing how they might build it from scratch.
Break up successful teams. Use your best when you need to, but if they really are good then ‘share the love’. Inject their skills and enthusiasm into the gaps. Elite is unproductive.
Mea culpa. Admit your mistakes, show your willingness to try, to invent, to explore, but don’t hide from the things that don’t work. Do it without shame.
Take an axe to the suggestion box. If you can’t talk to your managers and they can’t talk to their teams, then you’re nowhere near where ideas will thrive and change will be a way of life. Like an extra steering wheel in your car – the suggestion box looks like it could be handy but it only invites chaos.
Rethink quality systems. If they don’t foster change they’re unsustainable, change them, NOW!
And of course…Celebrate success.
