Wholehearted leadership, in pursuit of a clear purpose, and underpinned by great stories is the key to a positive change experience in our personal, professional and communal lives, says Jennifer Emery
None of us has to cast our mind around very far to alight upon an area of our lives – professional, personal or communal – that is currently in a state of flux.
Markets are volatile, our poltical future uncertain, our socio-economic problems complex and our relationships with one another in networks, communities and nations shifting and ambiguous.
We see this playing out in politics, in the media, on the high street, in our schools and hospitals… and we see it in our businesses. More technology, flatter management structures, an ever more innovative and entrepreneurial workforce; from the nimblest startups to established corporations, change is happening around us all the time.
Change, we learn, is the new normal, and I, in common with many others, have made a career of helping people and organisations figure out how to adapt accordingly.
Resisting change
You would think we would all be used to it by now. That it must be about time for me, too, to change and find another way to make a living?
Organisations talk a good game about change. Leaders are applauded for their ability to challenge received wisdom and redesign the old ways of doing things.
And yet, all of us – battle-weary change experts and fresh-faced novices alike – default, time after time, to resisting change.
Now there are good neurological and social reasons for that. We are hard-wired to perceive the unknown as a threat – it’s a jungle out there. Our brains make no real distinction between social threats and physical ones – challenges to our status, or autonomy, or our sense of fairness, are every bit as stressful as being chased by a tiger.
But we make this inevitable discomfort worse by our choice of models and language. We talk about change as though it is something aberrant. We pathologise it. We use the Kubler-Ross grief curve to explain why we feel so terrible, and the extent of our ambition is to emerge from any change process asap and relatively unscathed.
We accept a paradigm which says that, when faced with change, the thing to do is to resist, minimise the impact, write some rules, maybe build a wall.
A new perspective on change
But what if we changed our perspective entirely?
What if we embraced a different paradigm? One which says, instead, that the thing to do when faced with change is to step towards the new and unknown thing, with open hands, and an open mind, and to recognise that the period of change in and of itself can be a valuable, rich and productive place to be?
Done well, change can create value for an organisation in a number of ways – ways that are not just about the promised outcome, but about the process itself. Let’s consider just three of them: change can foster agility, change can be the catalyst for simplicity, and change can create energy and momentum.
Change can foster agility
How are you doing at keeping pace?
Whatever your sector of the market, chances are you are operating within a quickly evolving environment in which customers, investors, competitors, regulators and collaborators are all highly demanding, and their demands are constantly changing.
How well are you adapting to the constant introduction of disruptive technology? How are you handling the expotential increase in the volume of information, its democratisation, and the resulting need to communicate in every direction all the time?
Companies need to be agile, and a period of change can be the perfect time to learn what this means and to hardwire your organisation for greater agility.
Change, by definition, brings things that cannot be predicted. By all means, write your plan and plot your course, but what happens when the unexpected happens? You need to be able to move swiftly, and in a manner which bests suits the particular complex context facing you at the time. You will often not be the person best placed to make the decision that needs to be made, and so you need to learn to lead in a way that trusts and empowers the people at the coalface, those with the best understanding, to make decisions in the moment.
In order to do all that without unleashing chaos (‘It’s not on the Gantt chart’) you need to maintain a ‘strong spine’. And it’s exactly this strong spine that is also the secret to agility in the future, because it enables you to balance stability and dynamism.
Picture a gymnast. Or a ballet dancer. Or one of those incredible breakdancers you see body-popping a metre off the ground in any European city square. All of them able to bend their body into incredible shapes – to spin and leap and draw a perfect arc through the air. All of them bendy beyond belief, and incredibly powerful. This power comes in large part from their backs – the strength in their spines is remarkable.
For organisations, the spine comprises a few core elements – purpose, structure, governance, processes and enabling technology – that can then support a range of dynamic capabilities, enabling the organisation to get going, empower people, act quickly, and learn quickly.
A period of change is the ideal gym within which to find and strengthen that spine.
Change can be the catalyst for simplicity
Simultaneously, a period of change is also the ideal crucible within which to burn off extraneous things that are holding your organisation back. A strong spine ensures stability and releases dynamism – but only if you also let go of the things that are stiffening you up.
As you do so, you have the opportunity, too, to introduce a degree of simplicity into how your business operates – the holy grail, surely, in this era of overload.
By this I don’t mean that we should be ‘simplistic’ – there is complexity and nuance in any change process, and these are important. Rather, I’m talking about simplicity which is ‘post-complexity’ – that is, you can only get there by wading through the mud. Change gives you the opportunity to do this work and to be rewarded with simplicity across myriad aspects of your business – how information is shared, how decisions are made, how governance is structured, how things are made to actually happen …
The creation of the strong spine helps with this process. Anything which doesn’t clearly form part of that spine should be open to question, even if – perhaps especially if – ‘we’ve always done it that way’. It is tempting, as discussed at the outset, to deal with change and uncertainty by adding things – more roles, more processes, more committees … but the opposite approach is the better way forward. Use the opportunity that change presents to spring clean: focus on your purpose and be ruthless in stripping away the bureacracy and noise that is overwhelming everyone.
Change can create energy and momentum
There are always periods in any major change project that are intense and exhausting. More than once, I have cried in the loo. More than once, I have cupped someone’s chin in my hand like their mother and urged them to go home, eat something, and sleep. These acute situations have a lot to teach us about how our approach to change can either diminish or bolster individual and corporate energy levels.
David Whyte, the business thinker and poet says: ‘The antidote to exhaustion isn’t rest.
It’s wholeheartedness.’
Now, there is a piece of this that is about resilience. As discussed, change is challenging for our brains – our sense of status, security, belonging – and a good change process needs to recognise this and address it.
But beyond this, the change process itself can actively generate energy and value in two ways.
First, there is evidence that participation in a community in pursuit of a common goal is actively energising: ‘We’re all in it together’. Once we identify with a particular group, we will look for opportunities to expend discretionary effort to ensure a good outcome for the group.
Secondly, change begets change. There is a momentum and ‘change readiness’ that comes from undertaking a change process: the confidence that it can be done, the ambition to do more and go further, and the space to move that comes by virtue of things being in a state of flux anyway.
Change is good
So, change is good, but a leader cannot simply blithely insist that any proposed change has its upsides; they need to show up. Wholeheartedly, and – whisper it – with a degree of vulnerability.
We like to think of leaders as all-knowing problem solvers. But a positive posture towards change involves accepting the need to take an evolutionary approach and admitting that you don’t have all the answers.
Compelling research shows that leaders who show vulnerability are actually perceived as courageous and inspiring. And the sheer act of admitting to not having all the answers gives others the opportunity and agency to innovate and experiment.
Leaders also need to be crystal clear about the purpose – of their organisation as a whole, and of the specific change programme in question. An organisation changes best when everyone has the opportunity to understand what is happening and why, and to share in a sense of common purpose.
Thirdly, leaders need to be good storytellers. We are twenty-two times more likely to remember a story than a hard fact, and stories work on our hearts and minds in a way that rational explanations just can’t. Leaders can tell the story of the organisation, and they can encourage people to tell and share their own stories, to build a rich tapestry around the change, its purpose and its impact.
Wholehearted leadership, in pursuit of a clear purpose, and underpinned by great stories is the key to a positive change experience in our personal, professional and communal lives.
Jennifer (Jenni) Emery is the author of Leading for Organisational Change – Building Purpose, Motivation and Belonging (published by Wiley, April 2019).
She is a leading expert in people, culture and change. After securing a law degree from Oxford University, she spent the first 20 years of her career in a variety of legal, strategic and coaching roles across the world’s largest law firms (Linklaters, Hogan Lovells) and other professional service firms.
Jenni is currently Global People Leader at Arup, a design and engineering consultancy, with 16,000 employees in 35 countries.
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