Ĺ Prepare your actions, know what you want to do and where you want to go next.
To be effective as a leader, we always must be prepared before actually undertaking an action of any significance. Being prepared involves the exploration of options and difficulties, planning, and securing the necessary resources and support in advance. Just rushing into things is asking for trouble. We should know exactly why we are doing something, where we are going and what we can expect to find there. In this way, we can also prevent needless stress. The next step then consists of actually undertaking the action in a wholehearted and undivided way, and knowing already precisely what we want to do next if we are successful.
In order to be successful, it is also necessary to know what the other parties want to do, why they want to do that and who will support them. All this preparation is concerned with acquiring overview and vision, which are essential elements of leadership. This overview is not a magic quality, but only the outcome of paying attention to the right things, which actually is the outcome of a learning process. All of this may sound like a collection of truisms – and maybe it is – but it is a fact of life that by far the majority of people in leadership positions do not live up to these truisms. As it is, I derived them from Sun Tzu, a Chinese strategist from the fifth century BC (see Sun Tzu, 1993).
Ĺ Don’t change too much at a time. See to it that all change can be labeled with one concept (Hammer, 2001).
In Chapter 1 I explained that it is an essence of culture to keep things the same and to provide stability. People need stability to function effectively. Consequently, changes that are too extensive tend to upset human functioning. Too many changes at once may jeopardize the functioning of the whole organization. In order to avoid doing this, it is only logical to implement changes in a well-measured way. The provision that all change can be labeled with one concept is intended to structure the change process, to simplify it and also to demonstrate the impression that there is really only one change going on, the success of which can be easily monitored by applying only one overall criterion.
Ĺ Don’t do the work of your employees, not even when they do it badly. Just provide clear direction.
Leading is a task in itself and needs all the attention we can mobilize. The task involves having oversight over the organization and its environment, developing a vision, initiating activity, making sure that everybody does what they are supposed to do, monitoring the progress of everything and following up its outcomes. Essentially, appropriate leadership
is such an extensive task that it does not leave any room for helping out employees who do not meet their targets. Helping out will simply be at the expense of our own tasks.
Moreover, helping out employees sends the wrong signal to those involved: essentially, they should solve the problem themselves. If, after all, it turns out that meeting their targets is an impossible assignment, we can assign somebody else to help. Even then we should resist the temptation to help out personally, in spite of the fact that this may seem the nicer and even more natural thing to do.
Ĺ Stress common interests.
Leading an organization also consists of balancing the interests of the different individual employees, the different departments and the overall organization. Usually, individuals and departments look after their own interests. If they do not, it may be the leader’s task to step in and to protect these interests. However, the primary leadership task here is to balance individual and group interests in such a way that the organization as a whole benefits the most, but still so that the interests of individual parties are not neglected. Essentially, the leader is the one who primarily is responsible for guarding the interest of the overall organization. Emphasizing the interest of the overall organization is an important task, as individual departments tend to go for their own goals and often are rather shortsighted when the overall interest is at stake. It can thus be recommended that a leader speak now and then in terms of ‘we’ and ‘our’.
Ĺ Define and advertise your goals and mission in clear and positive, general and generic terms.
Leaders should always be clear about what they want and stand for. The easiest and most logical way to do this is to communicate clear goals and a clear mission, in which the culture change is strongly anchored. The goals and the mission can give then clear guidelines to everybody involved. To emphasize the importance of these goals, we can show a vision of what will happen when these goals are fully accomplished (see Chapter 6). In addition, we can make the most of what would happen if these goals were not accomplished. Both techniques should be repeated time after time, but with different wording. In this way a sense of urgency can be created. Something similar should be done with the mission, though this is more of a general guideline and less of a clear target to be accomplished. Awareness of the mission is built into the organization by advocacy, as well as by questioning, challenging and probing (Sengeet al., 1994). The same can be accomplished by making what we do into a symbol of the mission and advertising that. We can do that too by showing that we use the mission as an explicit guideline and touchstone in our decision making, as well as in the selection of new personnel.
Ĺ Support and reward what adds to the change.
Many managers are inclined to respond only to what does not go well: they limit themselves to correcting and punishing. Though, when they are needed, correcting and punishing are a legitimate part of managing that no manager should avoid, exclusively correcting and punishing can be very damaging to employees’ motivation. The only attention the employees then get is negative, and this may feel to them as if they only make mistakes.
For that reason, it is important to consistently reward things that go well, especially when they contribute to the intended change. Moreover, learning psychology teaches us that
rewarded behavior tends to be repeated. Rewarding and supporting the intended behavior thus will actually strengthen and stabilize the intended change. So acknowledge well- focused industry and toil, show sympathy and give tokens of appreciation. In more general terms: celebrate and feed success, and starve failure.
Ĺ Make clear that there are different ways to accomplish the intended change.
Acknowledge that accomplishing the mission is no linear process and that different ap- proaches are feasible: let people find out themselves what the mission implies for them and make enough room to discuss this in progress meetings. Letting people find out themselves what they can do can involve asking questions as well.
Ĺ Ask questions.
When too much correcting and punishing is to be avoided, asking questions can be a good alternative, at least if it is done in time. This implies that the leader introduces and monitors everything that is going on and from time to time has talks about progress. Besides just asking how things are going – which by the way is a very good question to ask regularly (see Chapter 6) – this is also about discussing problems and solutions:
Ĺ What is the most difficult point right now?
Ĺ How are you dealing with that?
Ĺ How can you do that better?
Ĺ How can you do that in a more innovative way?
Ĺ How can you do that in a more satisfying way?
Another technique that can be used here is Klein’s ‘premortem’ technique (Klein, 2003).
This consists of imagining that a project goes bust, then discussing what the main reasons were for it going wrong and how we could have prevented it. Asking questions does not imply at all that we ourselves must have all the answers. Asking questions explicitly also ensures that we explore new territory.
Asking questions is also the preferred technique in the case of resistance. Fighting resis- tance has proven to be completely counterproductive. Instead asking the right questions –
‘I see you are not happy with that. Can you please tell me what would be better for you?’
‘What is the problem here?’ ‘OK, if you were in charge, what would you do?’ and so on – is a much better approach.
Ĺ Give protagonists of the intended change enough room and authority.
Protagonists of the intended change by definition are your allies. It is only logical to put them in positions where they can help you most; that is, if they are good enough to do the job well. Putting allies in the right positions implies that you should – if appropriate – put them in key positions, in positions where they can further change the most. One of the ways to accomplish that is to make them responsible for the model projects you initiate to further the change mission. When such a project is successful, it is important to consolidate that success by anchoring it firmly in the organizational cycle (Kotter, 1996).
Ĺ Take ample time to reflect on how you are doing and how you can improve things.
When you are very busy bringing about all kinds of changes, you are perceiving things from an internal perspective. In itself this is good, but it is not enough, because you must
from time to time look at things also from an external point of view. This is both true at the individual level and at the group or organization level: some reflection is indispensable.
Techniques and exercises to that effect are discussed in Chapters 6 and 8. It is also advisable to reserve from time to time a longer period to think things over, for example in the form of a long walk (see Chapter 8). The errors you undoubtedly will make are issues for reflection as well. Errors should not be perceived as annoying or disastrous, but rather as excellent learning material. So find out what exactly went wrong, why it went wrong and how the errors in question could have been prevented. In short: learn from your errors.
Essentially this is all about a direct approach, following what seems to be the shortest way. It is for example in line with the list of leaders’ characteristics from theField Manual of the US Army(McNeilly, 2001). This list consists of the following concepts:
Ĺ integrity Ĺ will Ĺ flexibility Ĺ endurance
Ĺ coolness under stress Ĺ justice
Ĺ assertiveness Ĺ sense of humor Ĺ bearing Ĺ tact Ĺ maturity Ĺ self-discipline Ĺ confidence Ĺ decisiveness Ĺ initiative
However, as Sun Tzu has taught us, the shortest way is not always the best one and is often not even the quickest either, even though direct approaches may be an indispensable element of the overall strategy (McNeilly, 2001). What is meant here is that a frontal approach organizes the attitudes of the people you are confronting: the other people imitate it or assume a complementary attitude. At the least, they subliminally simulate it (see earlier in this chapter). When their attitudes are successfully organized in such a way, this leaves the others exposed to the more indirect approaches that are examined in Chapter 5.
A combination of direct and indirect approaches is thus the most likely route to overcoming resistance and preventing conflicts and damage (McNeilly, 2001). Two of these indirect approaches are discussed in the following two chapters.