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From the Debunking Department:
Do Your Work:
Why Change Leadership is Not Possible Without Your Own Capacity To Change
“There is no such thing as corporate transformation without individual transformation.”
Or so we like to say in our leadership programs. But what exactly does that mean?
Let me illustrate.
A talented CIO I coach is experiencing this first hand in attempting to transform a real estate developer from a highly profitable, fast-moving deal maker to a disciplined organization capable of scaling to sustain growth in new markets. His major realization, I daresay breakthrough, came recently when he realized he was not building relationships with his so-called “first team” – in Patrick Lencioni’s parlance, his peers – for fear he had nothing to offer them. His mental model of relationship was quid-pro-quo: a successful relationship entails providing service or solving problems for others (colleagues, friends, even family). If you can’t do something for others, no one will want to be around you. In fundamental psychological (or regressive) terms, this is ‘love me for what I do rather than for who I am’.
Your Past Shadows Your Present, Especially in Change
When he realized why he wasn’t proactively seeking out his peers due to his own fears that he would not feel worthy absent doing deeds, his relationships began to change. He realized he could ask for a meeting in order to simply learn about a colleague’s business or personal history. He realized he could take a colleagues to lunch or dinner and not feel like he had to ‘sell’ them on anything, or worse, fear they would fear being ‘sold’.
What shifted for him was doing the personal work to connect his family of origin trauma with his present dilemma of how to be an effective change leader. Of course, he was motivated and curious, necessary ingredients for any executive. But he also had to make a shift from rationalizing that while consciously he feared making promises his IT team couldn’t fulfill, that was a convenient excuse for the subconscious fear of not having to experience rejection if he did not offer his colleagues something of value. The limitations in his own IT department was not why he wouldn’t meet with colleagues, even though he had convinced himself that it was.
Most Change Models Focus on Others
This story illustrates the kind of personal work leaders must do to drive large-scale change. It may be counter-intuitive because most classic, 20th century change models – the kind we have been taught in business school and through best sellers – make no mention of change leaders doing their own personal work. Most change models are fixated on the behavior of others – the change targets – and their readiness, versus one’s own readiness, capacity, and willingness to lead change.
But think of it. Large scale organizational transformation in the face of major adaptive challenges inevitably requires asking the organization to do something very hard. If it was easy it would have been done already. That hard stuff inevitably involves culture, because cultures are rooted in taken-for-granted “dominant logics” (shared mental models) embedded across longstanding organizational routines and habits. Culture lives in practices, not just in people. You can’t just swap out people, even senior leaders, and expect change (this is why people, including leaders, can come and go but cultures live on).
Asking Hard Questions
But to address deep-seated and well-established cultural logics embedded in widespread practices, practices that have good reason to exist in the first place, you have to ask hard questions. Questions like ‘why do we do it this way?’ and ‘whose interests are served?, and, ‘what is being preserved by doing things the way they have always been done?’
To do that requires courage -- or at least a willingness to find courage. Those posing such questions will inevitably be met with resistance, if not hostility. Such questions may put one’s job, if not career, in jeopardy because answering such questions inevitably leads one into the dense jungle of historicity, personal agendas, corporate fiefdoms, sacred cows, and – the mother of all rationalizations – ‘because by doing it this way we make a lot of money and keep our investors happy. So why do you want us to change?’
To challenge all that, one had better do one’s own personal work to separate signal from noise, and to keep one’s sense of identity, motivation, and existential purpose intact.
Five questions are particularly important to address through personal work:
Who am I, existentially, as a leader? What do I want (out of this change)?
What matters here? Why are we doing this? What do we as an organization need?
What is my “stuff”, my projections and psychic baggage, and what is not mine?
Where do my fears and anxieties reside, and why? What triggers them? How can I test these fears in real time to see if they’re not distortions from my past?
Who are my change recipients, and how curious am I about them – what motivates them, how do they see the world, what are their assumptions about success, etc.? (i.e. is it all about me, or do I really care about you?)
Doing one’s own work first and in parallel to what one is doing outwardly with others is critical to addressing today’s large scale and seeming intractable organizational and societal challenges.
It also is essential for building trust. And we know that without trust, little else is possible.
