Making Commitments—Do You Know Your Limits?
“The good fellow to everyone is a good friend to no one.” ~Jewish Proverb
Transformational change generates an exhilarating, fast-paced environment where key people seek, and are often asked to take on, many demanding tasks. The sum of these tasks can sometimes push everyone past their capacity to meet commitments. The result is failure to deliver what was agreed to. This often means realization does not materialize, which is unacceptable for business-imperative initiatives.
This is no less true for us as professional change facilitators than it is for sponsors, targets, or advocates. In fact, given that our role is often to serve at the epicenter of an initiative’s activity, we are particularly vulnerable more
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©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Lessons Learned About Building Commitment to Change
After three-and-a-half decades of being a professional change practitioner, I’ve seen my share of successful and unsuccessful attempts to generate enough commitment to reach full realization. If there is one thing I’m sure of it’s that the necessary momentum and critical mass of commitment toward desired outcomes is not easy to come by. Below are some of the more important lessons that have affected my practice.
1. The commitment process unfolds at both intellectual and emotional levels.
Usually, intellectual commitment precedes emotional commitment. Most people can grasp the implications of a change at a cognitive level fairly quickly. However, they often find that they need more time to make the necessary emotional adjustments.
This split-level commitment can produce confusion, mixed signals, and more
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©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Momentum and Critical Mass
In my last post, I talked about redirecting energy during a transformational change from protecting “the way things are” toward addressing the ambiguities and confusion that occur in the shift. In this context, momentum refers to the forward motion of energy through the role sequence (advocate to initiating sponsor to primary sustaining sponsors to local sustaining sponsors to targets) toward realization of the change. Regardless of which roles are involved in the energy transfer at any given time, the presence of strong momentum dramatically increases the chances for realization results. Alternatively, transfers that produce no more than moderate momentum can stall initiatives or compromise installation outcomes.
Energy transfers can result in a strong, moderate, or weak momentum exchange, which means that merely passing energy through the role sequence is not enough. Momentum must reach a certain magnitude within each person in the chain to provide the level of energy needed to ultimately achieve true realization results. When we achieve this degree of energy strength, it means the person on the receiving end of the transfer has become fully committed to the endeavor’s success. more
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©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
The Learning Paradox
In this series, I’m encouraging you to review the models (concepts, approaches, and frameworks) that may have slipped into unconscious application over your years of practice. I’m also sharing a few learning-related models that have surfaced from observations in my practice. The model below is one that came to light for me as I watched people learn (or fail to learn) from their disappointments.
Model 2: Corrective Mistakes vs. Failure
In organizational transformation, clients must have lofty ambitions in order to break the gravitational pull of the status quo. However, aggressive aspirations make them risk falling short of their objectives. Many people, and even entire organizational cultures, assume they must choose between succeeding with goals that don’t challenge the current paradigm, or failing at groundbreaking—but nonetheless out-of-reach—intentions.
My experience is that clients who consistently succeed with change embrace an alternative path— more
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©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
What Have We Learned About Learning?
(1) CommentEnlightenment isn’t about knowledge you learn, it’s about knowledge you turn into. ~Deepak Chopra
In my opinion, learning is one of the indispensable bedrocks of our craft. I layer many concepts, tools, and techniques on top of this core element, but fostering learning—my own and my clients’—is at the heart of what I do.
Recently, though, I realized that I haven’t been paying enough attention to what I’ve “learned from learning.” This prompted me to go back and reexamine a variety of learning models that I’ve used over the years and ask myself to what extent I apply, by design and with forethought, the concepts or tenets from these frameworks. I didn’t merely ask, “Have the models influenced my thinking or impacted my actions?” but “Am I intentional and mindful about their application?” My answers varied from model to model—sometimes it was encouraging, but mostly it was sobering. more
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©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
The Path of Intent Management
(1) CommentIn my last post, I said that, as practitioners, we sometimes devote more time getting people to change than we spend on the change itself, and that having a complete, concise, understandable, and compelling statement of intent is critically important to achieving change success. I’d like to say more here about managing the intent process.
When important projects are not orchestrated effectively, they sometimes melt down or never get off the ground. More often, what happens is more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Are You Stuck?
“Most obstacles are imaginary; the rest are only temporary.” ~Scott Sorrel
We all get stuck sometimes…it’s part of the human experience. We know what we want to achieve and have a plan for doing it, but suddenly we’re faced with a challenge that mystifies us. The situation may involve a problem or opportunity, but the fact is, we don’t know how to resolve it given the present circumstances (or aren’t willing to because of certain implications). In other words, becoming unstuck isn’t about problems/opportunities—it’s about problems/opportunities with no clear way to address them.
There are as many ways to be stuck as there are aspects to our lives. We can become stuck with our spouse or kids, our friends, our careers or boss, our physical well-being, our spiritual development, etc. Anything of significance that we set out to accomplish can, and most likely will, become stuck at one time or another.
Professional change facilitators are not immune to being stuck. From time to time, even the most accomplished practitioners, applying the most capable execution methodologies, are unable to find a viable resolution to a particular more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Use Mindset and Behavior Patterns to Your Advantage
(2) Comments
Once you understand that a specific mindset and its associated behaviors can either facilitate or impede success, you have a level of insight that can be truly invaluable to a sponsor who is less familiar with these kinds of change dynamics.
Mindsets are made up of frames of reference (the ways individuals make sense of situations) that lead to the formation of priorities (the relative importance of various options). Shared mindsets within an organization serve as the foundations of culture and ultimately lead to common patterns of behavior.
Successful change requires a specific mindset that is shared among key players as they perform their respective roles. This “success mindset” reflects the more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Patterns: Order Beneath the Confusion
(1) Comment“What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.” ~Chuck Palahniuk
How do we make sense out of the often extremely complicated and confusing dynamics that influence the outcomes of our change initiatives? And once we understand what’s going on, how do we help our sponsors (and, of course, agents and targets) grasp what is unfolding and choose the best course of action, given the present circumstances?
We could use simplistic explanations, but those don’t describe the depth of the situation. Too often, we get lost in the convoluted intricacies of the change and offer help that is more baffling than enlightening. Instead, what we must find, more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
