I'd like to piggy-back on Michael Erickson's comments on the fear expressed
by staff and the impact of fear on organizational change:
Michale uses glacier climbing as a framework for facing fear, and in that
situation failure has real consequences. I frequently work with people in
situations involving significant change and have found that their fear is
very near the same level as Michael may face on a glacier; and emotionally
if not physically their fear is very much of potential or pending dire
consequences.
Staff who remain in a department after a senior manager has left (or been
fired) (or as I saw in a recent situation - had been left on the shelf for
two years while the company decided what to do about outsourcing everything)
have a lot of fear, and often are frozen from motion.
" They'll never let us do that"
" We can't do that because (because,because,because,because,...)
" It won't work"
Coming into this situation, usually with a lot of change that needs to be
implemented, I must create motion, which means getting fear out of the way.
Creativity and fear don't mix well.
To get around this I ask questions around the following themes:
- What is the worst possbile outcome that you can imagine could occur if you
took this activity on and it went poorly.
- Can we afford that outcome?
- What would be the impact of the failure?
- What would be the recovery from the failure?
- Could you personally handle a failue of this type? Would you still be able
to get up tomorrow and come to work
- If it did fail, what would we learn from the failure that we could use
next time.
- Now that we've discussed the failure potential do we have a better
framework for understanding how NOT to let it fail.
The second thing I find is that a lot of people don't separate "who they
are" from "what they do". So if what they are doing fails - then "they have
failed", not "they have failed (this time) at what they do".
I spend a lot of time differentiating for people what they are to me(ie.
their intelligence, humour, knowledge, work ethic, values, team work, etc)
from what they do and help them to see that who they are - applied to what
they do is what helps us succeed.
With buy in to these two concepts it helps to create motion because they are
less afraid to step into the gap between a current situation and a required
response.
Creating and sustaining motion into uncertainty is a key component
of creating a learning (and growing) organization.
Some one told me once their were 6 types of employees, with evidence of
varying degrees of stepping into that gap:
Type 1) Come into your office, tell you there was something wrong and what
they did to fix it
Type 2) Come into your office, tell you there's something wrong, identify 3
choices to fix it, and recommend one of them
Type 3) Come into your office, tell you there's something wrong identify 3
choices to fix it, and ask you which they should do.
Type 4) Come into your office, tell you there's something wrong and ask you
what to do
Type 5) Know there is something wrong but don't come into your office
Type 6) Don't know there's something wrong.
Don Rycroft
Spectrum Integration Services Inc.
drycroft@icis.on.ca
--drycroft@icis.on.ca (Don Rycroft)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>