How do I build a winning team to make change happen? (Q&As with Michael Leckie)
Question: “When I struggle to build a winning team to make change happen in my company, help me understand the capabilities each of the leaders/change-makers should have, so I can be most effective to make change happen.”
Short Answer: Many leaders are struggling to build the type of team that is making change happen in their company because the team does not understand and personally embrace the capabilities that change makers and leaders need to have to truly make change happen.
Let’s break it down further:
I was recently speaking with a good friend who related this story to me. He was talking to the CEO of a company he consults to and the CEO said to him that, if he had been asked a year ago if he had in place the executive team he needed for the future, that he would have answered a resounding “yes!” He even said that, if he’d been asked that in March, just before COVID-19 impacted the US, he would still have said “yes.” But, now that he was listening to his executive team talk about “getting back to normal,” he was not so sure. He believes that there is no “getting back to normal,” coming. Ever. He sees a world of even more constant, unpredicted disruption and change. And he sees an executive team that, in their hearts, long for stability.
A team that is built to change is the holy grail for many leaders like the CEO in the story above. Oftentimes I frame their question like this, “When I struggle to build a winning team to make change happen in my company, help me understand the capabilities each of the leaders/changemakers should have, so I can be most effective in making needed change happen.”
I’ve talked about this so many times that I finally thought I should write a book on the topic. That book, The Heart of Transformation, comes out in mid-2021. But, ahead of that, let me take a minute to share some key elements of building that leadership team which embraces change.
First, you have to have a team that embraces change personally. What I mean is that it is not enough to give lip service to change. It is even worse to believe in change that requires everyone else around you to change, but you remain the same. There are key capabilities that leaders, and the people who work with them, need to understand and act in alignment with. But before you can even focus on what those are, you need to be a role model of that change. Again, this is not an exercise in words it is an exercise in deeds. You need to show change, not talk change! This is hard work, it is why most leaders don’t do it. It means that you have to destabilize yourself and look hard at your own assumptions and beliefs. You need to be able to be wrong, publicly. You need to show people that it is safe not to know or to need to learn.
These are not what we have been rewarding leaders for in the past decades. In fact, showing vulnerability and lack of sureness has been punished. But we are in a world where you simply cannot know all there is to know. Things change too fast and are too complex. In my book I talk about the capability of Learning Before Knowing as one of the six fundamental human capabilities of transformation. We have to move from a surety in what we know to a surety in how we come to know something new. We have to move from a place of invincible to a place of showing our weaknesses and showing people we are not afraid to identify them and to do something about them. That doing something may be learning more or it may be bringing in others to do what we cannot. And we have to be OK with that. We have to reward that, not disrespect or punish that.
To do that, we have to have some new questions. Questions that we ask out loud of each other. Questions such as, “What’s wrong with my idea?” and then having the first few replies yourself. Then, when someone finally ventures another idea, you need to thank them and really dig into the idea, finding what you can embrace in it, what you can learn from it. Show others that you truly value finding out what might be wrong with your ideas. Create the psychological safety to be challenged and be told, “you might be wrong here,” by people you have power over. You have to be a role model for change before others will. If you are not openly able to change yourself, you will never change your organization. Change is personal, it starts with the individual. It starts with you.
Question: “When I struggle to build a winning team to make change happen in my company, help me understand the capabilities each of the leaders/change-makers should have, so I can be most effective to make change happen.”
Short Answer: Many leaders are struggling to build the type of team that is making change happen in their company because the team does not understand and personally embrace the capabilities that change makers and leaders need to have to truly make change happen.
Let’s break it down further:
I was recently speaking with a good friend who related this story to me. He was talking to the CEO of a company he consults to and the CEO said to him that, if he had been asked a year ago if he had in place the executive team he needed for the future, that he would have answered a resounding “yes!” He even said that, if he’d been asked that in March, just before COVID-19 impacted the US, he would still have said “yes.” But, now that he was listening to his executive team talk about “getting back to normal,” he was not so sure. He believes that there is no “getting back to normal,” coming. Ever. He sees a world of even more constant, unpredicted disruption and change. And he sees an executive team that, in their hearts, long for stability.
A team that is built to change is the holy grail for many leaders like the CEO in the story above. Oftentimes I frame their question like this, “When I struggle to build a winning team to make change happen in my company, help me understand the capabilities each of the leaders/changemakers should have, so I can be most effective in making needed change happen.”
I’ve talked about this so many times that I finally thought I should write a book on the topic. That book, The Heart of Transformation, comes out in mid-2021. But, ahead of that, let me take a minute to share some key elements of building that leadership team which embraces change.
First, you have to have a team that embraces change personally. What I mean is that it is not enough to give lip service to change. It is even worse to believe in change that requires everyone else around you to change, but you remain the same. There are key capabilities that leaders, and the people who work with them, need to understand and act in alignment with. But before you can even focus on what those are, you need to be a role model of that change. Again, this is not an exercise in words it is an exercise in deeds. You need to show change, not talk change! This is hard work, it is why most leaders don’t do it. It means that you have to destabilize yourself and look hard at your own assumptions and beliefs. You need to be able to be wrong, publicly. You need to show people that it is safe not to know or to need to learn.
These are not what we have been rewarding leaders for in the past decades. In fact, showing vulnerability and lack of sureness has been punished. But we are in a world where you simply cannot know all there is to know. Things change too fast and are too complex. In my book I talk about the capability of Learning Before Knowing as one of the six fundamental human capabilities of transformation. We have to move from a surety in what we know to a surety in how we come to know something new. We have to move from a place of invincible to a place of showing our weaknesses and showing people we are not afraid to identify them and to do something about them. That doing something may be learning more or it may be bringing in others to do what we cannot. And we have to be OK with that. We have to reward that, not disrespect or punish that.
To do that, we have to have some new questions. Questions that we ask out loud of each other. Questions such as, “What’s wrong with my idea?” and then having the first few replies yourself. Then, when someone finally ventures another idea, you need to thank them and really dig into the idea, finding what you can embrace in it, what you can learn from it. Show others that you truly value finding out what might be wrong with your ideas. Create the psychological safety to be challenged and be told, “you might be wrong here,” by people you have power over. You have to be a role model for change before others will. If you are not openly able to change yourself, you will never change your organization. Change is personal, it starts with the individual. It starts with you.
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