Be Different or be dead

April 3, 2017

9 easy ways to be a successful Change Leader

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9 easy ways to be a successful Change Leader.

Standout leaders are proactively adaptive who thirst for change; they drive change as opposed to letting change drive them.

They enthusiastically embrace the change process and treat it as an opportunity for the organization and themselves as opposed to treating change as a threat and something that can be avoided.

They are good at anticipating how things will unfold but are brilliant reaction agents, reacting to an unforeseen event when it occurs. When Plan A is in jeopardy they move to Plan B in a heartbeat.

They are Change Leaders, as opposed to their more traditional organizational cousin, the Change Manager.

Change Managers

Change Managers want to perpetuate the momentum of the business, and reluctantly move into the change mode when the forces on them leave no other option.

The Change Manager isn’t particularly adept at reacting; they are limp reaction agents, reluctant to change and get dragged into it kicking and screaming with the real motive to keep the status quo for as long as possible.

They act from the belief that change can be affected in a controlled and organized fashion and tend to look to incremental improvements to address the challenges of the day.

Change Managers are students of the softer more evolutionary methods of organizational change.

Incremental thinkers drive incremental change which often falls short of what is required.

Don’t look to Change Managers to be proactive and initiate required changes in your organization; to have an adrenalin-rushed reaction to move in a different direction as a result of unanticipated events.

They simply will not do it. And don’t look for an out of the box alternative to the current way of operating your business; they will always be governed at best by modest incremental changes to the current operating model.

Change Leaders

Change Leaders, on the other hand, understand that real change with breakthrough benefits for the organization is the result of introducing discontinuities to the current business model.

They are proactive and are constantly on the lookout for operating models for running the business so that revolutionary break-through changes can be achieved. And in the face of unexpected events challenging the performance of their organization, expect Change Leaders to enthusiastically react with a sense of urgency to determine the appropriate life-saving course of action to take.

Change Leaders will present your organization with tough decisions because their proposals will require taking higher risks to yield greater rewards. Expect them to make your organization uncomfortable with the inherent risks associated with the order of magnitude changes they bring forward.

You must develop a plan to be a Change Leader; it won’t happen by serendipity. You will discover that most of your colleagues will fall into the change manager category and that differentiating yourself is very achievable and will get you the kind of currency in your organization that will highlight you for future opportunities.

These 9 steps will help you be a change leader.

▪️Use your personal network to discover the most critical issues the organization is facing. You can’t lead change unless you have an intimate understanding of the threats and opportunities likely to impact your business future.

▪️Focus on the critical few things that will deliver the maximum number of benefits to the organization. Beware of the long action plan list; you have neither the time nor the energy to do ten or twelve things really well nor will they be equally important in terms of the positive impact they produce.
Look for 20% of the actions — your critical few list — that will deliver 80% of the needed results and get going.

The long action plan list - pursuing numerous tactics - is a symptom of sloppy strategic thinking; a lack of appreciating the few actions required to produce the greatest impact.
Chasing numerous tactics may make you feel good about how busy you are, but it can be deadly in terms of achieving real progress. 

▪️Be anal about executing your top priorities. Don’t get mesmerized by the brilliance of your idea; it’s worthless until you do something about it and achieve positive results.

▪️Take on a ‘let’s do it differently’ attitude and way of working. Avoid linear thinking. Be a lateral thinker and look for out-of-the-box solutions to problems in the organization.

▪️Purge your vocabulary of words like evolutionary change and incremental change in favor of breakthrough and revolutionary change.

▪️Get on the internal speaking circuit. Talk up the importance of creating discontinuity for your organization as the way to meet the challenges your organization is facing and generate economic opportunity.

▪️Increase your depth and breadth of experience and expertise. Look for job opportunities throughout the organization; don’t get pigeonholed in one specialist role.

▪️Read insatiably, and develop a portfolio of new concepts and ideas that could be applied to solve your pressing business problems or lead your organization in new directions.

▪️Seek out others in the organization others who aspire to be Change Leaders. Encourage them. Mentor them. Support them in their day to day activities. And be seen to be doing it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.3.17 at 07:34 am by Roy Osing
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March 19, 2017

How the useless clutter in your business can be taken out

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How the useless clutter in your business can be taken out.

If your new strategy development process does not deal with the CRAP you need to eliminate, it will surely fail.

Strategy is just as much about what you’re NOT going to do as it is about what you are going to do, but less attention is paid to the CRAP elimination activity.

CRAP is the enemy of progress. It’s the stuff that may have been a priority at one point, but is now no longer relevant to achieving our strategic goals.

If it isn’t expunged from your organization the ‘old’ will continue to have a significant role and the ‘new’ will be hampered. The major source of bandwidth for taking on new activities is the time currently being spent on thinks that really don’t matter.

CRAP will keep you stuck and prevent you from moving forward.

How to eliminate the CRAP?

▪️ Assign a Cut the CRAP Champion to be responsible for inventorying ALL projects and activities going on in your organization;

▪️ From this inventory, create a KEEP category. Make it short. Bear down on the projects to make sure each one of them is 100% aligned with your new direction;

▪️ Create a CUT category. Make it long. Gather all questionable projects. These will be the eventual source of bandwidth for new activity;

▪️ For each CUT project, note the person who is currently working on it. — the project prime. At the end of the day, people will have to be re-assigned to the ‘new’;

▪️ Have a CRAP critical assessment meeting. Involve the senior team responsible for the execution of your new strategy. Trot each CUT Project Prime into the room and have them explain in detail how their project relates 100% to the new strategy. Side benefit: you will see how well they really understand your new strategy;

▪️ Decide which CUT projects will be terminated and the resource savings that will result;

▪️ Develop a resource re-assignment plan. Be prepared to exit people who either don’t have the skills to take on a KEEP project or who don’t want to support your new direction;

▪️ Communicate the results of your work. KEEP Projects and CUT Projects and why certain projects were terminated. A great opportunity to talk about your new strategy. Involve the team accountable for executing your new course.

CUT projects have momentum. They need to give way for the keepers.

Tough work. Critical to your success. Get on it today!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.19.17 at 06:18 am by Roy Osing
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March 13, 2017

6 ways a leader can easily kill innovation and creativity

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6 ways a leader can easily kill innovation and creativity.

Innovation is crushed.

Creativity is stultified.

Employees are reduced to cogs.

Fresh thought is constrained to a minimum.

Barriers to new ideas are erected.

These results are often the product of leadership behaviour even though they are completely at odds with what leaders openly espouse to employees as the culture and values they seek to establish.

These six actions will effectively kill any desire for individuals to freely express themselves; they will suck every morsel of originality from their bones.

▪️Constantly say ‘That’s not the way we do things around here’ whenever someone presents a new idea.
This is the hold-on-to-the-past move that will shut out people from even thinking about new ways of doing things. It’s ok for a leader to honour the past, but they must say goodbye at some point to enable the organization to continually renew itself and survive.

▪️Measure employees on how well they follow internal policies. If you manage performance and compensation on how well people ‘Colour inside the lines’ and conform to existing rules they will be be solely internally focused and unlikely to advance changes to keep pace with the dynamics of the external environment.

▪️‘De-reward’ people for making mistakes in the pursuit of excellence, quality and perfection. Emphasize the importance of ‘getting it right the first time’ rather than trial and error. Communicate examples of employees making mistakes to show what is not ok.

▪️Insist on arduous analysis of every change being contemplated regardless of complexity. Impose a strict business case process that emphasizes analysis methodology rather than enabling fast and easy decision making.

▪️Recognize people for the ways they relentlessly practice the internal rules of the organization. A ‘Best Rule Follower’ award program always gets the message across that doing what the rules say is more important than using individual judgement and expression.

▪️Never allow people to step beyond their immediate role boundaries. Focus everyone’s attention on their job description. Keep their blinders on; never allow them to think beyond to discover the NEW art of the possible.

Do you witness any of these actions in your organization?

If you do, you are witnessing the annihilation of original thought.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.13.17 at 04:16 am by Roy Osing
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February 27, 2017

7 easy ways leaders can think creatively to achieve their goals

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It’s not good enough to rely on traditional methods; leaders must think differently to create value for their organizations.

The “silver bullet” for leaders is to loosen up on the process for setting business goals and tighten up on execution required to achieve them.

Organizations are trapped in the traditional business planning process of lengthy analysis, subject matter expert presentations and application of theoretical strategy-building precepts promulgated by consultants and academics.

What theoretically makes sense rarely works in the real world where people, technology, changing priorities, regulations and the unpredictable all collide in a “perfect storm”.

I come from the practical side of business.

I believe that if you can’t execute the strategy in a world of imperfection, the strategy is useless. After all, results are more interesting than the theoretical brilliance of the plan and the extent to which it conforms to pedantic norms.

Here are 7 ways leaders can think differently to achieve their strategic goals.

▪️Spend 20% of your time on WHAT you want to achieve; 80% on how you intend to achieve it. Execution detail is generally given the short shrift.

For some reason leaders assume they can pronounce a new strategy to the organization and miraculously it will get implemented. Nonsense. The granularity of your implementation plan will determine your success.

▪️Get comfortable with not getting it exactly right. We have this phobia about getting the business plan perfect. We spend an additional 4 weeks of planning time trying to make it more perfect.

It’s a ridiculous notion for two reasons: first there is no such thing as a perfect anything so stop trying to chase the illusion; second, as soon as your strategy is put to bed, it’s obsolete as unpredicted environmental events are felt.

▪️A strategy really understood is one that can be broken down into a handful of objectives intended to successfully execute it.

An action plan with 25 things to do suggests that the team that created the strategy doesn’t clearly understand it well enough to focus on the critical few actions necessary as opposed to the many possible actions that could be taken.

Focus on the must not the possible.

▪️Beware of the yummy incoming. Yummy is my way of describing over-the-transom demand that might be fun to chase, but it’s off strategy.

Ignore off-strategy demands on your time and resources, you can’t afford them. Stay on strategy and have the guts to turn away opportunities that suck you dry.

▪️Establish role clarity for everyone in the organization in terms of what they have to do execute flawlessly.
Dysfunction occurs when direct line of sight for people hasn’t been defined and included in performance plans.

▪️Cut the Crap! Stop doing the unnecessary so you can execute the necessary. It’s impossible to take on the new stuff when you won’t let go of the old stuff.

You don’t need more resources, you need to get rid of stuff that may have had relevance yesterday but not today.

▪️Kill the stupid policies that make your customers and employees go nuts. Customers won’t engage with dumb rules in their face which frustrate them when they engage with you.

Cleanse your inside with policies made to control customers; free them to transact with you on their terms.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.27.17 at 05:31 am by Roy Osing
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