Change Management: How To Drive And Adapt

Change is not a journey, it’s not something that should be emotional but it should rather be a process that can be repeatedly executed by any individual or organization.

While yes, it usually starts from a state of mind of either desperation or inspiration, embracing change is methodical, or as the saying goes motivation gets you started, habits keep you going.

And the habit element, the actual step by step process is what we’ll focus on in this course.

 This video is largely based on the famous ted talk of Simon Sinek called How great leaders inspire action.

 After watching this course or when you’re on a break I highly encourage you to go see the entire talk for more in depth understanding of the concept.

The aim of this video is to make you more self aware of your own limitations and increase your effectiveness in driving the change you want in your organization.

This topic was covered by many authors, studies and even philosophers.

Change inherently brings risk to the table. If it were 100% safe and easy to implement everyone would be doing it. Change might be a career shift, moving to a new department, going from a project that you master to one that you start from scratch, implementing a new process nobody is familiar with or is reluctant to try….change is risk. 

You cannot do it alone.

As much as you might hate people, you need them, and maybe if you hate them, you need to change something with regards to the people you’re working or dealing with or change your attitude and perception towards them.

High trust in your organization makes communication far less complicated. In fact you can look at all the problems people have in the workplace and at the source more often than not it’s a problem of communication. 

Clarity goes hand in hand with building trust and is one of the main factors of team morale.

And it doesn’t impact change alone. It’s an all round business success requirement.

Having clear outlines of the company’s procedures and policies reduce the number of mistakes and conflicts. Clear goals and guidelines might even speed up execution because people will find faster ways to achieve a specific goal.

When establishing an internal communication policy many organizations neglect the social side of things.

Communication is not just work oriented but also has the role of meeting our human needs to interact with one another and share our life experiences.

The 4 basic principles any message should meet is speed, transparency, clarity and reach. 

To simplify things I’ve organized the guidelines for implementing effective feedback systems into just 4 components.

First, make sure you are taking data driven decisions. Now the second one, comes to ground the first one into reality. And this states, the relationships matter.  Moving on to the 3rd component of effective feedback systems we have the follow-up. And for our forth and last element you need to make it a routine.   

We’ll quickly go over everything we’ve discussed in this module so you see everything as a whole not just the individual components.

The first concept that is essential to any successful implementation of change. And that is DOING.

As simple as it might sound, doing is one of the main reasons change is not universally adopted.

You might remember at the start of the course we addressed the topic of fear and discomfort with change by definition happening when you leave your comfort zone.

And fear is what happens when you leave that comfort zone. It can take many forms, fear of failure, fear of being judged by others or even fear of success.

Decision making and cognitive biases.

I’ll go a bit formal here, but bare with me.

So a decision is the process of selecting a choice from a range of possible options with the goal of achieving a very specific objective.

That’s why with focus I want to address many of the aspects required for achieving your goals. You need both motivation but also good habits if you are going to succeed.

A good sports analogy to this are the concepts of sprints and marathons.

Running a successful organization is more like a marathon. You need consistent progress over time and good resource management. It doesn’t matter if you’re ahead the first 6 months if you can’t keep the pace and get left behind. Short term loss in the form of investments or restructuring can prove long term wins.

However, while this marathon concept is valid, in day to day operations sprints are always present. You need to launch that new product, pitch that new client, add that new feature.

The best behavior to counter adversity is complete ownership. And what do I mean by that. You might remember some of the cognitive biases we’ve talked about in the previous module, one of them being that people place responsibility on external factors when they fail and consider their merit when they win. 

Forcing yourself out of autopilot. You’ve kept hearing me say throughout the course that in most cases you know what needs to be done especially when you want something to change. Then why haven’t you done it already. And your autopilot is the problem.

Call it your comfort zone, call it your internal thermostat, this is what stops you from growing.

Constant supervised stress. This is by far the most effective way to make progress in any field. It takes many shapes and forms, one of the most familiar is getting a mentor or a coach.

The importance of this is best seen in athletes. A good coach can sky rocket the progress of almost any team and can help peak performance athletes get unstuck whenever they reach a plateau or a mental block.

First of all I want to congratulate you for reaching the end of the course. Although throughout the course I kept saying reading, listening and learning are not enough, action is what makes the difference, what I didn’t say is that very few put in the work to learn. 

This short video comes comes as a resource for those of you that want to expand their knowledge on specific areas we’ve covered in the course. If you have any other recommendation, feel free to share it in the discussions section of this course.