Almost all organizations have employees, sub contractors or other types of associates. These are your ‘Colleagues” though their exact role and relationship to the organization will vary.
We need to manage and sometimes to engineer organizational change.
That’s usually a difficult task and the track record of these transformations is usually not a positive one.
Psychologists – academic researchers and others – have developed some ideas on what seems to be some of the more effective ideas on what will work.
This model consists of what I call the Four Pillars of Transformation – four things that can be done to successfully implement organization change. The more pillars that are utilized the better the outcome.
The Four Pillars consist of:
Create Understanding – Colleagues must clearly know what is required of them. They will clearly know what it is important to the organization and why it is the best approach.
People want their actions to align with their beliefs and core values. No one wants to be told to do something without understanding why. That creates cognitive dissonance which when it starts, creates poor performance.
Put another way, if a person or team doesn’t understand what they are supposed to do and most especially why they are doing it, failure will certainly follow.
Grow Skills, Enhance Abilities – Asking a person or team to complete a task without the skills and environment that creates success will demoralize the team/person. And will not succeed if they proceed anyway.
People can always grow and learn when they are motivated.
Provide Good Role Models and Examples – If everyone else is behaving in the way you are asking the team to behave, it is more likely you will get the results you want.
Don’t exhibit ‘Do as I say, not as I do”. People notice that sort of inconsistency.
Even further – whether they are aware of it or not, people will copy the behavior and ideas of the groups and individuals they work with. This is how company cultures are established. And culture permeates all of human activity even down to a simple group of a few friends.
Supporting Systems and Procedures – The formal organization structure and rules need to align with the three other pillars and allow the positive effects that come out of the other pillars to happen. So many times one or two of the above pillars are in place but the corporate bureaucracy, even the informal rules, prevent success from occurring. Don’t let your organization be its own worst enemy.
The next time you are frustrated with results from your team and its members, consider the four pillars above. The more of these that are working, the more likely the chances for success.
