change. In reading about the ways top leaders across the business world have navigated change, you can learn from their experiences before you are faced with challenges of your own. Understanding and using these steps will enable you to derive the full benefit of many decades of experience in change leadership – my own and that of other leaders – without needing to spend years acquiring that experience yourself.
As you use the Stacking the Deck process and revisit its steps for each change you tackle, you will find yourself capable of leading breakthrough change faster and more effectively than ever before.
Chapter 1
Step One: Establishing the Need to Change and a Sense of Urgency
Change has always been part of the DNA of business, but the accelerated pace of technological innovation means that leaders have less time than ever to show a success, recover from a downturn, or make a change stick. There is no fallow period anymore, no time for business as usual, and no patience. If you do not innovate, adapt, and persevere, you will be swallowed up by the hundreds – or thousands – of other people who do what you do and spend all their waking hours thinking of ways to do it better. You have to be nimble and look ahead. Being able to anticipate massive change, like embedding technology to improve your product or service, coming up with a new way to distribute your product, or dealing with a new service's sudden popularity, means that you spend less time knocked on your back, trying to catch your breath.
But no matter how well leaders understand the need for change, the challenges they must face in leading breakthrough change will be enormous. We can't deny that change is part of life. Yet in life and in business, some people embrace change and others actively avoid it. While “change” is theoretically a neutral word, in reality change represents the unknown, and people – some of whom you must lead – almost always find the unknown scary. As Terry Pearce, author of Leading Out Loud: A Guide for Engaging Others in Creating the Future, has said, “People hate change. People love progress. The difference is purpose.” These words offer an excellent starting point for any discussion about change. Progress implies an improvement, a move forward. And nothing progresses by staying the same.
Link the Purpose and Mission
In leading breakthrough change, we must first convince others – those to whom we report and those on our team – that our proposed change has a positive, necessary, and urgent purpose. To be convincing and to draw people to your leadership team, you have to be clear about the problem or opportunity you are tackling. First with the team and later with the larger organization, you've got to help people believe that the change facing them is actually progress. You will be most successful when you tie the change to the company's mission and show how the change will help achieve it.
If you are rolling your eyes at this reference to the importance of the company's mission, you are not alone. Even though nearly every company has a mission statement that is communicated to all employees from virtually the day they enter the company, and perhaps even in the recruiting process, company mission statements often become a joke among employees. Mission statements simply aren't lived up to in many companies. In these cases, tying the proposed change to a mission that no one believes the company leaders really care about is doomed from the start.
It is beyond the scope of this book to delineate the importance of establishing a strong company culture – the values the company lives by, the actions that make those values real, and a mission that inspires employee passion and commitment. And yet every executive interviewed for this book underscored the critical importance of employees believing in and feeling connected to the corporate culture. When employees believe in a mission, they get excited and passionate about contributing to the company's goals. Thus, connecting a breakthrough change to the company mission and explaining how it contributes to the mission can help employees see and appreciate why a change may be necessary – even critical – to the company's future success.
With more than 25 years as a senior leader in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, Ginger Graham has a successful track history with change. Now the president and CEO of Two Trees Consulting, she made it clear that many of her largest opportunities and successes have been born of very difficult circumstances. Ginger well understands that “crisis opens the door for change and new solutions.” As an example, she explained that at age 37 she became CEO of a privately held business that was in turmoil after a number of leadership changes and product recalls. The company, Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, had leading technology in the world of interventional cardiology. But when Ginger came on board, they were losing market share and had received a warning letter from the FDA. There was finger-pointing and blaming; in those stressful times, she “quickly learned about people and how they operate.” Employees, people who were there for the mission, were disillusioned and worried about what would happen next. She was faced with a classic burning platform, a situation in which the need for change is obvious and immediate.
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