The 4 Questions: How to Navigate—Not Avoid—Change

There are four questions that most companies and individuals seek answers to:

1. Change Management: How can you and your team manage new challenges?
2. The Future: What’s coming up tomorrow, next year and beyond?
3. Modern Leadership: How to remain authoritative in today’s landscape?
4. Purposeful Growth: How does one grow/remain relevant?

This week’s focus is Change Management.

Organizations grow and change only when people grow and change

Change is inevitable. Yet every company struggles with embracing new ideas and finding ways to grow.

Moving a company forward often happens in three ways: strategy; mergers and acquisitions; and reorganization.

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When it comes to your talent, you must have answers to three main questions:

• Why are the recommended changes good for their personal growth?
• What are the monetary or other incentives to change?
• When and where will training be provided to help them to learn the new skills needed?

The duality of change

Embracing technology and upgrading your talent are the two key drivers to reconfiguring a business, and both are required—at the same time. Keeping up with new technologies is necessary but not sufficient to succeed.

Change sucks. But irrelevance is even worse.

Basically, technology is like a lever, allowing talent leverage and scale. It is never technology or talent. It is technology and talent. Fantastic silicon (tech) with mediocre carbon (human talent) or vice versa are unlikely to succeed.

Talented people in a good culture with enabling technology are what create happy customers and drive innovation, differentiation, revenue growth and profits.

Recruit, train and promote with the Six Cs

The big C of change can only happen when teams cultivate and hone the Six Cs. Three of these have to do with the individual (Cognition, Creativity, Curiosity) and three with how we connect with each other and the world (Collaborate, Communicate, Convince).

• Cognition: Learning how to think and keeping your mental operating system constantly upgraded
• Creativity: Looking beyond the obvious to connect dots in new ways. This will be key as AI-powered computers crunch data and make correlations faster than we ever could. To be human is to be creative. We need to learn and feed this inside us.
• Curiosity: Being alive to possibilities, questioning the status quo and asking, “What if?”
• Collaboration: Key in a world where APIs (application programming interfaces) are not just about handshakes between software and hardware but between individuals with different skills, teams in different countries, partners, suppliers and much more.
• Communicate: Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to present. It may be old school, but the people who succeed are good at communication.
• Convince: Every one of us is a salesperson regardless of what our title is.

But first, cure Inner Dinosaur Disease

Change exposes us to vulnerability, with loss of control and clout. It demeans the very currency of expertise, seniority, networks and image we spent decades building.

All this awakens our inner dinosaur, and we let it roar and roam against these threatening changes to our ecosystem by indulging in a two-step shuffle.

 First, we justify our refusal to change via the Deflection Dance:

• Blame the bosses
• Attribute inaction to profit pressures
• Suggest the client/customer was only giving lip service to change readiness
• Exhume specimens from the when-things-went-wrong folder
• Wait for others to find the landmines.

The second step is Change Botox—temporary surface embellishments that distract from making real changes. A common manifestation: announcing the retention of a consulting firm that will benchmark and develop a plan of action.

But the inner dinosaur can be controlled, and even vanquished, with these five steps:

• Own change: If you change, others will follow.  If they do not, change your partners or your options.
• Empower the iconoclasts: There are many talented revolutionaries within your corporate environment, but they are often dismissed as “too junior” to add value. 
• Cross the line: We all cower within self-drawn boundaries, fearful of crossing a line.  Or we wait for permission. Let ethics guide you and start changing things.
• Leverage organizational inertia: Your organization may suffer from so much inertia that leaders might not actually know how to say no. This is a real opportunity for the daring.
• Act to change or change your act: If your company is stuck, you do not have to stick around.

Change sucks. But irrelevance is even worse.

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