Change leader, change thyself
Anyone
who pulls the organization in new directions must look inward as well as
outward.
Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, famously wrote, “Everyone thinks of
changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Tolstoy’s dictum is a useful
starting point for any executive engaged in organizational change. After years
of collaborating in efforts to advance the practice of leadership and cultural
transformation, we’ve become convinced that organizational change is
inseparable from individual change. Simply put, change efforts often falter
because individuals overlook the need to make fundamental changes in
themselves.
Building self-understanding and then
translating it into an organizational context is easier said than done, and
getting started is often the hardest part. We hope this article helps leaders
who are ready to try and will intrigue those curious to learn more.
Organizations
don’t change—people do
Many companies move quickly from
setting their performance objectives to implementing a suite of change
initiatives. Be it a new growth strategy or business-unit structure, the
integration of a recent acquisition or the rollout of a new
operational-improvement effort, such organizations focus on altering systems
and structures and on creating new policies and processes.
To achieve collective change over
time, actions like these are necessary but seldom sufficient. A new strategy
will fall short of its potential if it fails to address the underlying mind-sets
and capabilities of the people who will execute it.
McKinsey research and client
experience suggest that half of all efforts to transform organizational
performance fail either because senior managers don’t act as role models for
change or because people in the organization defend the status quo.
In other words, despite the stated change goals, people on the ground tend to
behave as they did before. Equally, the same McKinsey research indicates that
if companies can identify and address pervasive mind-sets at the outset, they
are four times more likely to succeed in organizational-change efforts than are
companies that overlook this stage.
Look
both inward and outward
Companies that only look outward in
the process of organizational change—marginalizing individual learning and
adaptation—tend to make two common mistakes.
The first is to focus solely on
business outcomes. That means these companies direct their attention to what
Alexander Grashow, Ronald Heifetz, and Marty Linsky call the “technical”
aspects of a new solution, while failing to appreciate what they call “the
adaptive work” people must do to implement it.
The second common mistake, made even
by companies that recognize the need for new learning, is to focus too much on
developing skills. Training that only emphasizes new behavior rarely translates
into profoundly different performance outside the classroom.
In our work together with
organizations undertaking leadership and cultural transformations, we’ve found
that the best way to achieve an organization’s aspirations is to combine
efforts that look outward with those that look inward. Linking strategic and
systemic intervention to genuine self-discovery and self-development by leaders
is a far better path to embracing the vision of the organization and to
realizing its business goals.
What
is looking inward?
Looking inward is a way to examine
your own modes of operating to learn what makes you tick. Individuals have
their own inner lives, populated by their beliefs, priorities, aspirations,
values, and fears. These interior elements vary from one person to the next,
directing people to take different actions.
Interestingly, many people aren’t
aware that the choices they make are extensions of the reality that operates in
their hearts and minds. Indeed, you can live your whole life without
understanding the inner dynamics that drive what you do and say. Yet it’s
crucial that those who seek to lead powerfully and effectively look at their
internal experiences, precisely because they direct how you take action,
whether you know it or not. Taking accountability as a leader today includes
understanding your motivations and other inner drives.
For the purposes of this article, we
focus on two dimensions of looking inward that lead to self-understanding:
developing profile awareness and developing state awareness.
Profile
awareness
An individual’s profile is a
combination of his or her habits of thought, emotions, hopes, and behavior in
various circumstances. Profile awareness is therefore a recognition of these
common tendencies and the impact they have on others.
We often observe a rudimentary level
of profile awareness with the executives we advise. They use labels as a
shorthand to describe their profile, telling us, “I’m an overachiever” or “I’m
a control freak.” Others recognize emotional patterns, like “I always fear the
worst,” or limiting beliefs, such as “you can’t trust anyone.” Other executives
we’ve counseled divide their identity in half. They end up with a simple liking
for their “good” Dr. Jekyll side and a dislike of their “bad” Mr. Hyde.
Finding ways to describe the common
internal tendencies that drive behavior is a good start. We now know, however,
that successful leaders develop profile awareness at a broader and deeper
level.
State
awareness
State awareness, meanwhile, is the
recognition of what’s driving you at the moment you take action. In common
parlance, people use the phrase “state of mind” to describe this, but we’re
using “state” to refer to more than the thoughts in your mind. State awareness
involves the real-time perception of a wide range of inner experiences and
their impact on your behavior. These include your current mind-set and beliefs,
fears and hopes, desires and defenses, and impulses to take action.
State awareness is harder to master
than profile awareness. While many senior executives recognize their tendency
to exhibit negative behavior under pressure, they often don’t realize they’re
exhibiting that behavior until well after they’ve started to do so. At that
point, the damage is already done.
We believe that in the future, the
best leaders will demonstrate both profile awareness and state awareness. These
capacities can develop into the ability to shift one’s inner state in real
time. That leads to changing behavior when you can still affect the outcome,
instead of looking back later with regret. It also means not overreacting to
events because they are reminiscent of something in the past or evocative of
something that might occur in the future.
Close
the performance gap
When learning to look inward in the
process of organizational transformation, individuals accelerate the pace and
depth of change dramatically. In the words of one executive we know, who has
invested heavily in developing these skills, this kind of learning “expands
your capacity to lead human change and deliver true impact by awakening the
full leader within you.” In practical terms, individuals learn to align what
they intend with what they actually say and do to influence others.
Erica Ariel Fox’s recent book, Winning
from Within, calls this phenomenon closing your
performance gap. That gap is the disparity between what people know they
should say and do to behave successfully and what they actually do in
the moment. The performance gap can affect anyone at any time, from the CEO to
a summer intern.
This performance gap arises in
individuals partly because of the profile that defines them and that they use
to define themselves. In the West in particular, various assessments tell you
your “type,” essentially the psychological clothing you wear to present
yourself to the world.
To help managers and employees
understand each other, many corporate-education tools use simplified typing
systems to describe each party’s makeup. These tests often classify people
relatively quickly, and in easily remembered ways: team members might be red or
blue, green or yellow, for example.
There are benefits in this approach,
but in our experience it does not go far enough and those using it should
understand its limitations. We all possess the full range of qualities
these assessments identify. We are not one thing or the other: we are all at
once, to varying degrees. As renowned brain researcher Dr. Daniel Siegel explains,
“we must accept our multiplicity, the fact that we can show up quite
differently in our athletic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual—or many
other—states. A heterogeneous collection of states is completely normal in us
humans.”
Putting the same point more poetically, Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am
large, I contain multitudes.”
To close performance gaps, and
thereby build your individual leadership capacity, you need a more nuanced
approach that recognizes your inner complexity. Coming to terms with your full
richness is challenging. But the kinds of issues involved—which are highly
personal and well beyond the scope of this short management article—include:
- What are the primary parts of my profile, and how are they balanced against each other?
- What resources and capabilities does each part of my profile possess? What strengths and liabilities do those involve?
- When do I tend to call on each member of my inner executive team? What are the benefits and costs of those choices?
- Do I draw on all of the inner sources of power available to me, or do I favor one or two most of the time?
- How can I develop the sweet spots that are currently outside of my active range?
Answering these questions starts
with developing profile awareness.
Leading
yourself—and the organization
Individuals can improve themselves
in many ways and hence drive more effective organizational change. We focus
here on a critical few that we’ve found to increase leadership capacity and to
have a lasting organizational impact.
1.
Develop profile awareness: Map the Big Four
While we all have myriad aspects to
our inner lives, in our experience it’s best to focus your reflections on a
manageable few as you seek to understand what’s driving you at different times.
Fox’s Winning from Within suggests that you can move beyond labels such
as “perfectionist” without drowning in unwieldy complexity, by concentrating on
your Big Four, which largely govern the way individuals function every day. You
can think of your Big Four as an inner leadership team, occupying an internal
executive suite: the chief executive officer (CEO), or inspirational Dreamer;
the chief financial officer (CFO), or analytical Thinker; the chief people
officer (CPO), or emotional Lover; and the chief operating officer (COO), or
practical Warrior
How do these work in practice?
Consider the experience of Geoff McDonough, the transformational CEO of Sobi,
an emerging pioneer in the treatment of rare diseases. Many credit McDonough’s
versatile leadership with successfully integrating two legacy companies and
increasing market capitalization from nearly $600 million in 2011 to $3.5
billion today.
From our perspective, his leadership
success owes much to his high level of profile awareness. He also displays high
profile agility: his skill at calling on the right inner executive at the right
time for the right purpose. In other words, he deploys each of his Big Four
intentionally and effectively to harness its specific strengths and skills to
meet a situation.
McDonough used his inner Dreamer’s
imagination to envision the clinical and business impact of Sobi’s
biological-development program in neonatology. He saw the possibility of
improving the neurodevelopment of tiny, vulnerable newborns and thus of giving
them a real chance at a healthy life.
His inner Thinker’s assessment took
an unusual perspective at the time. Others didn’t share his evaluation of the
viability of integrating one company’s 35-year legacy of biologics development
(Kabi Vitrum— the combined group of Swedish pharmaceutical companies Kabi and
Vitrum—which merged with Pharmacia and was later acquired, forming Biovitrum in
2001) with another’s 25-year history of commercializing treatments for rare
diseases (Swedish Orphan), to lead in a rare-disease market environment with
very few independent midsize companies.
Rising to a separate, if related,
challenge, McDonough called on his inner Lover to build bridges between the
siloed legacy companies. He focused on the people who mattered most to
everyone—the patients—and promoted internal talent from both sides,
demonstrating his belief that everyone, whatever his or her previous corporate
affiliation, could be part of the new “one Sobi.”
Finally, bringing Sobi to its
current levels of success required McDonough to tell hard truths and take some
painful steps. He called on his inner Warrior to move swiftly, adding key players
from the outside to the management team, restructuring the organization, and
resolutely promoting an entirely new business model.
2.
Develop state awareness: The work of your inner lookout
Profile awareness, as we’ve said, is
only the first part of what it takes to look inward when driving organizational
change. The next part is state awareness.
Leading yourself means being in tune
with what’s happening on the inside, not later but right now. Think about it.
People who don’t notice that they are becoming annoyed, judgmental, or
defensive in the moment are not making real choices about how to behave. We all
need an inner “lookout”—a part of us that notices our inner state—much as all
parents are at the ready to watch for threats of harm to their young children.7
For example, a senior executive
leading a large-scale transformation remarked that he would like to spend 15
minutes kicking off an important training event for change agents to signal its
importance. Objectively speaking, he would probably have the opposite of the
intended effect if he said how important the workshop was and then left 15
minutes into it.
What he needed at that moment was
the perception of his inner lookout. That perspective would see that he was
torn between wanting to endorse the program, on the one hand, and wanting to
attend to something else that was also important, on the other. With that clarity,
he could make a choice that was sensible and aligned: he might still speak for
15 minutes and then let people know that he wished he could stay longer but had
a crucial meeting elsewhere. Equally, he might realize the negative
implications of his early departure under any circumstances, decide to postpone
the later meeting, and stay another couple of hours. Either way, the inner
lookout’s view would lead to more effective leadership behavior.
During a period of organizational
change, it’s critical that senior executives collectively adopt the lookout
role for the organization as a whole. Yet they often can’t, because they’re
wearing rose-tinted glasses that blur the limitations of their leadership
style, mask destructive mind-sets at lower levels of the organization, and
generally distort what’s going on outside the executive suite. Until we and
others confronted one manager we know with the evidence, he had no idea he was
interfering with, and undermining, employees through the excessively large number
of e-mails he was sending on a daily basis.
Spotting misaligned perceptions
requires putting the spotlight on observable behavior and getting enough data
to unearth the core issues. Note that traditional satisfaction or
employee-engagement surveys—and even 360-degree feedback—often fail to get to
the bottom of the problem. A McKinsey diagnostic that reached deep into the
workforce—aggregating the responses of 52,240 individuals at 44
companies—demonstrated perception gaps across job levels at 70 percent of the
participating organizations. In about two-thirds of them, the top teams were
more positive about their own leadership skills than was the rest of the
organization. Odds are, in other words, that rigorous organizational
introspection will be eye opening for senior leaders.
3.
Translate awareness into organizational change
Those open eyes will be better able
to spot obstacles to organizational change. Consider the experience of a
company that became aware, during a major earnings-improvement effort, that an
absence of coaching was stifling progress. On the surface, people said they did
not have the time to make coaching a priority. But an investigation of the root
causes showed that one reason people weren’t coaching was that they themselves
had become successful despite never having been coached. In fact, coaching was
associated with serious development needs and seen only as a tool for
documenting and firing people. Beneath the surface, managers feared that if
they coached someone, others would view that person as a poor performer.
Changing a pervasive element of
corporate culture like this depends on a diverse set of interventions that will
appeal to different parts of individuals and of the organization. In this case,
what followed was a positive internal-communication campaign, achieved with the
help of posters positioning star football players alongside their coaches and
supported by commentary spelling out the impact of coaching on operating
performance at other organizations. At the same time, executives put “the
elephant in the room” and acknowledged the negative connotations of coaching,
and these confessions helped managers understand and adapt such critical norms.
In the end, the actions the executives initiated served to increase the
frequency and quality of coaching, with the result that the company was able to
move more rapidly toward achieving its performance goals.
4.
Start with one change catalyst
While dealing with resistance and
fear is often necessary, it’s rarely enough to take an organization to the next
level. To go further and initiate collective change, organizations must unleash
the full potential of individuals. One person or a small group of trailblazers
can provide that catalyst.
For many years, it was widely
believed that human beings could not run a mile in less than four minutes.
Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, many runners came close to the
four-minute mark, but all fell short. On May 6th, 1954, in Oxford, England,
Roger Bannister ran a mile in three minutes and 59 seconds. Only 46 days after
Bannister’s historic run, John Landy broke the record again. By 1957, 16 more
runners had broken through what once was thought to be an impossible barrier.
Today, well over a thousand people have run a mile in less than four minutes,
including high-school athletes.
Organizations behave in a similar
manner. We often find widely held “four-minute mile” equivalents, like
“unattainable growth goals” or “unachievable cost savings” or “unviable
strategic changes.” Before the broader organization can start believing that
the impossible is possible, one person or a small number of people must embrace
a new perspective and set out to disprove the old way of thinking. Bannister,
studying to be a doctor, had to overcome physiologists’ claims and popular
assumptions that anyone who tried to run faster than 15 miles an hour would
die.
Learning to lead yourself requires
you to question some core assumptions too, about yourself and the way things
work. Like Joseph Campbell’s famous “hero’s journey,” that often means leaving
your everyday environment, or going outside your comfort zone, to experience
trials and adventures.8 One global company sent its senior
leaders to places as far afield as the heart of Communist China and the beaches
of Normandy with a view to challenging their internal assumptions about the
company’s operating model. The fresh perspectives these leaders gained helped
shape their internal values and leadership behavior, allowing them to cascade
the lessons through the organization upon their return.
This integration of looking both
inward and outward is the most powerful formula we know for creating long-term,
high-impact organizational change.
byNate Boaz and Erica Ariel Fox
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/leading_in_the_21st_century/change_leader_change_thyself?cid=other-eml-nsl-mip-mck-oth-1404
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