If an organization needs to undergo significant change, that’s a leadership issue, right? Old dogs will learn new tricks when the lead dog — or ape, or penguin, depending on the management fable of the moment — shows them off. Leaders need to craft compelling elevator speeches, relentlessly deliver the message of change, and above all, walk the talk.
That is all well and good for animal packs, and it helps with humans, too. But by itself, the lead-animal theory is woefully insufficient for changing large organizations or large parts of organizations. Leaders modeling behavior and talking the case for change can indeed help enterprises transform. But how often is that corporate alpha dog actually sitting among the pack? Most people in large organizations catch a glimpse only briefly, via dispatch or WebEx or the rare visit. Soon, the appearance fades and the banners droop. The workers, the managers, and even the executives look around to see if their environment has changed, if the tried-and-true behaviors that made their world work will continue to do so. If the environment has changed, fine; it’s time to adapt. If it hasn’t, then why bother to change?
How, then, does one lead the changing of an organization, whether it is a company, business unit, service line, department, or work unit? By changing the work systems that comprise the work environment around the people whose behavior is supposed to change. Therein lies the key to successful, embedded, and sustained change: alter the environment, and people will adapt to it. Call it a species strength. We behave based on the reality around us.
Eight aspects comprise our world at work and, therefore, patterns of behavior at work: organization (organizational chart), workplace (its physical or virtual configuration), task (work flow or processes), people (specifically the skills and orientation), rewards (and punishments), measurement (the metrics employed), information distribution (who gets to know what when), and decision allocation (who is involved in what way in which decisions). A skilled change leader can convert these eight aspects into eight levers for change.
Clay Serenbetz 