Leading Workplace Change™

I was moved to start a blog due to recent experiences with long-term clients. I realized these clients were stuck - nothing new in change management consulting, especially if you focus on helping leaders adapt their organizational cultures! I finally realized that the difficulty was a few key members of the management teams were not making important decisions, holding the whole team back and mostly because they were unable to personally act differently.

Now, changing how you act is a difficult task for anyone, let alone folks who now realize that whatever they do as leaders will be watched like a hawk by all employees of their organization. As consultants’ we had done a good job in communicating the responsibility of leaders to model and reward how they wanted everyone to act if they wanted a shift in their workplace culture - maybe too good a job. Eventually, I realized these leaders were human and nervous about their abilities to change their day-to-day behaviors. I remembered the same feeling when I ran an organization 15 years ago and mandated that everyone use an electronic client update system and I personally still did not understand how Windows worked on my computer!

We initiated individual coaching processes in our client organizations, but it was not enough.  So, the idea of a blog came to me as a way to more privately support people to act differently through the use of personal and workplace stories. I knew in my bones the power to inspire when you tell stories in small groups and big presentations and it seemed worth trying this new blog technology to tell stories in a more intimate way.

Tags: Personal-Ah-Hah Moments //