Leading Workplace Change™

There has been a growing amount of focus recently on how people can stay healthy - looking at what we eat; how we exercise; and, how we manage stress - asking us to take more personal responsibility for our own health.  During my last annual medical check-up, I started to think more about the role of doctors in helping people to stay healthy.  What expectations should my doctor have of me and what should I have from her?

My next thought was - are doctors trained to help people stay healthy to prevent sickness or is the profession’s focus on identifying and treating disease?  It seems that the focus should be on prevention, but my sense is that the historical training for doctors is more reactive in nature.  So if people are becoming more proactive in thinking about their health rather than waiting for disease to strike, then we need to have doctors trained and rewarded to help us stay healthy as well as treat disease.  This would be a major culture shift for the profession from a focus on disease to health.

Now we can go back to the question of expectations between doctors and their patients, but wait a minute - first I need to think about language.  A patient is defined as - one under medical treatment and when I go in for my annual check-up, I am really a client looking for a health service provider. Let me know if I am sick, but please give me the info I need to stay healthy!

Again, the first step of acting differently is to think differently.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Personal-Ah-Hah Moments by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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I don’t remember when it started – just a general unease when everyone around me seems to agree – but I think I started becoming aware of my unease when I was teaching at night in a suburban junior college in the mid ‘60s. The Dean had said – “when teaching adults you have to be creative and find ways of getting your students involved in the classroom.”  

Well, my grand idea to engage my students was to juxtapose the principles of the Nuremberg trials with the arguments for and against the exodus of draft-age American men to Canada. To my surprise, I found myself the only one in the classroom on one side of the argument – all thirty some odd of my students were on the other side of the argument. So much for engagement - enter outrage - so creative was I that my teaching contract was terminated.  

But I persisted in my teaching and later became an instructor at a major state university while earning a graduate degree - bright young students, all 18-22, white, from middle-class (and up) families. As with any profession that puts you in front of people for long periods of time, all professors have to enjoy hearing themselves pontificate (interjecting, of course, the obligatory joke or two during each class period). But after a while, it becomes boring.  

My fellow graduate students – from all over the country – could debate the finest points over multiple pitchers of beer for hours at a time. No such luck when it came to the undergraduate classroom. I continued to spray my lectures and prayed that some of my students picked up some of the pearls while I entertained myself. (This, of course, is the widely used “spray and pray” method in teaching.) But I did begin to realize that I was unlikely to be successful in eliciting student participation if no one in the room had any “different” ideas. 

Next stop in my career – a large urban university in the center of a major metropolis – students from throughout the country, around the world – different backgrounds, socio-economic, cultural, racial/ethnic. I learned everyday – so did my students – I learned that if there are no “different” ideas to exchange, no one learns. Diversity is an antecedent of learning. I stayed awhile — 28 years — and learned something new everyday. Perhaps there’s a message here for organizations that aspire to be “learning” organizations.

Tags: Personal-Ah-Hah Moments by John – XEverything
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I just wrote a blog about a top-down culture which made me remember my first  visceral experience as a culture consultant in a company with a Daddy Knows Best culture. These kind of workplaces are similar to top-down cultures, but there is clearly a more family feel about the work environment where employees are taken care of; job security is usually guaranteed; and in return, employees are expected to be loyal.  There are not many of these Daddy Knows Best or Family cultures left as most companies broke the psychological contract with employees of life-time employment in the last 10 to 15 years.

But now, back to my first visceral experience with a Daddy Knows Best culture - we were presenting the results of our culture assessment to the top management team of the company - we had come to the point of offering recommended next steps, but then quietly, the CEO’s assistant came in and whispered in the CEO’s ear about something.  The CEO politely excused himself . No one said anything, we all just waited - 10 minutes - 30, 45 minutes.  It was very uncomfortable for everyone and it was clear (nonverbally) that it was our role as consultants to wait for the CEO to come back before we should continue.

I remember looking around the room and thinking that all of the company officers sitting around the table were male, the age of my Father and most likely had children my age - in their mid-30’s.  I suddenly realized that my Father was not infallible and that he probably sometimes worked in environments where he was treated like a child without any power.  I started to worry about the leadership of this company, of our country…  Finally, the door opened and the CEO came back into the room - we took up where we left off. 

The CEO led a spirited debate about our recommended next steps and then politely thanked us for our work.  We presented the findings to differing levels over the next 6 months, but follow-up actions were minimal. Within the next 10 years, this company was purchased by another company in its industry. Another time, we will talk about the delicate balance between loyalty, security and innovation.

Tags: Personal-Ah-Hah Moments by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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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 by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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This is a story about one of my first ah-hah’s regarding the reality of organizational culture. I was at a monthly staff meeting in my first job after getting my MBA. It was early in the year and the regional manager was talking about the annual sales competition. The part of the speech that was my ah-hah was about the prizes offered to folks with the highest sales numbers for the year. Remember, this is in the 1980’s and I am female, interested in the arts and from suburban New Jersey.
Third prize – season tickets for the University of Georgia Bulldog Football Games
Second prize – one-year lease on a Chevy Truck
First prize – all expense-paid trip to go boar hunting in Southern Alabama

My first response was blank as I looked around the room at the other sales folks (mostly male and primarily from the Southeast part of the U.S.) who were getting excited – I realized in that moment that this was not the right job for me. I looked at the sales manager, who had always taken care to support and mentor me, and I could tell that he knew he had lost me, but did not know what to do. My mind was saying – I cannot wait as long as it will take for this organization to understand, let alone appreciate and act upon what motivates me. I just do not “fit-in” here.

Now in hindsight, I wish I had the courage to go to my manager and talk about how the prizes were not going to motivate me; and, I wish my manager would have come to me and asked what was wrong. But, the corporate culture kept us both quiet.

Tags: Personal-Ah-Hah Moments by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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