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 by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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I recently read a good article that relates storytelling to leading change. It is called “The Four Truths of the Storyteller” by Peter Guber in the Harvard Business School (12/07). The cool thing is that Guber is a film producer of such movies as Rain Man, Batman and The Color Purple, so the article interweaves the world of filmmaking and leadership. What I like the best about the article is that Guber gives very specific and behavioral info about how to tell a story that people will get wrapped up in like a movie. He connects storytelling to the shamans’ and griots’ of pre-history who helped groups, tribes and civilizations to pass on their beliefs, values and rules in their tales of great heroes, triumphs and tragedies.

This connects directly to my thoughts that leaders who want to consciously manage culture change need to be good storytellers, because there is power in stories – we, as humans are biologically wired to like listening to stories – to be entertained and to learn at the same time. And the end goal for leaders who aspire to manage culture change is - to get people to act the way you want them to in a natural and self-sustaining way. So read this article to get the basics of how to tell a good story.

Tags: Good Books and Articles by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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