Ellen Auster

Change Leadership: Overcoming Change Fatigue and Organizational Burnout

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For any business, large or small, corporate change is critical for survival. Unfortunately, though, many of us are juggling multiple change initiatives simultaneously. Not only that, but 70% of changes fail – contributing to the exhaustion both individuals and organizations are experiencing. So, how can we avoid change fatigue and organizational burnout while still moving our companies forward?

Here are three success principles that will help you navigate this frenzy of activity and build the ongoing capabilities required for continuous evolution:

[wcm_restrict]1. Change Less, Achieve More

It may sound counterintuitive, but the single biggest thing we can do to achieve stronger results with less burnout is to shut down worthy projects, teams, and task forces. As Joan Lewis, former P&G Global Officer and SVP of Consumer and Market Knowledge says, “Hundreds or thousands of projects are good ideas but if we don’t prune the list, they will strangle each other like weeds in a garden.”

Steve Jobs, after reviewing hundreds of projects when he returned to Apple, famously focused all of Apple on creating and delivering just four great products – consumer and professional versions of a portable (what became the iPhone and iPad) and a desktop (what became today’s Macs). Shutting down projects and prioritizing was key to Apple’s subsequent explosive growth.

Interested in lightening your organization’s and your own load? Try Prioritization Grid Sessions with your teams to identify the highest impact initiatives. Then you’ll know what you need to do, versus what’s nice to do, so you can prioritize the top few projects and sunset the less essential ones.
Prioritization Grid

Figure 1: Prioritization Grid

2. Measure Twice, Cut Once

“Measure twice, cut once” is good advice for more than just tailors and carpenters. Piloting, prototyping, and contingency planning before a change can save weeks or even years of rework. For example, a major bank tried to do a technological transition of their system without sufficient pre-testing. The system crashed and customers didn’t have access to their accounts for three days. They lost customers and the reputational damage was enduring.

Another bank, doing a very similar transition, ran parallel systems and user acceptance training for several months. When they launched, they did it on a three-day weekend to allow extra time as a buffer. Thanks to their thorough preparation and pre-testing, all went well.

One technique we recommend is the “Pre-Mortem.” Before launching a major change, ask two questions. “It’s a year from now and the project has succeeded; why did it work so well?” and “Now pretend that it’s a year from now and the project has failed; why did it fail?” Once you’ve identified the key factors in each scenario you can focus efforts on those critical areas.

3. Learn to Learn

Most organizations spend too much time in activity – doing and redoing – and not enough in reflecting, diagnosing, and course-correcting. As a result, they are often repeating the same mistakes while using up precious company resources.

Athletes often report that their most important time is between competitions as they diagnose what’s working and what’s not on their quest to improve. For example, Roger Federer once said that he uses the breaks between sets to determine what in his strategy and execution is working or needs to change to win the match. This dynamic, on-going learning and refinement has been key to his becoming and remaining one of the top tennis players in the world, long after many of his peers have left the game.

We can all apply this same skill in our business life – between meetings, after key stages of projects, or any time we need to step back and look at the big picture. Even if, like Roger Federer, you only have a minute or two to reflect, that reflection can make all the difference in the outcome.

We recommend instituting after-action reviews (AARs) – formal learning sessions that were originally developed in the U.S. military. The best after-action reviews are aimed at uncovering 3 things: what worked, what didn’t work, and what we will do differently in the future. Conducting AARs creates the space and the forum to reflect, document, share and learn. In addition, they enable us to uncover blind spots and have conversations about why we chose a particular course of action. And they help everyone in the organization learn and improve.

Turning Change Fatigue into Change Fitness

By shutting down projects and ruthlessly prioritizing, conducting pre-mortems and prototyping, and reflecting and course correcting as you go, you’ll be building what we call change fitness – the ability to win at change again and again.

And it all starts with changing less to accomplish more. Doesn’t that sound like a nice change?[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Authors

Lisa HillenbrandEllen R. AusterEllen R. Auster and Lisa Hillenbrand are the authors of authors of Stragility: Excelling at Strategic Changes (Rotman-UTP Publishing). Auster is Professor of Strategic Management and the Founding Director of the Schulich Centre for Teaching Excellence at the Schulich School of Business, York University. Hillenbrand is the founder of Lisa Hillenbrand & Associates, and previously served as Global Marketing Director at Procter & Gamble.

StrategyDriven Affordable Business Consulting

Affordable Business Consulting – Low Overheads

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StrategyDriven’s radically different approach to management consulting eliminates the bricks and mortar consulting firm offices that sit empty most of the time and then passes that cost savings on to our clients.

 
Ask yourself, when was the last time your consultants’ downtown office building bring ground-breaking insight to your business? When was the last time you even visited your consultants’ offices? Don’t they normally come to you?
 
From time-to-time, all organizations encounter a need for specialized knowledge, skills, or resources they don’t maintain on staff. When the need is temporary, the engagement of high-quality consultants is a great way to fill these gaps. But every dollar spent on consultants should go to bettering your company’s bottom line, not building-up your consultants’ businesses or paying for unnecessary overheads.

At StrategyDriven, we’ve streamlined our operations; employing modern communications technologies and eliminating bricks and mortar offices that in-turn reduces our overheads and provides tremendous cost savings to you.

Combine this with our “only as much as you need” use of our seasoned business leaders, our use of your staff, and our vast array of fully developed methods and tools and you get superior advisory services at a dramatically lower cost.

But don’t take my word for it, try our services for yourself. When you signup for StrategyDriven’s Self Guided Insights Library, you’ll gain FREE access to hundreds of our how-to business management and leadership documents spanning topics from strategic planning to day-to-day business execution. Created by respected business leaders from around the world, these documents provide you with the real-world tested, immediately implementable advice you need to take your organization to the next level of performance.

Marie Peeler

Becoming a Smarter Leader

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One of the traits that often come to mind when people describe leaders is intellect. A leader is expected to be smart. But being smart shouldn’t be a static condition – there are always opportunities to expand your knowledge base. Here are a few ideas of ways to not only become smarter, but to become a more effective leader at the same time.

[wcm_restrict]Challenge yourself to learn. Pick a topic that you want to know better (or you feel like you should know better) and then offer to give a presentation, lead a class, or teach a colleague about that topic. The pressure of knowing that you need to share this information will help you learn it thoroughly (as well as improve your ability to retain this knowledge).

Occasionally veer from business topics. While it’s important to stay abreast of the latest industry trends, it’s also important to open your mind to other ideas. In particular, reading non-business-related selections cannot only provide some much needed downtime, but can also stimulate your thinking in new ways. This new way of thinking might surprisingly translate into an ability to look at work-related challenges in a new light as well. And at minimum, your latest reading time could become your new small-talk-topic at the next networking event.

Learn something new. Again, this doesn’t have to be business-related, but learning something new – like speaking a new language or playing a musical instrument – can actually exercise your mind in a way that makes you smarter, not to mention makes you a more interesting individual. This new skill can also provide a point from which you might find understanding with someone with whom you otherwise share very little common ground.

Sleep. There’s been a lot of talk lately about how sleep is not only a good idea, but is vital toward maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In addition, sleep allows your brain to process all that it has learned throughout the day, and to reboot during that time so that it starts the next day ready to absorb new information. In addition, although scientists still don’t understand the process, they do know that neural connections, critical to memory, are formed when we sleep.

Prioritizing these strategies throughout your life will not only make you a smarter leader, but may make you a better leader as well.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Marie PeelerMarie Peeler is the principal of Peeler Associates, a Pembroke, Mass.-based organization that helps leaders enhance their leadership effectiveness, focus on what’s most important, and achieve their goals. Believing that growth is vital in maintaining and increasing leadership effectiveness – growth of individual leaders, growth of leadership teams, and growth of organizations – Marie helps leaders grow through executive coaching, team building, organizational development, leadership training, business retreats, and keynote speaking. For more information, please visit www.peelerassociates.com.

Shel Horowitz

Products and Services that Address Deep Rooted Social Problems

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Perhaps you’ve read the game-shifting books The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, by C.K. Prahalad or The Business Solution to Poverty by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick. They prove that the most economically disadvantaged people on the planet create a great market for social entrepreneurs – AND provide a terrific testing ground for innovation and cost control. This can be part of your strategy.

These products and services become even more powerful through a lens of deep sustainability, co-solving multiple problems and incorporating multiple benefits. Two examples:

Let There Be Light

d.light’s simple three-item product line simultaneously addresses poverty, education, air pollution/toxic fumes/health risks, energy savings, carbon footprint, and more—and makes a huge difference in lives of its customers. d.light’s deeply holistic analysis of the problems faced by people in poverty led to developing inexpensive, durable solar-powered LED lanterns (sold on time payments) to replace kerosene, open fires—or darkness.

[wcm_restrict]Replacing kerosene provides better light that needs no fuel, isn’t toxic, won’t set the house on fire, reduces pollution, and ends a money drain. Where it replaces darkness, it creates four more productive hours per day. Children can get better grades; parents can start cottage industries. The lamp becomes a ladder out of poverty.

As of February 28, 2013, the company claims:

  • 13,638,438 “lives empowered”
  • 3,409,610 school-aged children reached with solar lighting
  • $275,817,462 saved in energy-related expenses
  • 3,589,490,280 productive hours created for working and studying
  • 656,952 tons of CO2 offset
  • 10,115,224 kWh generated from renewable energy

?(For the latest stats: http://www.dlightdesign. com/impact-dashboard/).

Company executives hope to grow that 13 million user base all the way to 100 million by the end of the decade – perhaps accurate considering the company was only conceived of in 2004, following founder Sam Goldman’s encounter with a child who had been badly burned in a kerosene fire.

The Brownie Strategy

Now, a completely different industry: wholesale food components and retail baking. Greyston Bakery, brownie baker to Ben & Jerry’s since 1989, hires ex-addicts, ex-prisoners, and ex-mental patients. Its slogan: “We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people.”

This is the company’s mission:

While baking 30,000 lbs of delicious brownies on a daily basis is no small task, Open Hiring is the hallmark of Greyston Bakery… offering employment opportunities regardless of educational attainment, work history, or past social barriers, such as incarceration, homelessness or drug use. We believe that employment is a first step in an individual’s path toward success…

[A]nyone that comes to the front door of our bakery is given the chance to work, no questions asked. When a job becomes available we take the next person off our waiting list and give them a job. Once an individual starts… Greyston provides them with resources, personal development tools and training in professional skills to give them the greatest chance…

Founded in 1982 by Bernie Glassman, Greyston now does $3.5 million in annual revenues. It also sells its own line of baked goods at Whole Foods and through its website. Located in economically depressed Yonkers, NY, the company was the first in New York State to achieve B Corp certification.

Hundreds of Similarly Conscious Ventures

How about a nearly-indestructible microscope made entirely out of paper, costing just fifty cents to manufacture, weighing nearly nothing, and fitting in a pocket? In this nine-minute TED talk, Manu Prakash demonstrates his amazing Foldscope and discusses its potential to eradicate disease in places where conventional microscopes are too expensive, heavy and bulky to be practical: http://www.thebetterindia.com/19178/folding-microscope-made-single-sheet- paper-can-save-billion-lives/

Maybe you’re more inspired to alleviate a water shortage affecting 12 million people, using a simple, inexpensive device to collect rainwater – dripping through the ceilings of São Paulo’s slum dwellings – for non-drinking purposes.

These are just two of hundreds of other examples. It’s good to see companies doing well by doing so much good—and combining environmental, social, and health benefits to serve the most needy.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Shel HorowitzGreen/social change business profitability expert Shel Horowitz, “The Transformpreneursm,” shows you how profit by greening your business, turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, highlights profitable and successful socially responsible strategies used by companies from Fortune 100 to solopreneurs.

Flexible Thinking Versus Rigid Thinking

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The Most Important Quality

In 1995, the Menninger Institute of New York conducted a study to determine the most important quality or qualities that would be necessary for business success in the twenty-first century. It finally concluded that the most important quality required for success would be “flexibility.”
It would be the ability to rapidly react and respond to the accelerating rate of change in all areas. The development of this attitude of flexibility, accepting that “the answers have changed,” would give an individual or organization a tremendous advantage over more rigid and inflexible competitors.

[wcm_restrict]Get SmartThe Three Enemies

Three enemies of change and flexibility must be countered head-on. The first and worst is the “comfort zone.” People start doing or working at something and quickly become comfortable. They then resist any change, even positive change that requires them to do something new or different.
Instead of learning, growing, and expanding their envelope of possibilities, they dig in their heels, justify and rationalize their resistance to change, and often sabotage the change efforts of others.

In Warren Bennis’s book, Leaders, he describes how the top people in his study resisted the pull of the comfort zone by setting bigger and bigger goals for themselves and their organizations, goals that would be impossible to achieve without major changes and improvements.

In Peter Diamandis’s 2015 book, Bold, he urges mold breakers and earth shakers to set goals to achieve ten times or 100 times their current levels of sales, income, and profitability in the years ahead. This size of goal, which seems overwhelming at first, soon leads to expanded thinking and new ideas to “go where no man has ever gone before” (Star Trek).

Fear Holds People Back

The second major obstacle to flexibility, to challenging and questioning the status quo, is fear of all kinds, but especially the fear of failure. “What if we try something new and it doesn’t work?”

According to the October 2013 Harvard Business Review, the major obstacles to business model innovation are fear and uncertainty. Eighty percent of corporate executives rank business model innovation ahead of the development of new products and services in terms of importance. But they don’t know how to do it, so they procrastinate and hope that the next generation of leaders will make the changes that will be necessary to survive and thrive.

Feeling Unable to Change

The third reason that people fear and resist change is “learned helplessness.” The individuals responsible know that change is essential, but they feel that they are helpless, caught up in the complexities of the current situation and unable to change.

Learned helplessness is expressed in the words “I can’t” or “We can’t.” What then follows is a litany of excuses in terms of not enough time, not enough money, not enough available talent, and other explanations for why change is not possible that involve a number of external pressures and internal limitations.

But as Winston Churchill said, “If you don’t fight when you have a chance of victory, you will soon have to fight when you have no chance at all.” The rule is to change when you can, not when you have to or have no other choice.

They should have told this to the executives at Blockbuster, who dominated the market for video movies to be viewed at home. When Netflix came along, the people at Blockbuster dismissed it as a small company that could never challenge the dominance of Blockbuster in the national market. But customer tastes had changed, and within a few years Netflix was the biggest player in the delivery of movies, both by mail and online, and Blockbuster was bankrupt.

Excerpted from Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field by Brian Tracy. © 2016 by Brian Tracy. TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Brian Tracy is chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations. Tracy’s books include Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement, and most recently Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field. His writing has appeared in Entrepreneur, Success, Fast Company, and Forbes among many others. Learn more at www.BrianTracy.com.