Breakthrough Change

Leaders want a strategic plan, but trust, relationship and leadership issues often stand in the way of effective strategic planning. While there are always similarities from organization to organization, it is the distinctions one sees that make the differences in serving the client.

The Desire for Change

Every CEO, director, manager and employee has his or her own gifts, personality, character, and life experiences. When they all come together they form a corporate culture. As a leader or a consultant each of these characteristics need to be nurtured, supported, enriched and cared for individually and collectively. And they often are by leaders.

Leaders lead out of their life experiences, out of how they were mentored, or out of what the corporate culture honors as a “good” leader. Sometimes this produces good work and results. But then something happens and leaders look around and ask, “Is this enough?” “What more can I/we do?” “How can this organization reach the impossible, create the improbable, and be the benchmark in the world for excellence?”

The aspiration to be and do better is universal in healthy organizations.

Cultural Limitations

What happens in organizations is they unintentionally become self limiting. Their own culture, although they are doing good work, limits their own possibilities in the world. It is like the gauze blanket you see in nurseries or in large fields during growing season. There is a lot of good stuff going on underneath and nurtured by the blanket but there are also limitations to the blanket.

In organizations, leaders become limited by their own actions and view of what is possible. It is the “unintended consequences” of the corporate culture. In the nursery blanket analogy, there are often individual leaders who try to break through the blanket. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they are not. Occasionally organizations honor their boldness and offer them greater responsibility and other times they are left to dry out in the sun or rot in corporate purgatory.

Employees sometimes take the risk and are bold in their desire for something more out of their companies. Again, sometimes they are honored and promoted for their boldness and risk taking. Other times they are relegated to the corporate leper colony for challenging the culture and “the way things are.”

The blanket can become heavier and heavier, and, despite good intentions, the organization does not find the breakthrough it desires. There may be a poke through the blanket here and there, but nothing sustains major lifts in outcomes for the organization. Nothing that makes the blanket lighter or removes it entirely. Nothing, until a leader or group of leaders begins an inquiry about what else is possible. The danger, unless the leaders are willing to shed old styles and behaviors, is when decisions are made under the old blanket and therefore repeat the self-limiting behavior.

Change Begins Inside

So, how do you get past the limitations of both self and corporate culture? Leaders must start with self examination. What is it about me that should change? What is it about senior leadership that needs to change in their behavior?

The paradox is when the organization looks up and says, “If leadership would change we could really do something,” and leadership looks down and says, “If the employees would change we could really do something.” Success never happens when we expect someone else to change.

The flashlight must be turned on ourselves. We must change first. That is the self responsibility of organizational breakthroughs. Knowing yourself is where organizational transformation begins. Leadership has the greatest responsibility here because of their weighted influence in the organization.

Organizations seeking new strategic direction must start from the inquiry of how individuals find their natural limitless skills? Ask yourself, "How do we as an organization nurture those limitless skills? How do I as a leader uncover my own limitless skills? How does the senior staff mine its untapped capabilities?"

A gauze security blanket covers individuals as well as organizations. What often happens is leaders are perfectly willing to deal with organizational issues but shy away from personal development because it is personal and therefore has a vulnerability to it. Transformation requires the courage of self examination.

The Breakthrough: Creating a Culture for Change

So, what more can we get out of work? Organizations that struggle to find the breakthrough often look in the wrong place. They look for more productivity, better bottom line, more hours, and more customers. All critical to business success but the wrong place to look.

Competence is at the core of a successful business but everyone, whether they know it or not, is seeking a greater meaning out of work. Work has to mean more than eight hours a day plus the time they think about work and a pay check twice a month. Leaders and employees alike want fulfillment, deeper meaning for what they do.

I don't contend that everyone thinks about these things all the time, but if you have confidential, off the record interviews with employees, like I do, you will see that is exactly what they want. They simply don't know how to express it.

Leaders have to raise the blanket, nurture themselves and their employees, grow their organization to a place they haven't yet imagined, and fracture the unintended consequences of their well-intended culture. Organizations that honor competence and seek fulfillment will not have to worry about productivity and the bottom line. They will be a consequence of nurturing the limitless capacity of the employees. The blanket will be lifted and the organization will thrive at levels heretofore not thought possible.

What I passionately believe in is human potential. I also believe leaders have a unique responsibility to nurture that potential. First, by nurturing their own gifts and then by creating the authentic environment at work so employees feel valued, enriched, inspired, and committed. This will lead to the breakthrough changes organizations seek.