By Dean Anderson & Linda Ackerman Anderson who can be contacted at

www.beingfirst.com 

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Introduction

After twenty years of coaching change leaders and consulting to their transformation efforts, we have identified ten operating principles that promote conscious transformational leadership. Inevitably, when we see transformational change efforts working, we can trace the success to these principles being used, purposefully or intuitively, in the shaping of the change strategy, plan and communications. When a change effort sputters, the cause is more often than not because its leaders have made decisions or taken action inconsistent with these principles.

These principles are not the answer to all of the possible problems in transformation. Transformational processes are just too complex for such a simple solution. However, our experience suggests that if you learn these principles and adhere to them in the planning and oversight of your change effort, you will increase the probability of designing your change strategy and guiding its rollout as well as you possibly can.

This article overviews the ten principles and offers examples of how the principles can be applied by change leaders in the creation of relevant and pragmatic change strategies. We provide the first five principles in this newsletter, and the remaining five in our next issue.

The basic premise of conscious transformation is that transformation includes people and process dynamics that most leaders do not know how to resolve. In fact, most leaders do not see or understand these dynamics because their mindset, or worldview, does not allow them to do so. The key to success, then, is leaders expanding their awareness to become conscious of these dynamics so they can effectively deal with them. And as they become conscious of these principles as guides for their actions, they can use the principles to not only predict, but to respond to the people and process dynamics both intelligently and compassionately. As leaders increase their conscious awareness, they increase their probability of success.

Use these operating principles as decision and design criteria for your change effort-for both its outcomes and its change strategy--and you will unleash the fundamental benefit of greater conscious awareness into your organization's transformation.

# Wholeness

• Promote what is best for the whole system

• See the system and its components as one integrated entity

• Treat individual components of the system as wholes themselves, and

• Design one integrated overall change effort.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHANGE LEADERS: Clarify the outcome that supports the whole organization, not just one function or part. Even though your overall transformation process likely includes numerous individual change initiatives, each initiative must clearly support the enterprise's primary change outcome. Employees must overtly understand that all of your change initiatives and activities fit into and support the whole system's transformation, be it the whole enterprise, a line of business, or a region. Link everything to your overall change objective. If any activity does not link, then modify, stop, or replace that activity with ones that do support the whole. This is a great opportunity to take work off of people's plates! And, when decisions are required that may serve one initiative but hurt another, make this dynamic overt and create a process that looks after the good of the whole rather than just the political agenda of one part. Think Big Picture first, part second.

# Inter-Connectedness

• Integrate and coordinate your sub-initiatives and activities; integrate organizational/technical initiatives with cultural/ human initiatives, enterprise-wide initiatives with area-specific initiatives, corporate-centered initiatives with line or business unit initiatives.

• Think about the impacts of any decision, event or action across organizational boundaries; see everything as connected and affected; consider the distant impacts of local actions, and vice versa, and

• Build and sustain relationships between your organizational entities--and the people within them--to enhance mutual and system-wide effectiveness and support. Create true partnerships!

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHANGE LEADERS: Attend fully to the interdependencies of your various change initiatives. Build bridges across functions, processes, stakeholder groups, and change initiatives to ensure collaboration, information-sharing, and shared accountability for enterprise outcomes. In addition, be sure to establish the infrastructure and governance systems you need to accomplish this integration of mutually dependent components. Perform impact analyses from the perspective of how interdependent functions or efforts will be affected, short and long-term. Assess in terms of individual (human) impacts, team and organizational impacts, and external impacts, such as those on constituents, customers or vendors. Think about how relationships are affected or are needed to support overall success, and when you create or strengthen relationships, work towards partnerships that have a shared Big Win as their purpose.

# Multi-Dimensional

• Attend to all internal and external realities (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) at the levels of the individual, relationship, team, whole system, and marketplace/ environment

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHANGE LEADERS: Change leaders must expand their focus and competency to be able to attend to not only external reality (i.e., tangible solutions, structure, systems or technology), but to the internal realities of individual mindset, interpersonal dynamics, and team and organizational culture. Discern the systems dynamics of your organization at all levels, as well as the influence of your organization's marketplace and environment. Furthermore, look for the potential impacts between the larger and smaller systems within your organization. Keep these forces in mind as you design and implement a transformational change strategy that attends to the needs of each dimension in an integrated way. Give the human/emotional/motivational data of your change efforts as much credence as the financial/organizational data. Keep track of the many dimensions as the change proceeds, since they will fluctuate and have evolving needs during the entire lifecycle of the change.

# Continuous Process through Time

• Think about impacts across time; think ahead and think behind; understand the influence of the past on your current situation and the impact of current decisions or actions on the future

• Build momentum and critical mass; leverage interactions between people and events to create a positive "snowball" effect over time; plan events so that each adds to the success of the next

• Go slow to go fast; take the time to build the upstream foundations for your downstream success; pace activities according to your people's and organization's true capacity to succeed

• Build off the best of the past and present, and

• Honor the natural order of death and rebirth in change; support the process to move ahead by attending to what needs to die and what needs to grow.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHANGE LEADERS: Assess how your organization's recent change history will have an impact on how this change is initiated, and acknowledge it publicly. Minimize attempts to influence your transformation with isolated events. For example, when you decide to communicate about your change effort, first evaluate previous communications for how the content and delivery were received by the organization and then tailor the process and content of this next communication accordingly. Furthermore, plan future communications to reinforce your key messages over time and create further buy-in. In short, think of communications as a continuous process. Do the same for all of your transformational activities.

Transformation is often accompanied by a sense of urgency. Unchecked, this time pressure can actually slow the process. Learn when clear-headed and thorough planning up front can be an accelerator of future action. Often, taking the necessary time upstream to establish the proper conditions for success pays off handsomely downstream.

One such upstream condition is celebrating the past. Change often carries a tone that the past was somehow insufficient (why else would we be changing?). Instead, overtly celebrate the positive attributes of the past and present so that your people can build off their accomplishments as they move into the future. The death of your old state must be reframed in the minds of your employees from something bad to the necessary positive birth of something better, something more aligned with current and future needs.

# Continuously Learn and Course Correct

• Overtly communicate what you are clear about today and what you are in the process of discovering

• Proactively generate useful information and feedback about strengths and open questions and share them across boundaries to promote continuous learning

• Remove barriers to sharing information, insights and learnings; Always seek the value in mistakes and failures; befriend and explore aberrant information as guidance for future success, and

• Pilot possibilities; float test balloons; support forays into new ways of designing or operating your new state.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CHANGE LEADERS: In transformational change, more is uncertain and emergent than not. This can trigger leaders' desire for even more certainty and control. However, this desire causes them to fall into the trap of thinking that their current change decisions can be and are fixed and complete. They forget that all answers and plans are only temporary best guesses, because new information will likely surface and alter or improve the knowledge and plans they currently hold.

Instead of putting so much importance on being right, focus on learning and inquiring. Overtly design and establish a learning and course correction process that invites everyone's input about new ideas, alternative perspectives, and feedback about how the change is going--on any issue. Take this information into serious account, and communicate all significant course corrections that occur as a result of it. Change the culture of "kill the messenger of bad news" or "Make a mistake and you're dead."

Build learning communities around key transformation issues and create structures and processes to share insights and build best practices. Explore all mistakes or difficulties to clarify their causes and discover better approaches. Encourage your people to take risks and attempt new practices in all internal and external dimensions of your change, even though they are likely to make mistakes as they learn. Plus, make the results of their forays, positive or negative, available for everyone's insight.

Because information generation and sharing are integral to learning, build information generation processes that feed directly into your change process design and facilitation practices. There are numerous ways to promote learning through information exchange. Examples include:

• Give employees direct access to the marketplace by sending them on benchmarking missions, putting them on teams to study industry trends or exposing them to competitors' strategies and practices

• Employ open book management, exposing employees to your business strategies and rationales, and the business model they employ, as well as the financial performance of your organization

• Create an enterprise-wide project integration infrastructure so individual change initiatives continually share status reports and other information and resources with one another, and

• Deliver continuous "mid-process" communications about the marketplace and your change effort, rather than only share information when you have formalized an answer or solution.

• Engage everyone in the process of continuous course correction, and celebrate money and time saving adjustments.

Summary

These ten principles form the foundation of a worldview that is larger than profit and speed, which are so central to today's executive agenda. When changes ignited by new business directions are being planned, or more typically, are already struggling, the principles can be used to audit, inform and course correct the desired outcomes, the people dynamics, and the process of change. Use them to unleash the fundamental benefit of greater conscious awareness into your organization's transformation. Doing so will enhance the likelihood of profit and speed, and equally support a change experience that serves the larger good of the workforce making the change, and the marketplace being served by it.

*Reprinted by permission of the authors