Ideas on The Leadership of Change

A business or organizational leader will often find themselves in a situation that is not meeting their expections. Profitability may be low. Sales are not growing. The productivity of employees is lacking. Whatever the indicators are, there are only two possible courses of action. The first is to work harder doing the same thing. This is the most common approach. The second is to make changes. Making a change sounds simple enough, but is it?

Alan Deutschman, in a recent article in Fast Company, discusses the difficulties that individuals and organizations have with the changes which are necessary to achieve positive results. He asks that if you were in a life or death situation which required change, would you? The expected answer is that you would. The truth is you would not.

Dr. Edward Miller, dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School reports that there are approximately 600,000 bypass and 1,300 angioplasty surgeries in the United States each year. This equates to an annual health care expenditure of $30 billion.  Many of these patients could avoid the return of pain and the need for repeat surgery- not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it killed them –by switching to a healthier life style. Yet few do. “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90 % of them have not changed their lifestyle”, Miller said. Those results have been duplicated in study after study on this subject.

The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But it seams that severe heart disease does not seem to motivate the majority of people. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situation. It is as though our brains are hard wired against change, even if it’s in our best interest.

The article continues with the thoughts of Dr. Dean Ornish, professor of medicine at theUniversity of California at San Francisco. Dr Ornish developed a program and implemented it on a group of patients over a one-year period. The group was led by a psychologist, attended twice-weekly group sessions and took instructions in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise. As a result, after three years, 77% of the patients had stuck to their new healthier lifestyle and avoided future complications. Dr Ornish had replaced the “fear of dying” as the motivator with a new vision, “the joy of living”.

One can point to a number of examples of how business leaders have used this idea of positive emotional motivation as the engine for change, but let’s look at Apple. Steve Jobs return showed the impact of reframing and telling a new narrative that’s simple, positive, and emotional. Upon his return, after a long exile,  he recast its image among employees and customers alike from a marginal player vanquished in the battle of market share to the home of a small but enviable elite: the creative innovators who dared to “Think differently”.

 The conclusion is that whether the goal is to improve your personal time management skills or your organization’s productivity, it is essential to understand and communicate the positive emotional rewards to be gained. The fear of always not completing tasks on-time must to be replaced with the joy of spending guiltless time with family and friends. The fear of the financial losses associated with poor productivity must be replaced with the joy of reinvesting the revenues from increased profitability in the development of the business. Business coaching is process by which a professional  guides you through the changes  with a greater likelihood of success.