Are you Making a Difference? | Horizontal Change Management

Gail Severini over at the Change Whisperer got thinking again.

It seems her summer vacation has her questioning beyond today and today?s change work to reasons and effect.

She asks, ?Are you Making a Difference??.

Her answers (she hopes a difference is being made- knowing her I am guessing a big yes):

1. ?The opportunity to make meaningful differences for our organizations and thereby our communities and our economies?.
2. ?Any insights or processes that I can bring to ease the pain of change for individuals?.

The first may represent the butterfly flapping its wings and some positive reaction in a different place.

The second illustrates the empathy and understanding of people that all good change practitioners and leaders have.

I will take the bait.

Yes

• Paying attention to people. I know I have made a difference at the individual level. Because I enjoy seeing others use and leverage their skill (and improve it) each engagement has me doing some sort of consulting at the individual level. Sometimes it is with senior leaders other times with mid level managers. My hope is that the end state focus I push has those single people thinking of and planning for possibility. In quite a few instances I know they would not have moved from their present to past focus on the tedium of task.
• Planting seeds. There is evidence of an interesting effect I had at one client. I planted a seed and that seed grew on its own. The original idea actually went through iterations over the 4 years since I was there. The idea was applied in different ways. In this case my pattern of pulling senior leaders into half day meetings to really dig into end state descriptions paid off. Our dialogue, interaction and a whole lot of prodding on my part created a giant scribble on the white board. It looked like a camel. The languaging took off as did the representation of ups and downs, valleys and hills. Here is an organization that is talking, interacting and moving forward because of the idea the, now model, represents. For it to still be there 4 years later means there has been a lot of success.
• Energy. I, like most change practitioners, come in with a full head of steam every day. It is actually a struggle at times to slow down. My role centers around moving forward (and sometime moving on with increases my own urgency). When harnessed and focused our energy and positive perspective as change practitioners always makes some difference. People follow up with me after engagements. They are not shy in mentioning they would like a little of that energy to come in their direction.
• Seeing Business Success. I am not sure how much practitioners get to actually make business success happen. If they are putting their hands on tasks and responsibilities, which you need to do to get tangible success, then they are not change management consultants. What we can do is see where and how business can succeed. We can make that vision appear and we can help clients to communicate and get to end states.

What stands out on the yes side is that we do not have to make much difference to make a huge difference. Practitioners want to get as close as possible to those original end states. That is a little too lofty a goal considering the many things they have no control over. Maybe we can find ways to do even more to get a bigger huge as outcomes.

No

• No end state has ever been attained. If you do get it exactly right you actually came up short. This isn?t the sales goal that strategically stays just out of reach. This is a scenario where many things that are not very controllable must be lined up so the path is clear. There is just no way we can ever get that right more than once or twice in our career. (The stars really do have to align). We don?t make a difference because we never get to make the really BIG difference. If you are nodding your head up and down (I am) stop torturing yourself. Read on of the yes bullets.
• Because we rarely get the chance to follow through on extra things we see in organizations our talent is not being used effectively. We do not make a difference where we really could make one.
• There is so much competition (and comfort) from the models that try to make change management a scientific or templated pursuit? that we are often forced to keep food on the table and just go with the group think. It is in those oh too common scenarios that we have to try to make teeny tiny differences here and there. If we are lucky one of them gets fertilized and grows to something that can make a difference.

It looks like yes has an extra bullet point. Yes wins then.

I think if you can see a path forward, can translate that into a journey of work and participation, with people doing things they do well then YES you are making a difference.

Technorati Tags: camel model, change journey, change management blog, change management consultant, change management model, Cisco

Source: http://horizontalchange.com/2012/09/are-you-making-a-difference/

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