Blogs

Has anyone else ever felt like this daffodil? 🥀

You’re excited to tackle something new in your organization, you spring into action, only to be met with a cold reception that takes the life right out of you.

When you’ve worked hard to develop a new organizational wide initiative & it isn’t successful, the aftermath can leave you feeling lonely, misunderstood, discouraged, & a failure. It can be difficult to break the doom loop in your mind & get your confidence back to try again.

When you’re stuck in a situation like this the best thing to do is take yourself out of the equation, it isn’t about you. You must look at the situation analytically & deconstruct each phase to understand where the failure occurred.

It is likely your organizational change failed because you didn’t follow the tried & true methods from change management expert, John Kotter (Book: Leading Change):
🏵Build a sense of urgency for change (what will happen if you do nothing)
🏵Create a cross-functional team that can help guide the change
🏵Develop a vision for the future & a strategy for how to get there
🏵Effectively communicate the change (in a variety of ways & constantly)
🏵Empower people for the change through training & systems
🏵Generate short-term wins to put fuel in the tank
🏵Gather momentum, share wins, & produce more change
🏵Anchor the change in the culture for long-term success

Another book I’ve found helpful when building an appetite for organizational level change is – Conversational Intelligence by Judith Glaser.

She outlines the 3 levels of communication, from the most basic to the ideal state:
➡Transactional – Exchange information. Giving & taking.
↕Positional – Exchange power. Using your position of power to get a win-win solution.
🔁Transformational – Exchange energy. Exploring others’ perspectives & innovating together.

She also shares what’s happening in your brain whenever you are talking with someone else, your mind is trying to assess the following things: (It’s no wonder so many organizational change initiatives fail!)
❔Protect: Do I need to protect myself from this person?
❔Connect: How can I trust this person?
❔Belong: Where do I belong or fit in with this person?
❔Be strong: What do I need to learn to be successful?
❔Partner: How do I create value with others?

Once you understand the science behind communication, Judith provides you with practical tools to help you take your conversations from transactional to transformational.

When you leverage the combination of John Kotter’s + Judith Glaser’s work you’re sure to end up with a successful change in the organization… & a perky daffodil. 🌼