Without a Shift in What We Believe and How We Act, Change Fails.
Thinking. Reading. Reflecting. Doing … all vital aspects of productivity!
I’ve often thought that the very best education that any of us could have at a very early age would be to understand our emotions and how they drive beaviour…better yet, how our thoughts create feelings and therefore how we behaviour. I’m hoping that later generations do have this kind of education but I’m not totally convinced.
One of my favourite reads is www.corporate-rebels.com a Danish organisation that has done a massive amount of research and study on organisations that support self managing teams. There is a lot of discussion about what self managing means, what it takes, how we do it in organisations, when we shouldn’t apply it etc. There is also a LOT of work done on what leadership looks like in this context and this has great relevance to all leadership activity if the leader genuinely wants to inspire empowered people who take responsibility for their behaviours, their results and their team contribution.
The fact is.. letting go of control is hard. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have so many micro-managers. My work is all about translating a concept into real behaviour that leads to performance improvement both individual and collective. For that we need to go through the messy process of aligning our beliefs with what we say and how we behave and all of that starts with our identity, who we are or at least who we think we are. That process is messy because we find that we have opposing beliefs operating and we evolve. For example: I want to be empathic with my team members but we have hugely challenging sales targets and we can’t deal with people who aren’t in top form. Another one might be: I want to generate a high performing team but I know that in a month or two I’m going to have to downsize by at least two people. Or, I really want to develop capable team members but we just don’t have the time.
This article from one of the Corporate-Rebels team, demonstrates the nitty gritty of changing beliefs and owning decisions that diverge from our learnt behaviour. It is a slow-ish process, often annoying as you fall back into defaults and requires a lot of intentionality, a bit like developing a new habit. This is the reality of making a change in an organisation. Every person impacted has to go through some version of a process or realigning beliefs and values with the spoken word, prioritisation of interests and behaviours. Tricky!
How are you going with those new year resolutions?
Every change requires clarity of purpose, time, self awareness, self compassion and empathy on the part of leaders for their teams.
If you want to learn to lead or achieve change more effectively than you are now contact me to talk it over.
https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/from-overwhelmed-to-ownership-my-self-management-journey
https://uncoveries.com/why-true-change-takes-time/
