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21 Organizational Change Management Pitfalls

9/2/2014

How change ready is your organization?

For organizations to survive in today’s competitive and fast paced environment, they need to know how to change and adapt quickly.

How to manage change or deal with change should be a core competence that should no longer be considered one of the ‘nice to have’ skills for leaders and staff. Yet, many organizations fall short in the race to get their workforce ready for change or train their leaders to successfully manage change.

Whether organizations like it or not, change is here to stay!

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Make the jump today!

7/6/2014

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Make the jump today!

From the day I started working, I always hear the same comments from my former colleagues. "IF ONLY I have the money to start a business.", "IF ONLY I have the guts to apply abroad", "IF only I have time to go to graduate school". IF ONLY.

Sounds familiar? I am also guilty of that just like you. Whatever you aim in life, IF ONLY you act NOW, then you are an inch closer to your goal. NOW, not tomorrow, not next week, but NOW.

Boost your career. Be respected by your boss and peers. Be Six Sigma cerified.
http://www.6sigmaph.com

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The Career Ladder Isn’t In The Office

7/3/2014

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Sean Johnson Partner at @digintent and @founderequity.
Professor of marketing at Northwestern. Very pale.
http://www.sean-johnson.com

A dirty secret about getting ahead: half of it is about what you do when you’re not at the office.

Too many people believe it’s their company’s job to carve out a career and professional development plan for them. It can be awesome when a company does this — it’s one of the big goals of our company this year. But it’s rare.

It’s also not an excuse. Your inability to make progress is not a function of your company’s ability to train you.

It’s your job to train yourself.

What You Do At Night Matters I was lucky to have this drilled into my head when I was younger by my parents and mentors. I graduated with a marketing degree but wanted to become a designer. So I spent my evenings and mornings practicing, doing real projects for free to get the skills I needed. It took a long time, but eventually it paid off.

When I become a business owner we decided UI/UX was no longer my highest and best use and I switched back to marketing. After the kids went to sleep I practiced and learned and experimented. It took a long time, but eventually started paying off.

I never would have become a creative director or led product development or taught marketing to MBA students if I relied on professional development initiatives from my employers. I had to create my own curriculum, and I had to practice. For a long time.

Most people I know who are successful follow the same pattern. One friend graduated with a history degree, but had an interest in technology and sales. He started doing inside sales and learned programming at night. He eventually became a VP of sales at a startup. Now he’s a CTO.

Another friend had a political science degree, but was interested in startups as well. He learned enough design and development to build an agency that he later sold, and he ended up in venture capital.

In both of their cases, the things they did between 6pm and 12pm were what determined their future.

There obviously needs to be balance. If you have a spouse and kids, you need to be fully present with them each night. Even if you’re single, you need to carve out time to exercise, see friends, connect spiritually, etc. And of course, giving yourself the opportunity to catch a movie or a game periodically is fine.

But what you don’t need to do is queue up another season of Downton Abbey on Netflix, spending the 14 hours a week the average American spends watching television. You don’t need to spend as much time playing Candy Crush or stalking high school friends on Facebook.

So what should you do instead?

Read more. My college mentor grew up in a poor African American family in Alabama. He managed to be the first in his family to get into college, attending West Point. He was a decorated officer before getting his MBA at Harvard. When I met him, he ran economic development in Colorado Springs.

When I asked him what he most attributed his success to, he said it was because he started reading and never stopped.

He believed knowledge was the key to getting what you wanted in life. So much so that his life goal was to build libraries in underprivileged communities like the one he grew up in.

He always asked job applicants what book they were currently reading. The A players were folks who could answer without hesitation. They usually were in the middle of 3 of 4 books, and at least one of them was professional in nature.

Reading gives you a huge head start on your peers who don’t.

You’re more likely to identify strategies and tactics from other industries that might work in your company.

You’re more likely to avoid making common pitfalls that otherwise would only come with experience.

You’re able to transfer that knowledge in your organization, creating new capabilities for your company.

And you’re more interesting to talk to.

It’s unlikely you’re going to have a conversation at a networking event about the 4 P’s of marketing or some other concept you picked up in your textbooks. But it’s very likely you’ll have a conversation about the long tail, or the 10,000 hour rule, or the build-measure-learn loop.

Anthony Robbins used to say that if you spend 1 hour a day learning about a particular topic, you’d know more about that subject than 99.999% of the world within a year.

Even if you have only 30 minutes a night, you can easily read a book a week. Maybe you’re not an expert, but I guarantee you’ll know more than your peers.

Maybe you don’t know where to start. At the end of this post I’ve included a list of my favorites to get you started. One less excuse.

Read. Take good notes. Repeat.

Work on (Real) ProjectsIdeally, you’re able to take what you’re learning and apply it in real world situations. If your company doesn’t provide that opportunity, you need to create it yourself.

I’ve argued in the past you should be willing to work for free. The reason is that it gives you reps. You simply learn more on real projects with real constraints than you do working on imaginary projects for a portfolio.

You get to learn how a principle applies in an actual industry, with actual team members, and how it impacts actual customers. You learn how to execute under a deadline, and have the benefit of a real feedback loop to see if what you did actually worked.

When you’re not very good yet, that experience is invaluable. May more valuable than the measly fee you’d collect as a novice.

If you can realistically justify charging for it and you can convince someone else, go for it. But don’t let fees get in the way of the work. Do whatever it takes to get as many reps as you can. The more times you get to practice the faster you improve.

The other way to get more reps is to take on projects no one else wants at work. By taking on those projects, reframing them, and making them successful you get opportunities to acquire new skills and influence within your organization. It’s unlikely you’ll have a ton of time to do this during the day since you’ll have your normal job responsibilities. You’ll have to do these projects at night. But the payoff can be huge.

Aggressively Build Your NetworkA strong network accelerates everything you do in your career. You should spend considerable time building yours if you aren’t already.

A good network gives you smart people to bounce ideas off of.

A good network gives you access to information and knowledge that are otherwise hard to come by.

A good network gives you introductions to consulting or freelance work that can give you more reps.

A good network will lead to more potential partnerships or revenue opportunities for your current company.

A good network will become the source of your next gig.

If you start your own business, your network will be the source of your early customers, your best employees and your most favorable sources of capital.

Rather than going home or going to the bar with your college buddies, you should be hitting up Meetup groups.

You should join your local chapter of whatever professional organization is most relevant to your career.

You should be grabbing coffee or drinks or breakfast with new people every single week.

And you should always stay in touch, actively looking for opportunities to help your network — to make new introductions, offer advice or share knowledge.

Your network can become your most powerful career asset, and the time you’re spending watching Duck Dynasty can be spent building it.

Change Your Destiny, Starting TonightThe great thing is you don’t need permission. Your boss doesn’t control your down time. When you’re home, your kids are in bed, and you normally shut your brain off, you can instead be doing things that will make you smarter, more capable and more connected.

If you spend an hour a day doing these things, I guarantee your professional life will be dramatically different in a year than it is today.

Appendix: A Book a Week to Change Your CareerHere’s a list of some of the books that have helped my career the most. Read one each week — in a year I guarantee your career will be on a different trajectory.

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz
Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Good to Great by Jim Collins
Great by Choice by Jim Collins
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim
Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al and Laura Ries
Little Big Things by Tom Peters
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet
Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher
The New Solution Selling by Keith Eades
The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes
The Power of Full Engagement
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Winning by Jack Welch
Drive by Daniel Pink
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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How To Become a Great Facilitator

4/6/2014

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I always tell my Six Sigma class that if you meet a Six Sigma Black Belt/ Master Black Belt and tells you that he/ she can solve any of your problems at work, DO NOT BELIEVE that person. Yes, Six Sigma professionals are expert in Six Sigma methodology, expert in process improvement tools, but at the end of the day, it would be the members of a process improvement team that he leads that will identify the root causes, and identify solutions on how to solve them. In short, Six Sigma professionals are more of an EXPERT FACILITATORS then expert problem solvers.

How to become a great facilitator?
Being a great facilitator is one critical success factor of a six sigma professional and change agents. A lot of Six Sigma tools inside the six sigma toolbox are brainstorming techniques. I'll share an article of M. Ditkoff's Idea Champions, rate yourself on how proficient you are on each of the important traits of a great facilitator:

Then tune into your biggest strength and ask yourself how you can amplify that quality. Then identify your biggest weakness and figure out how you can improve in that arena.

1.CONDUCTOR
A skilled brainstorm facilitator knows how to orchestrate powerfully creative output from a seemingly dissonant group of people. In the conductor mode, the facilitator includes everyone, evokes even the subtlest contributions from the least experienced participant, and demonstrates their commitment to the whole by offering timely feedback to anyone who "gets lost in their own song."

2.ALCHEMIST
A good brainstorm facilitator is able to transmute lead into gold -- or in modern terms -- knows how to help people "get the lead out." This talent requires an element of wizardry -- the ability to see without looking, feel without touching, and intuitively know that within each brainstormer lives a hidden genius just waiting to get out.

3.DANCER
Light on their feet, brainstorm facilitators move gracefully through the process of sparking new ideas. Able to go from the cha-cha to the polka to the whirling dervish spinning of a brainstorm group on fire, savvy facilitators take bold steps when necessary, even when there is no visible ground underfoot. "The path is made by walking on it," is their motto.

4. MAD SCIENTIST
Skillful brainstorm facilitators are bold experimenters, often taking on the crazed (but grandfatherly) look of an Einstein in heat. While respecting the realm of logic and the rational (the ground upon which most scientists build their homes), the enlightened facilitator is willing to throw it all out the window in the hope of triggering a "happy accident" or a quantum leap of thought. Indeed, it is often these discontinuous non-linear moments that produce the kind of breakthroughs that logic can only describe, never elicit itself.

5.DIAMOND CUTTER
Fully recognizing the precious gem of the human imagination (as well as the delicacy required to set it free), the high octave brainstorm facilitator is a craftsman (or craftswoman) par excellence -- focused, precise, and dedicated. Able to get to the heart of the matter in a single stroke without leaving anything or anyone damaged in the process.

6. ACTOR
Brainstorm facilitators are "on stage" whether they like it or not. All eyes are upon them, as well as all the potential critical reviews humanly possible. More often than not, the facilitator's "audience" will only be moved to act (perchance to dream) if they believe the facilitator is completely into his or her role. If the audience does not suspend this kind of disbelief, the play will close early and everyone will be praying for a fire drill or wishing they were back home eating a grilled cheese sandwich.

7.ENVIRONMENTALIST
Brainstorm facilitators are the original recyclers. In their relentless pursuit of possibility, they look for value in places other people see as useless. To the facilitator in full mojo mode, "bad ideas" aren't always bad, only curious indicators that something of untapped value is lurking nearby.

8. OFFICER OF THE LAW
One of the brainstorm facilitator's most important jobs is to enforce "law and order" once the group gets roaring down the open highway of the imagination. This is a fine art -- for in this territory speeding is encouraged, as is running red lights, jaywalking, and occasionally breaking and entering. Just as thieves have their code of honor, however, so too should brainstormers. Indeed, it is the facilitator's task to keep this code intact -- a task made infinitely easier by the ritual declaration of ground rules at the start of a session.''

9.SERVANT
Some brainstorm facilitators, intoxicated by the group energy and their own newly stimulated imagination, use their position as a way to foist their ideas on others -- or worse, manipulate the group into their way of thinking. Oops! Ouch! Aargh! Brainstorm facilitating is a service, not a personal platform. It is supposed to be a selfless act that enables others to arrive at their own solutions -- no matter how different they may be from the facilitator's.

10. STAND-UP COMIC
Humor is one of the brainstorm facilitator's most important tools. It dissolves boundaries, activates the right brain, helps participants get unstuck, and shifts perspective just enough to help everyone open their eyes to new ways of seeing. Trained facilitators are always on the lookout for humorous responses. They know that humor often signals some of the most promising ideas, and that giggles, guffaws, and laughable side-talk frequently indicate a rich vein of possibility to explore. Humor also makes the facilitator much more "likable" which makes the group they are facilitating more amenable to their direction. Ever wonder why the words "Aha!" and "Ha-Ha" are so similar?

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What is the Best Trait of a Change Agent?

2/1/2014

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What is the number one question I get from HR Managers and Business Owners who are looking to hire Six Sigma Professionals? "What is the Best Trait of a Process Improvement professional? Is it the person's technical skills in statistics? The number of projects she has completed? The number of persons he has trained in DMAIC and process improvement tools?

For me the most important trait of a Change Agent is Tenacity. Persistent determination to go against all odds. The internal motivation to continue and keep going even if all else fail. Tenacity.