[A]rmed with a one-day contract and a request that I provide help to get to the heart of the issues which were framing so many of a new CEO’s initial interactions on arriving in the organization, I knew I was facing a big task in my role as Interventionist working with him and his Senior Management Team. In my attempt to understand where best to place my focus, I set up a series of exploratory interviews with each member of the team to help me understand more about their perspectives on their current situation and what they thought might now be needed to realize the future they wanted for the organization. They recounted colourful stories, which held within them numerous strands of data from which a number of themes effortlessly emerged.
From these stories, I was left in no doubt that exploring the team’s past experiences and the impact of those on their current behaviours would be an important part of this one-day session. Equally significant, would be the need to identify and explore each of their individual and collective ambitions, hopes and aspirations. But I knew that the real challenge lay in reaching the heart of these issues quickly and that would only be possible if we were able to create open, honest and effective communication with one another; something I already knew had not been in evidence at the top levels of the organization for some time.
Although the event was designed to move the team towards the future, so much of the past hung in the air. It seemed natural to ask these senior leaders to look back in time, to honour the legacy and the past, and to share their own unique experiences and perspectives. I wasn’t advocating story-telling without purpose. Quite the opposite. It was designed to make a very powerful and specific point. Whilst it is important to acknowledge and respect the history, you don’t need to live in it. You need to know it but it doesn’t need to control what you do. If you can bring together the strands of each individual story, they begin to intertwine and, eventually, they start to build a shared storyline; one which often frees people to use their history and experience to invest in their future and write their new story.
I asked the team to sort themselves by the date they had joined the SMT – from the longest serving to the most recent arrival. From there, I asked them to respond, on a flipchart, to each of the following questions individually:
- When and why they joined
- What had been their best experience
- What had been their worst experience
- What had challenged them the most
- What they were most proud of
- Why they stayed
Starting with the longest serving member of the team, each individual placed their flip charts on the wall and presented their responses, as I encouraged the rest of the group to notice the similarities and differences. How was their experience impacting on them as a team – in their behaviours, conversation and thoughts? Far from just swapping stories, what this actually did, was draw out those unwritten, unspoken rules, which govern just about any group in any environment. For better or worse, these were the ‘rules in play’ for this team whether they were conscious of them or not.
I watched as the enquiry finally broke through the wall of politeness that inevitably faces every new leader. It was a significant moment for more than one reason, but the most obvious was that the CEO had been given, in minutes, a wealth of information about the organization and the behaviours within it, most of which had remained unspoken for more than a decade.
The simple truth is that most leaders don’t do this. They don’t examine what is really happening in their organization before embarking on a change initiative. Instead, they return over and over again to familiar and comfortable models for change; thus armed, they begin with the solution in mind, and fit the problem or issue to that model. And before they know it, they are surprised to find their efforts forming part of that well-worn statistic ‘Seventy five per cent of change efforts fail because….’
In reverting to the use of well-known and well-used theories of change, what even the most well-intentioned leaders are doing, is subconsciously putting their own need for familiarity ahead of the actual needs of the organization. Because in every system, to a greater or lesser extent, there will be hidden and protected forces, at first appearing to exist beyond our reach in subterranean levels of the organization. But they aren’t beyond reach – work has to be done to reveal them, name them and understand them. It’s only after you have done that that you can even think about changing them and, even then, there is unlikely to be an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution.
Sarah Hill