A Call To Action

A Look Back - and - A Look Forward

I saw a post the other day of a sea of people crowding into a small space and my friend noted that this will be our gym for the next few weeks starting in January. I had to chuckle at the truth of the post, but it got me thinking. As we wrap up 2015 and begin to look towards 2016 many of us are reflecting on the past year and are planning out our upcoming goals. As we go through our reflection we go through a range of emotions. Some of us will feel pride in what we have accomplished, some of us will feel regret as we think about the things we should have done but didn’t and some of us will be both happy and disappointed at the same time.

I find it interesting that when we look towards the future, we will generally have an enthusiastic outlook and set our upcoming goals from a positive frame of mind. It’s part of our human nature to be optimistic about change. It’s our blessing and our curse. Most of us are not happy when we don’t have goals, and yet something in us forces us to resist and or sabotage them as well. Like my friend’s post about the attendance in the gym, some of us will set goals based on what we feel like we should do. We should be in better shape, we should lose some weight, we should eat better, etc. … and we head into the New Year with excitement. Very quickly we begin to see changes in our bodies and it feels good. Then something happens and inexplicably we start to resist the changes. We start to waiver in our commitment to our fitness goals so we take a day or two off instead of going to gym and doing the right things.

Before we know it, we have stopped our good habits altogether and by the springtime we are in the same comfortable spot we were in December. We rationalize why we stopped doing the good things but these excuses don’t address the real reason we gave up. Simply put, we were never committed. We only felt that we ‘should’ be healthy. We fail because when the time comes requiring the discipline to work through some discomfort in sticking to our plan we don’t have enough of a compelling reason to persevere. So we allow ourselves to take the easy way out, we make excuses for our decisions, we return to our comfort zone feeling slightly bad about it.

The Burning Platform

Organizational change is similar. Even a change that everyone recognizes as being good can be difficult to sustain. Like with our personal exercise plan, our organizations start off enthusiastically, but just when we start to see some benefits from the change we start to slack off. Before we know it our organization is back to the same starting point. Think about how many change initiatives you have experienced at work. How many have really stuck?

I’ve even been in organizations where its very survival depended on making a change work, yet the resistance to change overwhelmed the reasons to change and the organization was taken down. Years ago the term ‘burning platform’ was coined as a means to visualize the need to change. It portrayed your organization as standing on a burning platform giving it only two choices: Stay on the platform and perish; or move off and survive. Experts agreed that portraying the burning platform to our teams was a good idea so they would see their options, commit to the change and thus ensure the organization’s survival or hold fast and succumb.

Unfortunately, the burning platform metaphor doesn’t always work. Our team members are smart. They don’t want to lose their jobs or see their companies go out of business.   So, why do our organizations fail to take action and embrace the change?

The Leadership Challenge

They fail because they don’t buy into the burning platform – they fail to buy into us as leaders. They see this picture of doom and gloom as another leadership gimmick to get them to work harder or longer and they don’t believe the danger. Let’s look at the Fortune 25 list from 2000. On that list you will see MCI Worldcom, Enron, Lucent, SBC Communications and Sears. In just 15 years this group of companies went from being on the top of the list to no longer existing. That’s an astonishing 20% of the top 25 with more than $206 Billion in annual combined revenue and earning $19.4 Billion in total profit. Talk about a burning platform!

The “burning platform” can be a good technique if and when it is used honestly and judiciously. Our teams are too smart and will develop apathy as a natural defense to a constant neurotic ‘our hair’s on fire’ approach to managing change or when we flit from priority to priority. Change management must be conducted in a deliberate manner – this does not mean it has to be slow, but it has to be planned and nurtured to succeed. As leaders if we want to change our organizations, we have to paint a vision that sells the importance to the team. This vision has to transcend our personal egos as leaders and be for the greater good of the organization.

The Warrior Way

In my military career we used two means to do this. The first is we would describe the situation to our soldiers. Following Sun Tzu’s principles, this description included the disposition of our friendly forces as well as the disposition of our enemy forces so we could know ourselves and our enemy. Next we would define a clear mission. It wouldn’t be a nebulous mission like we see in business such as make more money, or launch product X next year. It would be a detailed description of who does what, when and why.

Once we had an understanding of the environment and had a clear objective, we would go to work on developing the plan to execute the mission. This included the detailed milestones to be accomplished, the resources necessary to succeed and check points along the way. Lastly we would define roles and responsibilities as well as when and to whom we would communicate. Even though the military has a rigid chain of command and a rank structure that is clear, for each and every mission we would define who was responsible for what parts of the mission or the plan. Furthermore, we would define backups and alternates to key individuals and decision makers in case someone in the chain of command was not available or unable to execute.

Watching a military unit in the field is a study in change management. The units that survive take all the items described above and continually evaluate and revise the plan. Sometimes they even need to react to an adjusted mission. But millennia of fighting has taught military leaders that a unit that digs in and fails to respond to the situation around it is likely to perish, whereas a unit on the move and with a compelling mission is almost certain to succeed.

Be The Warrior Leader

As a leader rolling into 2016 and setting new goals for your organization, see what lessons you can take from the military techniques. Be honest and clear with your team on the situation. How is your organization or the company really doing? Who or what are your known and potential threats? What needs to change in order to survive and even better thrive in the coming environment? Take the time to identify your strengths and weaknesses and plan around these. Make sure you identify shortfalls in resources (time, money and people) so that you can account for them.

Take the time to develop the reason for the change. Make sure you really and passionately believe in this reason. Whether you believe in the change or don’t, your team will pick up on this and act accordingly. Make sure you take action that is congruent with the change. If the reason for the change is so dire that failure to act could put you out of business then don’t hesitate to make drastic and swift changes in your team and stick to your goals. Your plan will need to change as the situation changes, but staying focused on a tight mission will ensure your team commits to executing and sustaining the change.

Lastly, you need to set the sail and lead by example. The team will watch what you focus on and in turn focus on that too. Check in regularly and hold your team accountable. When you encounter resistance to change you have very few options. You can try to win the team over by convincing them of the initiative’s importance, you can remove the naysayers and move on without them, or you can ignore the resistance and watch it slowly eat away at the enthusiasm and progress until it ceases and the initiative has failed.

Warrior Leaders know and believe in their mission; they can communicate it simply and quickly; they can inspire themselves, their teams and their peers to rise to the challenge and make their goals ... be the Warrior Leader this year!