Preparing to Lead Change

The times they are a-changin’

My father and mother were born in 1904 and 1908 respectively. In 1988 I interviewed them with a cassette recorder and I just found the tape. I had to scramble to find an old Walkman to listen to it. It was strange to hear their voices as they passed more than twenty years ago, but their answer to one question still amazes me.

“You folks have seen so much technological change in your lifetime, what change had the biggest impact on your life?”

I don’t know what I was expecting. Cars? Airplanes? TV? Computers? After all, my mom was a computer programmer and my dad worked setting type at The Herald Traveler when the newspaper went from linotype to computer typesetting. But the both said in unison,

“Refrigeration!”

“Refrigeration?” I said. I was incredulous.

“Absolutely! Having a refrigerator in your home was a life changer.” said my mother. “In central Florida you had to shop every day. If you bought your meat before three o’clock in the afternoon it spoiled before dinner. Vegetables wilted. The only ice cream you could ever eat was from the drug store or maybe the bicycle ice cream man – if you caught him in the morning.”

“We put the icebox on the front porch, ‘cause it faced north,” my father chimed in. “The iceman came every day. You put your 25¢ or 50¢ card in the window. Heaven help you if you forgot to put it out.”

“But when we got a ’fridge’ you could shop once a week!  Talk about freedom!”

I was surprised, but it made sense.

Technology changes and it changes people’s lives, sometimes for the better, sometimes, not-so-much.

I remember when my parents bought a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, I spent less time in the library, but I also put off longer term homework till the night before. Much later, I was working for the owner of Collier’s when encyclopedias went to CD Rom format from print. Talk about change. They started to make the transition and then sold to Microsoft for integration into Encarta. Of course, everything is online today. I get effusive thank you emails from Jimmy Wales for being in the small percentage of Wikipedia users who donate to the support of the platform.

Change. There’s a lot of that going around. If you look back one hundred fifty years and contemplate the change that has occurred it makes your head spin. Just picking two:

• Transportation: from walking and horseback to trains, planes, and automobiles, and bicycles, motorcycles, electric scooters and skateboards.
• Communications: from face-to-face talking and print to telegraph, telephone, radio, film, TV, Internet streaming, cell phones, VOIP, smart phones, Zoom, Skype, blogs, vlogs podcasts, etc.

I’m not even touching how computers have evolved in my lifetime from warehouses full of vacuum tubes to the power of the smart phone to super-computers of quantum computers and generative artificial intelligence.

Reactions to change

These changes changed people’s individual lives and they changed how people interact locally and globally. The changes in transportation, communications, and the transfer of information shrunk the world. People started talking about “globalization.” The export of communications and entertainment products from the developed nations created a homogenization that some found offensive. There was a resurgence of identification with local identity, nationalism, in some cases a kind of tribalism.

Companies in developed nations started staffing and producing all over the world. Then during the Covid epidemic, extended international supply chains became a problem. Off-shoring became balanced by re-shoring.

That’s the thing about change; it produces reactions. Newton’s Third Law, “Every action produces and equal and opposite reaction,” applies to social systems as well as physical bodies. Pendulum’s swing: growth and recession, innovation and improvement, fragmentation and consolidation, start-ups and acquisitions, progress and retrenchment.

Some people say this is because “people fear change.” But if that were absolutely true, no one would ever leave home, get married, have children, move their home or do anything difficult that might mean they might be a different person.

People don’t fear change; they fear loss – loss of job, power, status, whatever. Some people also see the potential for loss in the unknown more than others. Mostly, though people don’t like to be compelled to change. They don’t fear change; they fear your change. They fear potential loss when they don’t have a choice to make it their change.

Time keeps on slippin’ into the future

There are myriad challenges facing us. How will we respond to changes in the climate? Will we innovate our way out of the problem or reduce human behaviors that damage the environment, or both? How will we balance equity of basic needs and opportunity for growth with return on investment, and reward for assuming the risk of growth?

So as we look forward, we should expect change. Perhaps this has always been true. There is a story of a young prince, one Siddhartha Gautama who lived around 450 BCE. He became newly and thoroughly wise and was asked the secret of life. “It changes,” said the one who came to be called the Buddha, (teacher).

As I look forward to the future and realize just how much change the next generation will need to adapt to I thought to write down some ideas for those who step up to lead.

Leading change

I often differentiate leaders from managers. Managers get the job done in a steady state. Leaders operate in abnormal circumstances like change, to provide direction and attract followers. I developed this description when I was delivering leadership workshops for senior or mid-level leaders engaged in change, because the question always came up. Of course, this is overly simplistic and ignores the fact that a leader and a manager are often the same person applying slightly different skills in different circumstances. The leadership rubric of direction and attracting followers is a good start, but not enough.

Max Depree, who was at one time the CEO of Herman Miller, the high design office furniture maker who made the Aeron chair that supports my back even as I write this, wrote two books, Leadership is an Art, and Leadership Jazz. These books are a description of Mr. Depree’s philosophy of servant leadership passed down to him by his father. I’m not sure which book it’s in, but  I wrote down Mr. Depree’s words:

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality; the last is to say thank you.”

Start with Why

Start with Why is the title of Simon Sinek’s best-selling leadership book. Stating the compelling case for change and expressing gratitude are ways to attract followers, to enroll followers to make the change happen. There was a story that was told to me so many times during the British Airways privatization project in the 80s that I thought I’d  witnessed the meeting. Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister that privatized the airline,, said to the gathered executives, “Gentlemen, please understand I will sell you. I can sell you off in little pieces, planes and routes one-by-one if I have to, or I can sell your stock in a public offering. It’s your choice.” This was the first and maybe the best compelling case for change in my career.

Late in my career, I worked at another of Mrs. Thatcher’s privatizations, BP (shortened from British Petroleum). I helped with Continuous Improvement work focused on improving process safety. The compelling case for change was the accidents at the Texas City refinery, and the Deep Water Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. No one had to tell that story repeatedly; one only had to mention the name of the sites to focus everyone on improvement.

Begin with the end in mind

“Begin with the end in mind” is habit number two of Stephen R. Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  It describes planning using outcomes  and work backwards, but also setting direction, vision, a clear and inspiring description of the desired future state.

Recognize that everyone will change

In the 1990s I wrote an article that rapid-fire change as a “speed-learning crisis.” Change like we are experiencing was already visible. Now one might argue change is accelerating and it requires new knowledge and skills, new models for leading, and a perpetually adaptive mindset. At that point, I had watched Colin Marshall the Chief Executive of British Airways transform from a well-dressed toff barking demands for tea to a shirt sleeves colleague willing to listen and respond positively to his mid-level leaders driving the change. I heard a BA union rep respond to a rank and file complaint about the money spent on privatization, “True, mate, but then we were re-educating our Chief Executive and you know how expensive that can be.”

“The thing about change management,” says Dr. Nelson Repenning of MIT, “Is that nothing happens unless someone does something different.” New thoughts and new behaviors change you, make it impossible to be aloof or to delegate change. I changed tremendously over my thirty-seven years as a change consultant. Sometimes I changed slowly or reluctantly; sometimes I used my late-adopter persona as an excuse, but I changed and you will too.

So while the entrepreneurs and engineers bring on the transporter beams and tricorders, prepare to lead or follow, but decide what shouldn’t change no matter what.

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality; the last is to say thank you. In between the leader is a servant” who ensures that no one is left behind and that followers learn and grow.