'The Only One Who Really Likes Change...

...is a wet baby.' Unk.

Recently, I had occasion to talk about change as our organization prepares to experience a major change in many important processes. The reality is that even people who handle change well have something they don’t want anyone to mess with! It’s true in our organizations, but it’s just as true in our daily lives. And it is a rare person who goes through life able to stay flexible enough to keep trying new things as they go.

In a few days I turn 55 and the list of things I’ll never do does grow. I’ll never play a professional sport – not that such a goal was ever in my future, but it’s certainly not now. I’ll never get to ride on a supersonic jet that crosses the Atlantic Ocean and lands before it left. I don’t expect to reach the top of Mt. Everest. On the other hand, I have another list – the practice of yoga, teaching yoga, competing in national ballroom dance competitions, writing for people to read (this blog and my office’s bi-weekly newsletter to name two examples) – all things I’ve begun since I turned 40. None of these are really surprising as most flow from activities or kinds of activities I’ve done before and there wasn’t much resistance to overcome.

On the other hand, I’ve been sure for most of my life (54 years or so) that I’m not any more able to draw than, at 5”4’, I’m able to slam dunk a basketball. It didn’t matter that my husband, who can draw wonderfully has told me many times that if I would just take a class I could learn to draw. I knew better. Of course, you know the moral of the story. The picture at the top of this is something I’ve drawn. Now, I haven’t turned out to be an amazing prodigy, but who cares, I’m able to draw and I’m enjoying drawing.

There are so many ways our ideas about what we can and can’t do limit our ability to do those activities and many other things besides. One of the ways we can learn to handle change is to practice changing. One of the ways we can practice changing is to try new activities, stretch our ideas about what we can and can’t do, and in doing so, find out we can survive changes.

So what’s on your list of things you can’t do? Some may be realistic – no Olympic bobsledding for me. But some activities on the list may be there because you’re afraid of trying something new, or are unwilling to do something badly, or any other of the many reasons we’re sure that We. Can’t. Do It!

I suggest you actually write down your list of things you’ll never do and look at the list thoughtfully. You may have to admit that serving on the space shuttle may not be in your future. But you may also have to admit that there are items on the list that you just never tried. Try it – maybe you won’t be any good at it and you can say you were right. But maybe, just maybe, the worst will happen and you’ll have to admit your ideas were the only thing stopping you and you’ll actually learn a new skill!

Have fun,

Gage

Ideas and Actions

“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” Joel Barker

In the latest edition of the UTSA Student Affairs staff newsletter, I wrote about a woman who made a very large gift to the university to fund scholarships. Years earlier, she had heard students discussing the difficulties of paying for college. What makes her different from so many of us is that instead of ignoring what she heard, instead of feeling sorry for the students, instead of wishing the world was otherwise, she did something to make a difference. She started a scholarship fund with a small donation and she kept adding to it throughout her life, finally ending with a multi-million dollar bequest. She saw a need and took action.

She saw a need and took action. I don’t think this characteristic by itself defines a leader, but I’m beginning to wonder if it is possible for leadership to exist without it. Last week I wondered if the term ‘creative leader’ was redundant, since leaders have to be able to see new possibilities, new ways of doing, new ways of being and that seems to be the very definition of creativity. Here is the definition from dictionary.com “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination”. I still think creative leader is redundant, but it’s not enough. Having a new idea is fantastic, seeing a new way to meet a need is wonderful, but without the next step of ‘taking action’, there’s not much leadership in evidence. While lead is not always a verb, in this context, lead is an action word. A person has to be moving us forward in one sense or another for us to consider it leadership. It may be from one state of being to another, but I think change is required.

And, as I’ve said before, there have to be other people involved. If I walk out of the room saying ‘Follow me’ and everyone stays in their chairs, there is not a whole lot of leading going on!

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending TEDx San Antonio* and I listened to more than a dozen people who exemplified leadership. Their initiatives ranged from addressing hunger to ending the death penalty, from fostering creativity in children to helping people who are paralyzed walk – they covered a very wide range of issues and ideas. All of them have their own style, their own focus, their own way of thinking about issues, but all of them have these characteristics:

^They pay attention to the world around them.
^They see a need and believe they can make a difference.
^They find others who know about and care about this need they have identified.
^They are willing and eager to learn.
^They are able to step out on their own if need be, but able and willing to connect with others.
^They envision a world that is different from and better than the one that currently exists.
^They take action.

If the quote above is right, these folks are going to change the world by changing their part of it – sounds like leadership to me.

Best wishes,

Gage

*http://www.tedxsanantonio.com/

Leading from the Middle -Part 2 - The Butterfly Effect

I’m often intrigued by the idea of weather, imagining what it must have been like before radar and satellites. Now, we watch hurricanes form off the coast of Africa and we can follow their route across the Atlantic to our front door off the Gulf of Mexico. As we see the storms move into the Midwest, we have at least a marginal understanding of where our weather comes from. But 100 years ago, probably even less, the storms had no such history. Probably a weather-knowledgeable person understood that the changes in humidity or the clouds heralded a storm in the near future, but I doubt many people thought of the storm starting in Africa.

We now have some understanding of the way in which something as far away as Africa can have an impact on us. We act as if we understand it when we toss around the phrase ‘the butterfly effect’ as a shorthand way to express the idea that a small change on the other side of the world can impact our lives. But I wonder how often we bring that concept into our day-to-day lives of our organizations. I’m not sure we think about it very often and, I suspect, we consciously act on it even more rarely. Within our organizations, little behaviors and actions can have as much impact as the major policies and those little behaviors and actions come from each one of us.

In her book, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, author Margaret Wheatley writes about this idea saying that organizations have self-similar behaviors that are exhibited by all of the people in an organization no matter what their position or work might be.

“These recurring patterns of behavior are what many call the culture of the organization…. By observing the behavior of a production floor employee or a senior executive you can tell what the organizations values and how it chooses to do its work. You hear the values referred to even in causal conversation…. [This similarity] is achieved not through compliance to an exhausting set of standards and rules, but from a few simple principles that everyone is accountable for, operating in a condition of individual freedom.”

If it is this repetition of behaviors that creates the culture of the organization, then the way to change the culture is to start changing behaviors. At various times in different organizations, I’ve worked with staff members to find ways to improve the way we work together. After working at it awhile and seeing some change, people begin to like it and wish the entire organization was working on the same challenges. My response to them is always the same, we can only work on our own behavior and interactions, but I believe that the changes we make, if they are good ones, will begin to exert influence beyond our part of the organization. And I’ve found that to be true. So if you think your organizational culture is negative, first look at what you’re doing to support that negativity and stop doing it. Second, identify more positive behaviors you can begin to exhibit, start doing those and watch what happens. It may take a while, but don’t get discouraged. If that little butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong can start a tropical storm in Africa that then dumps rain on Texas, surely we can have an impact on the organizations we lead.

Good luck,

Gage

Leading From the Middle

In the past couple of years I have developed a few workshops that I have now taught multiple times. While each basic workshop always addresses the same premises they are always slightly different because the members of each group bring their own experiences, insights and questions to the discussion. I set up a structure and purpose, but the interactions between me and the participants and, even more importantly, between the participants themselves create the real dynamic and benefit of the workshop. As a general rule, my workshops and conference presentations are highly interactive and usually that makes for a very fun and creative learning session. However, the quality of each session depends much more on the willingness of the participants to step out of their comfort zones and interact with each other than it does on what I have designed. The workshop called the Leadership Dance which is designed to help participants experience the dynamics of leading and following is a great example of this reality. If no one was willing to get up and dance with me, the workshop would be a complete flop.

In the same way, if the members of an organization are unwilling to work to their highest potential, if they are unwilling to take responsibility for the success of the venture, if they are unwilling to be creative, there is no way for a leader to be successful. During the workshop, I often hear myself saying, ‘If you hear yourself complaining about your organization’s leadership, perhaps you need to stop and see how you are contributing to the success or failure of the leadership dynamic’.

Which brings us back to the title. Now, I know that in big organizations many of us don’t have a chance to create the structure or to change the rules in the Big Book of Rules that all large organizations have. Nor can we all serve as President. However, as a speaker I heard this past week said– all systems are perfectly designed to create the results we observe – therefore, if we don’t like the results we have to figure out someway to change the system. And the very simplest way, and one that is completely under our control, is the one suggested by Mahatma Ghandi - “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” So if you hear yourself complaining about the leadership of your organization, stop for a moment and examine your own leadership. If we don’t like the results we are seeing in the work of our organization, it’s worth taking a look to see how we are contributing to those results. And then we need to take some time to consider what we might change in our own behavior or department that will improve things.

Change in any organization comes slowly. The change I make won’t create change in the organization tomorrow and it may be a while before the response becomes obvious, but when one part of a system changes, the rest will change in response in some way or another. The reality is that the only change over which I have any control is the change in my actions or my area of responsibility. When we make positive changes in ourselves or our departments and thereby create the possibility of change in the larger organizations, that’s leading from the middle and it is a powerful form of leadership available to all of us.

Good luck,
Gage