The Hazards of Leading Culture Change
Photo by David Reece on Flickr
I’m thinking about change and culture and innovation a great deal these days so I’m reading everything I can get my hands on. I came across this paper, or manifesto – The Hazards of Leading Culture Change. Its concise but packed with good stuff!
Some of my favorite points:
- When you are up to your backside in alligators, it is hard to remember you were there to drain the swamp.
- …the illusion of advancement is far worse than none at all.
- Three turtles sat on a log in the edge of the swamp. One decided to jump in. How many are now on the log? Nope, there are still three. Deciding and doing are not the same thing.
- Leaders sometime achieve their positions through competencies in other than superior leadership of people.
- Without hands-on trial and error and confrontation of outdated behaviors – all done with a helpful but unswerving facilitator – employees will not likely give up obsolete tasks
- Old ways can die hard – for employees and for customers. Even if the old way has been a negative to customers, they have learned to deal with it. They also can harbor some of the same cynicism as employees, and may actually work to sabotage new efforts.
- When leaders have even the slightest doubt about the worth of the vision or the correctness of the strategies, they can acquiesce and soften their resolve before the culture change effort has had a chance to gain a solid footing
- Culture change takes a long time because its complex and disruptive.
- What separates the culture change winners from those that drop out of the race? It starts with a clear vision that is clear, compelling and constantly used both as the anchor for judgement and a lens for alignment.
These are just a few nuggets of wisdom, go read the whole paper.
Freedom, Responsibility and Culture
This is a great slideshow from Netflix* for salaried employees which discusses nine values which should be embraced:
- Judgement
- Communication
- Impact
- Curiosity
- Passion
- Innovation
- Courage
- Honesty
- Selflessness
It’s long and parts may be controversia,l but it makes some great points about what it takes to create the culture you want in your organization and it’s worth the time to go through it all.
seen on The MLxepreince
*I haven’t been able to verify that this come from
Matt Hamilton : Libraries and Innovation
Matt Hamilton : Libraries and Innovation : creating environments for encouraging and supporting creativity and innovation among staff
How do we begin the messy job of creating a culture of innovation
What will you need? Patience, perseverance, vision and a way to empower staff
Patience is hard to come by for innovators, we see something and want it now, and have made the change before others even see it coming
Get comfortable with ambiguity
incubation
Don’t be afraid to use the word – pilot, even if it fails it encourages others to try new things
Look before you leap, but don’t be afraid to leap
To lead others – we need to create and communicate a compelling vision, build ways to communicate and to listen even if you don’t like what you hear
Keep articulating vision until its truly shared, this means address the concerns of people who aren’t on board
Look for hidden treasures, mine the skills that already exist, find out what ppl did before they came to your organization, discover passions and hobbies
Push power down org chart wherever and whenever possible
Empower staff at all levels of organizations
Create an environment where people enjoy coming to work, this helps the best people come to you
Give your ideas and your people the time they need – you’ll get the most out of your people if they are allowed to grow, the same is true for your ideas
Let your staff play – like google allows employees to spend 10% of time on project of own design
Question – if we are gonna have these new duties how will we get everything done? Allows staff to work on things of their own choosing if they found time
Demonstrate that we trust and respect our staff to made good judgement in pursuit of noble goals
If you lead them to freedom they will follow, freed from monotony, cubicles and stifling policies
Sing praise of colleagues in and outside of org
Don’t try to do too much, some of your project will rust while pursuing others
We can’t all move at the speed of our ideas
Where the world sees trash Africa recycles – balls of trash childen in afica use to play soccer
Questions:
You talked about pushing power down the chart, do you have examples for directors on they can do that? Let your staff make decisions
Have you ever crashed and burned trying to start a project if so how do you reinstile confidence? Yes, build up a peer group so you can demonstrate the idea outside of the organization, then inside might reconsider
With new duties how do we find time? How do you motivate people who just say they are too busy? Talk with staff, background, career goals and what got them excited? They were so excited that they could select something and follow through with it that they were able to find time. There are some people who are particarlury motiviated to do anything other than to come to work and get their paycheck
Rick – Likes idea of project and things being in beta, can sometimes do things because it’s a trial, sometimes can bring others on by saying where just gonna try this for a while
We’re barely treading water, what will keep us from drowning?
Start with this, I did
Now think about this – How do libraries fit into this picture? As far as I can tell the technologies we’re struggling to adapt to and implement might very well be outdated by the time we’re ready to start using them. That’s not good. Right now technologies are running by and we’re still crawling to keep up. What does it mean? Maybe we can’t keep up, maybe we should stop focusing our energy there, at least temporarily. Let’s face it we’ve been talking about the next gen OPAC for how many years? Would our time be better spent elsewhere? Maybe we need to look at changing our organizational structure and mindset first. Then we’ll be better equipped to keep pace. Perhaps becoming more fluid and ready to adapt much more rapidly to change as it happens? Because right now I see two problems
- The level of online service and interactions patrons take for granted is not being met by libraries. Not even the most cutting edge, front line, tech savvy ones.
- The technologies and trends the most cutting edge, front line, tech savvy libraries are preparing may not longer be relevant by the time they implement them or become obsolete soon there after.
We’re barely treading water here people and I don’t think another blog post about how your library can use Twitter or an article about website usability is going to keep us from downing. We’ve got to change, and I mean really change.
More Reading:
- The Beginning of the New Normal
- Inherit the Wind
- Libraries might not provide content in the future & its okay
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