November 2008
Email: gcohen@co2partners.com
Dear Just-In Readers;
If our values haven't changed, why have they gotten harder to adhere to?
Recently, I facilitated three strategic-planning sessions for a fast-growth technology company. During the final session, the executive team was asked, "During the past several weeks have you and the other members of the executive team been living up to the organization's values?" We did an anonymous poll (using Turning Point Technologies' audience response system) and 75% of the team answered "No"!The values that prompted these entrepreneurs to leave "The Man" (Big Business) years before had become an impediment to their own growth. This is a relatively common occurrence for fast-growth companies. They wanted to provide great service to their customers, but they also valued a highly independent workforce. What they needed was a better system for measuring, controlling, and executing work. They may have been loath to admit it, but they were becoming "The Man" themselves, and with the shift from a small organization to a large one, they needed compliance. Rather than steering into fault language, we steered toward commitment language-commitment to their values, customers, and employees. We spent the whole day creating a compliance system that reflected these commitments. Now their values and work expectations are much better aligned.Make sure your organizational values and systems are in tune with each other. You can start by doing a free values-assessment at ceotest.com.
"How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work" Authors, Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey
Reviewed by: Peter Coleman
One of the chief obstacles we face as executive coaches is the apparent inability and/or unwillingness of our clients to complete the changes to which they have given what appears to be whole-hearted endorsement and commitment. Without these fundamental changes taking place, the enterprise is often stuck in a rut of repetition and entropy.
In this well-written and well-thought-out book, the authors present a new way of getting through any necessary change, by introducing the "Seven Languages of Transformation". We learn how the resistance to change is really a fundamental process of our personal "immune" system, and changes in individual behaviors are necessary to overcome this obstacle. The book is laid out in a step-by-step method to achieve these behavioral changes through seven new "languages" that we must learn to speak to ourselves and those we lead and coach.
For example, the first new "language" they discuss is learning to take a "complaint" about something going wrong as actually a reflection of a "commitment" to a better way. The person making the complaint is asked to restate the complaint in the terms of the positive commitment that is implied. A negative situation is thus turned into a positive, transformational one that gets things going in the right direction for a change. The positive movement achieved by the application of each new "language" leads to the next mental hurdle, for which the authors provide another new "language" to handle. The book includes many step-by-step worksheets for the reader to use individually or with a partner, to apply the principles to a real-life problem they may be working through.
The authors are developmental psychologists working chiefly in academia, so their examples are a little top-heavy with educational situations. The examples are universal and transferable to the business world, however, so this is a minor complaint. The book as a whole is quite free of psycho-babble and mumbo-jumbo, and can bring the reader to an exciting and novel way of changing the way we do business, and changing something fundamental in ourselves. I recommend it most highly.
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