Are you a Purpose Maximizer or Profit Maximizer?

RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us – StumbleUpon.

In light of the increased chatter on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and traditional business rags, I am sharing this very creative and engaging video regarding employee motivation. You may have heard of The Energy Project, well this is right up that same alley.

How do you create engagement with your employees? As a manager, how do you engage your teammates? As a leader, how do you engage your teammates?

The concept of a purpose maximizer over a profit maximizer resonates with me. If you had to pick one of these as a descriptor of your leadership style or intention, which one would you pick? What do you do to engage teammates on the purpose of your team’s goals? Do you think of your job as a manager, leader, or teammate in this fashion? Its pretty powerful.

It has been a long time since we as a society have been as challenged as we are with respect to profit maximization, as a whole. Making a dollar hasn’t been this challenging since the late 70s or early 80s by most of my instinctive perceptions. It can become very easy to be a profit maximizer, and that may pay off in the short-term, but what about the long-term?

All the buzz about engagement is at the center of this question. The key is knowing how to walk the line between being a profit maximizer and a purpose maximizer. It’s impractical to choose one over the other permanently. I see the magic as being more of a balance between the two. We will always have that challenge, but my sense is that we have a heightened degree of that challenge these days given the current state of affairs in business and the economy.

Give this video 10 minutes of your time, and see if your personal and professional engagement is impacted.

Collaborating – Do you want to be happy or be right?

Have you ever found yourself in the place where you are debating one side of an issue and gaining no ground whatsoever? Have you ever asked yourself what matters more, being happy or being right?

In my change efforts, I frequently look for and, more importantly, listen for these two points. The next time you find yourself in a debate or a slight disagreement, try to determine if the other person is really worried about being right (e.g. I know the best way to do this and there is only one way, my way) or if they are willing to be happy and accept an answer that might be somewhat different than their current view. Its not always easy to hear the differences. A lot of time it comes down to emotions. If you can gain a perspective on their emotions, you will do yourself a favor. Here are a couple of my favorite questions to assess the situation:

• What is the emotional state of the person debating me? Are they frustrated and driving to a point to prove themselves correct?
• Ask “So what?” in a very genuinely curious fashion. Without being curious, you will sound (and be) arrogant. Asking this question is the best way to cut through the “noise” and distill the real underlying issues. HINT – you many need to ask the “so what” question multiple times until you get to the real root cause. Being genuine is the key here. NOTE – This cannot be taught. You are either genuine or not, and people can figure that out.
• Is this person interested in my perspective? When I share my view is the person really listening to me? Or, are they just waiting until I pause so they can insert additional supporting reasons for why they are right? Ever heard of “active listening”? Do you use it? Do they?
• Last, ask them the question of this entry, “do you want to be happy or be right?”. Be prepared for the “what do you mean, response?”. It may stop someone in their tracks, the first time. Then everytime thereafter, they will ask themselves the question and possibly preempt the debate in the first place.

In closing, being right usually feels really good to the individual “being right”. It helps the self-confidence. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, its nice to be right, isn’t it? It definitely beats being wrong! Happy, on the other hand, creates room in a team for others to be right, and it allows you to provide input without focusing on being right.

Integrating Project and Change Management

On April 27, 2010 project & change management leaders came together in Las Vegas to discuss how and why project management and change management are integrated.

Prosci Global Change Management Conference

I recently had the great honor of speaking as a part of a panel at the 2010 Global Change Management conference hosted by Prosci (www.prosci.com) and the Association of Change Management Professionals (www.acmp.info). My esteemed fellow panelists were from Oracle, the Brighton Leadership Group, & the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and in spite of our varied industry backgrounds, we shared several perspectives on this subject. Whether you are a project manager or a change manager at heart, I think this quick excerpt from our perspective will resonate with your experiences:

• Know your environment and begin your integration building on core competency. Where is your organizational maturity: Are you stronger in project management or change management? Build on what is already working well; learn lessons from what is not successful
• Everyone must understand why the integration is happening and what it will accomplish. Answer the question, “What does success look like?”
• Don’t disband the change team when the project “goes live” some resources need to support the change and manage resistance
• Integration is not meant to be a tug-of-war
• Project success depends more on stakeholder perception than on meeting project goals
• Project completion doesn’t mean everything was accepted
• Never, never, never stop learning
• Stay 5 steps ahead of the change
• Get all stakeholders involved; both supporters and resisters

We had a lively discussion with great participation from the audience including many Global and Fortune 500 companies. In the end, I would assert to you

• While all surgeons are doctors, not all doctors are surgeons; While all change managers are project managers, not all project managers are change managers, and
• Like the London tube: “Mind the Gap” – the gap in knowledge and skills. Knowledge of project or change management does not mean you are skilled at either, AND knowledge is a great start.

My thanks and appreciation goes out to my fellow panelists and the 350+ conference attendees for your participation and engagement at the conference.

Stay tuned for more discussion on this topic. In the meantime, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Why? Leave a Comment.

Strategic decisions, when can you trust your gut?

Strategic decisions, when can you trust your gut? – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Strategic Thinking.

So, what does your obituary say? What is written on your tombstone? What did you die of?

If you are a project manager type you are pretty familiar with contingency planning, risk planning, and risk management. To compel the attention of your audience to your change priorities, try crystalizing these traditional PM concepts into the openning questions.

The above link will take you to an article regarding executive decision making by a Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, and a psychologist, Gary Klein. Interestingly, these two esteemed thinkers disagree on several aspects of decision making. One concept they agree on is “premortem” or contemplating the failure of an endeavor (project or company or decision) as a part of the decision making process. I couldn’t agree more.

As change leaders, we must keep ourselves and others grounded by contemplating the possible failure of an endeavor. One of my favorite and most frequent planning activities is to ask myself to write an obituay for the endeavor you are leading. “Here lies project X, having died of …”. This is a very powerful exercise to sharply define what really matters or the causes of death for your meeting, project, company, or even your career.

I agree with Kahneman and Klein on conducting premortem and I have found asking the “tombstone” or “obituary” question forces clarity on what really needs to change within a company, division, department, project, and even career.

Try it and let me know how it works for you.

What are the top 10 characteristics YOU think are critical as a Change Leader?

My list….(in no particular order)

Visionary
Entrepreneurial
Introspective
Passionate
Sensitive
Courageous
Practical
Self-aware
Amiable
Intellectual

What am I missing? What do you think are the most important?

Defining Agile Change Management

UPDATE – Please be sure to check out the Change Management Manifesto as well.

How much process is too much process? How can you implement enough process so that you get the benefits (e.g. efficiency, repeatability, scale, etc.) but not too much so as to slow down your agility? The Change Management discipline / industry would be wise to reflect on the concept of “agile” from the software development industry to address these questions.

If you are a change leader, I encourage you to learn more about “agile” concepts in software development. You can easily search on the term “agile” and get a plethora of sites with information. In summary, the agile approach embraces

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Don’t take my word for it. These bullets originated in “The Agile Manifesto” at http://agilemanifesto.org/

Personally, I find agile principles serve as a helpful guideline when trying to balance the need for process. However, many people incorrectly define agile as “without process”. This is not true, and in some ways, agile techniques require more personal discipline than a classic SDLC approach (e.g. waterfall). Agile processes exist, but they live within the context of the four bullets listed above.

Processes are definitely needed, in particular for companies that have reached a certain scale. I have come to experience that “with complexity comes a need for increased discipline.” Processes are proven and worthy tools to deal with complexity in scale, speed to delivery, geographic distance, business risk (e.g. SOX), language barriers, technical barriers, human resource management (e.g. hiring & firing), financial planning (e.g. establishing and managing budgets), software development, etc.

So, in our current environment of a shrinking economy, is complexity going up or down? I say, up. Companies are forced to deal with challenges that they previously may have avoided due to success. Said another way, “success covers up many ills”. To deal with these new complexities, companies may look to leverage processes for increased productivity, efficiency, and most importantly transparency into their business. It is my assertion that, with process comes the law of diminishing returns. There comes a point where process gets in the way, and inhibits a business if process is not actively managed. How do most large entities (companies, governments, institutions) deal with the complexities listed above? They implement processes to manage risk and maintain a level of homogeneous execution across a diverse operations model. This will work, and many companies are proving their success with large scale process deployments today (e.g. look to the Business Process Outsourcing models of any big consulting firm and the existence of ERP software).

The challenge I want to address here is the need to balance process with innovation, delivery, and growth as a change leader. I am not sure there is an answer to “how much process is enough process?” but I am certain that the agile manifesto and the principles it aspires to are helpful to begin addressing the question.

2010 Prosci Global Conference on Best Practices in Change ManagementBusiness Transformation, change management, conferences, prosci

I will be speaking at the 2010 Prosci Global Conference on Best Practices in Change Management in Las Vegas, NV on the topic of Integrating Project Management and Change Management. I look forward to a lively exchange of ideas and to hearing more thought leadership on the topic.

So, what is your experience with the intersection of project management and change management? I shared some perspectives on this topic in a previous blog post here ->http://wp.me/py1Ni-2I . These perspectives were sourced through a lively discussion via a few of LinkedIn’s group discussions. I am very interested in your thoughts and comments in my guestbook for inclusion at the conference.

For more information, please check out http://www.acmp.info/conference/integrating.htm

The Inter-relation of Project Management and Change Management

In my previous post here, regarding skills necessary for next generation project managers, I referred to an article on CIO.com. I also posted a question to multiple groups within LinkedIn (including but not limited to CIO magazine, Change Consulting, Leaders & Thinkers, Philadelphia Technology Group, Business Improvement, Change Management, and Turnaround, etc.) and the response has been overwhelming.

Many of you have agreed that there is a close link between project and change management. I decided to pull some of the better excerpts here.

• I do believe that if you want to make important changes in an organization, a complete turn-around or a transformation, then it easily gets diluted if you do not run it as a project. Considering people’s adversity to change they will find every opportunity to avoid changes or go back to their former way of working. A project creates a solid framework, with measureable milestones, progress reports, focus on areas where change does not happen according to the objective, and subsequent corrective measures.
• A project by definition is a special endeavour that is different from routine work. Anything which is new and people are not used to, will require change management for its effective implementation or delivery of its intended results. However, the scope of the project and its impact will determine the change management required. On the other hand Change Management is again by definition is something special and hence can be considered a project and needs to be run like a project even though some of the outcomes of a change management initiative are qualitative and difficult to quantify. More visionary leadership is required for a change management initiative.
• Any change program of a certain magnitude must be managed as a project.
• I totally agree that to change the mindset of the people really need people who have influence or leadership qualities ,who can drive the ideologies in such a way that people start accepting those ideas.The success of any Project lies on the shoulder of leader as to how influential or diplomatic he or she is to drive people for change without much resistance I agree that individuals need to have willingness to change but my experience is that Strong leaders first create strong team then show the positive aspect of the desired changes to people,influence people to accept changed environment,motivate people in such a way that they are willing to accept any change and then establish informal communication channel with grass root level people and then simply put across the formal roadmap of any Project.
• Both Project Management and Change Management are disciplines. Both are managing a transformation from current reality to a desired future state. Any initiative that is responsible for the development and/or delivery of something significant will require a Project Manager to drive planning and execution. The question that most people struggle with is “when is a change management track required along with a dedicated Change Manager?” The answer lies with “behavior”. The more that the project’s deliverables require a change in human behavior, the greater the need for Change Management. (Ex. The delivery of new spreadsheet software to people who use spreadsheets, simply requires some user training. However, an initiative that changes business process and the roles, responsibilities and procedures expected of people is expecting new behaviors and requires more than training classes.)
• Most projects are initiated to change something and therefore, change management should an integral part of what is done to ensure success.
  
• The ultimate value of any project rests with how well the change is absorbed in the organization. All successful projects I have seen tend to have incorporated some level of awareness that the transition from the ‘as is’ state to the ‘to be’ state will involve change and have – to some degree – proactively planned for the need to understand and manage that change throughout the project.They should be joined by the hip. I can’t recall any project that I have run where the organisation I was delivering the project for wasn’t prepared for the implementation in terms of communication, training etc.
• …it is hard to imagine any kind of significant change that would not benefit from being managed as a project.
• Change is constant, project is the boundary we draw to manage it in a phased approach.
• Project management is a discipline that is about delivering change. Organisational change management is a closely related discipline that is also about delivering change.
• They are related inasmuch as you have many Project Managers who have been involved in “change” initiatives and many Change Managers who have been required to “project manage”. That said my view is that they should not be related but complimentary. Why? A Project Manager is the owner of a plan that is milestone driven whilst a Change Manager has the unenviable task of winning hearts and minds and changing culture which cannot be milestone driven. Ideally the PM and CM should compliment each other in the context of a project. First and foremost I am a Change Manager and my Project Management skills are secondary to what I do.
• Change management is also studying the impact of any change. It is also about continuous re-inventing.
• Formal plans and statements contribute to this process. But these consistently fail to address crucial aspects of real-world organisations that managers experience every day. Other, ever-present features of organisational life – such as the impact of power and politics, the importance of informal processes, and the implications of paradox – tend to be dealt with superficially or ignored altogether.

And, I am only through about half of the feedback! This is clearly a topic of interest across a broad group of individuals.

I believe the two modes of thinking are related, and probably best described as “co-dependent”. While some comments focused on technical change management, most folks articulated the concept of project management providing a “blocking and tackling” approach to driving incremental organizational movement in a direction that is different from where an entity is today.

I prefer to think of project management as one important technique to enable change. In itself, it is not sufficient. Project Management is effective as breaking up a large problem into smaller digestable pieces. My team and I have a saying to refer to this phenomenon “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Some methodologies I have been exposed to encourage “a series of small successes.” These are all project thinking models that help us digest large scale changes.

Change Management (in the cultural / transformation sense) becomes necessary based on the magnitude of the change the project is driving. Sizing the amount of change, can be a challenge. I use the framework from this blog entry to contextually appreciate the change at the enterprise and project level. When more of the domains are involved, more change management is required.

In closing, I would like to share a final word on management vs enablement. In our transformation approach, we have implemented and built out a project management system (processes and tools) to manage the business and IT related projects. We are driving large scale change into a company using project management as one technique. We also realize that project management, while important, is not sufficient in isolation to drive a business transformation. A broader framework is required. We view Change Management as a broad all-encompassing concept with multiple capabilities required to conduct a successful transformation. Along side of program & project management, we are building out a “change enablement” capability as well. I am not convinced that one can manage change like one manages projects. In textbooks and theory, we can definitely defend an approach to managing change like managing a project. However, in reality, its not that “black and white”.

We are breaking down our business transformation into a series of measure outcomes using project / program management techniques and dealing with the softer aspects of change via change enablement. When the size of the change impacts are broader than the business capability and technical enabler domains, (ref. this model) a much more entrepreneurial model is being applied to address the strategy, cultural, competencies, and structural domains. Our enablement serves as the “grease on the corporate gears” and facilitates the highest level transformational direction which can then be programatically broken down into a series of small successes so that we are able to eat the entire elephant!

Sacred Cow Driven Change

At multiple points in a transformation, the program / company will plateau. Consider looking to the corporate sacred cows to invigorate the transformation and breakthrough the plateau.

In leading transformations, you need to rely on your instincts and know when to be provocative, and when to live to fight another day. In the teams that I lead, we refer to these moments as “The Gambler”, named after the Kenny Rogers song and the memorable lyric “you gotta know when to hold’em and know when to fold’em.” Change Leaders must maintain a connection with the program stakeholders and the business environment to recognize “The Gambler” and take the most fitting actions.

One technique when its time to hold’em is to address a sacred cow in the company. This could be a sacred cow from any of the domains of transformation (outlined in a previous post here). Perhaps, the program has a leadership challenge, or perhaps the business model is not as compelling as suggested by industry perspectives, or maybe the “not invented here” syndrome is pervasive. Some people refer to these issues as “the emperor has no clothes”. If you see your transformation stalled, idle, or in a plateau, a sacred cow can be an effective “sacrificial lamb” to get the program out of paralysis.

A change leader’s ability to apply this technique is also heavily reliant upon the relationships they have built throughout their environment. Imagine a new change leader with no relationship, or even bad relationships trying to challenge a sacred cow. It is not hard to speculate how that dialog may play out. You may have experienced this in your transformation experiences. When change leaders approach a sacred cow without the requisite trust in their relationships, they undermine their leadership and influence. Comments like “why should we listen to johnny-new-guy? We have been successful for years without their ideas” can be heard by the water cooler. Frequently, the discussion turns to the lack of confidence in the leader or the fear of change”, resistance to the change rises, and the sacred cow becomes further entrenched.

Contrast this with a discussion of sacred cows amongst two or three leaders with a strong relationship as reflected by a high degree of trust and respect for each other. Defenses are down, and the sacred cow can be discussed in hypothetical terms, frequently resulting in “mind-expanding discussion” and a potential breakthrough for the program.

If your transformation is stalled. If you are facing “the Gambler” and find yourself folding your cards over and over again, look to your trusted relationships and consider if they are strong enough to withstand a sacred cow discussion. If they are, engage the leadership opportunity, create a non-threatening environment, disarm the potential negative emotional reactions of a sacred cow discussion and make your wager. Lead the change, breakthrough the plateau and invigorate the transformation to a new level.

What would you expect from a website dedicated to driving business change?

I am considering the possibility of building out a website dedicated to driving business change and business change leadership. I have many thoughts on what this site might look like but am interested in what the business change community wants to see. Please leave me a comment here. My initial list of topics includes but is not limited to:

• Business Alignment
• Business Strategy
• Business Transformation
• Debate
• Delivery & Execution
• Education & Training
• IT Governance
• Leadership
• Quotes
• Project Management
• Resource Management
• Tools & Techniques

I eagerly await your ideas and recommentations / comments.