Manage-Wise

When is transformation possible?

Consciousness of the need for transformation can occur when leaders have gradually prepared for change and are ready to embrace it, or when they are unprepared for it and life events force them to wake up.

Usually, multiple life events contribute to an individual’s or group’s readiness for transformation. For example, a leader may be aware that her industry is going through profound changes, the exact shape of which won’t be clear for years. At the same time, she may have also attended a conference at which she heard another leader describe experiences preparing an organization to deal with these changes. And she may have had a taste of the power of transformative interventions at a leadership development program she attended. The combination of these events sparked commitment to change, to exploring new visions of what she and the organization could become.

Often, the combination of events that opens a leader to change, especially of a personal nature, is less positive. The organization has lost significant revenues. There have been disaffections from its senior ranks in reaction to the leader’s authoritarian style. Negative press stories are further hurting morale. The stress of handling the job is having painful ramifications on the leader’s personal relations. Perhaps she has developed serious physical symptoms from the stress. Too often, failure or trauma—divorce, heart attack, scandal, loss of position, prosecution—occurs before a leader opens to transformation.

Personal transformation

The essential steps that make transformation possible are the acknowledgment of the need for change, the admission of blemish, the owning of some responsibility for the current state of affairs, and a glimpse of the potential to become something better.

Let’s examine what the process of transforming attitudes and behavior consists of, as well as the forces that can impede or facilitate the process.

Self-organizing processes

Though many living things transform themselves, we don’t expect a cater-pillar to become an eagle, a tadpole to become a fox, or an acorn to become an apple tree. Every life form has its own mature potential. Similarly, we cannot expect an individual to radically change her personality, but we can expect and encourage that individual to evolve to her full potential.

Each human being has a core personality. That personality is formed and held in place, at least in part, by certain “core ordering” processes. These include how we organize experience into our view of reality, how we form our sense of identity, how we rank our values, and how we try to control our environment. Because these processes form the core of “who we are”, they are very durable and not easily subject to change. They make us recognizable to our college classmates at our twentieth reunion, and to ourselves as we pass through the stages of our lives. But they are not immutable.

Discomfort, threat, and crisis

Human beings generally maintain a dynamic state of balance until faced with a dramatically new situation in the form of a novel opportunity, a unique challenge, or a crisis. Then we either accommodate to these events and achieve a new dynamic balance, or our framework for life begins to unravel.

When we experience too much threat to our core ordering processes we try even harder to use our old solutions. If these fail, we may experience a “breakdown”—physical, emotional, mental. The pain of the breakdown serves the function of demanding that we pay attention to our need to change.

Resistance

It is completely usual to resist change even when we see change is desirable or necessary. We are fearful that we will lose important parts of ourselves that have made our lives work up to now. We can respect this resistance and its self-protecting purpose without succumbing to it. We can allow it to modulate the pace of change to a rate we can tolerate, without letting it sentence us to stagnation. We will find ourselves alternatively opening and closing to the prospect of change. If we honor these natural fluctuations, we can use them to enter and retreat from new territory until we have surveyed it, chosen our preferred positions, and incorporated them into our core processes.

Developing understanding

As we open to the need for change, we observe more about our relationship to ourselves and our relationships to others. We observe how we feel and what we do in a particular situation, and we observe the consequences of these feelings and actions.

Observation is the first step in reengineering a process. We need to know exactly what the current process is and exactly what needs it serves. Then we can consider how to change it, how to get legitimate needs met more efficiently and thoroughly. We must understand our current patterns, their depth and force, and how much we rely on them. Then we can do the hard work of transforming them.

Willingness to experiment

As we open to transformation, we realize that the way we have done things, which seemed to be the only way things could or should be done, is not in fact the only way. And it may not be the best way. We begin to explore the options open to us.

We may try doing the opposite of our ingrained response, testing what it feels like to use nonhabitual behavior. We may let our recessive traits come to the fore and see what effect they have. It can be a small behavior that we do differently, like listening at a meeting rather than jumping in early with forcefully made arguments.

Usually, the sustainable options open to us are not those at the other end of the spectrum. They may be a few degrees further in the direction we would like to go. We may place a little more value on something we previously ignored and a little less value on something we previously held sacrosanct—for example, a bit of less value on a deadline and a bit more on the impact of the deadline on ourselves and our family. We experiment and evaluate these results.

Excerpt from ‘The Courageous Follower’ by Ira Chaleff. Reproduced with permission © 2005, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. E-mail:Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com