Change

The Obvious Solution is Often Not The Best

Lisa Thinks…
Sep 6, 2018 · 7 min read

Introduction: The New Leader

He walks into the situation tentatively at first. It is new for him but it is not his first rodeo. He has led people before. “This is just a new situation,” he tells himself. He straights up and standing tall enters the room.

All eyes are on him. He knows they are sizing him up. They are waiting to hear what he has to say. He knows that some people are unhappy with their jobs. “Aren’t some people always unhappy though? Yes”, he tells himself but he also reminds himself that is why they brought him in from the outside — even into a critical department like Product Planning. They were looking for a fresh start. They wanted to change.

And so it began.

First, he listened to the complaints about previous management that…

… did not provide training for new associates when they came into the department.

… did not provide clear expectations of what should be included in presentations to executives or even to things in general.

… did not provide consistency.

They were frustrated. It was clear.

He noted each complaint carefully. He would definitely not make those mistakes.

The key issues seemed to be that people wanted clarity and consistency — something that would give them. That should give them a sense of control and comfort. He needed to move and relatively quickly. He could not afford to have the high turnover the department had been experiencing.

The Change Maker

So he moved forward. With the help of others, he put together templates for major milestone meetings that were given to executives. The planners would fill out these templates to prepare for their meetings. They would then know what exactly they were supposed to do and present.

A side benefit was that new executives loved the consistency too. The same colors for different competitors. The same way of looking at the market: segment sales, model sales, demographics. They could quickly get the jist of the information when going from product to product.

The templates were implemented and things seemed a bit calmer. People felt like they had a bit more control with the consistency. Whew!

Meanwhile the awards from the previous management came rolling in as new products hit the market. National, industry leading awards. Award after award.

He thought to himself “They managed to win those awards with all their problems imagine what we will do now when people are happier.”

The Fall Out

But, alas, as the newer models developed under the new management came to market, they were not home runs. Far from it. The organization was also blindsided by competitors. A new experience. They struggled.

The department and even new executives appreciated the changes but the end result far from bring as good as before. Things had taken a step backwards.

Lessons Learned:

I had transferred out of the group but was able to observe what happened. I was one of the frustrated planners. The product, that I worked on from concept to design and feature fix, won many of the national, industry awards. I sat next to the person whose product also won many national, industry awards when it was released. (Our two products were the two that carried the day.)

I too was frustrated with the inconsistency and lack of support by management. I too thought templates might help reduce the frustration which did they did although they had far reaching, secondary consequences that I did not quite anticipate.

In hindsight, after seeing the end results, I realized that through the frustration something was working and working well. I also realized that the focus to make things better needed to be different.

When looking at the stated problem:

“I too was frustrated with the inconsistency and lack of support by management.”,

the new leadership focused on the inconsistency. It makes sense and was obvious. It was more tangible than “support by management”. “Inconsistency” was something that they could deal with. It gave people a sense of control and comfort — conformity does that.

But in the the process, everyone lost sight of the larger goal.

The templates turned out to be a bad idea and broke something that was working. Before the different planners looked at the market in slightly different ways — ways that were most relevant and usable to their models but different from other models. As a result, the executives would see the market from these different perspectives and from these different viewpoints they would put together their understanding of what was occurring in the market in general. This reduced the likelihood of getting blind sided but it was also the source of some of their crazy questions. In trying to understand the market from different perspectives, they sometimes had questions — very odd questions — that would seem to come out of no where.

None of this was the problem. This was what was working although we did not realize it at the time. What was not working was the support by department management when those odd questions came up. Not only did they not anticipate them themselves and prepare the planner, they looked down on the planner when an immediate answer was not available — even though the question sometimes involved a different model.

To make matters worse, management actively prevented planners of different models from talking. A mistake that I made once when asking a person for information on their soon to be released model that was one step up from my product. I needed to have a comparison — to figure out what that product would “look like” in the market when my product was released. Management was gone and I just asked the person for the information so I would have time to integrate that information into my presentation. Not only did I hear about it at the time, I heard about it 6 months later and over and over. An unforgivable sin. Yet if they had allowed us to discuss things with other planners, we may have been able to anticipate the questions of the executives.

So our hands within the department were tied as far as discussing our products or showing others our presentations and management did not fill the gap. Not only did they not fill in the gap but they would be upset when we were not able to.

They too did not understand what the executives were doing and how they were using the different perspectives to help them put together a more robust understanding of the market. I suspect also that even our individual approaches to our models gave the executives additional insight.

In the end, we did not need consistency and templates although that made us feel better. We needed to understand that the lack of consistency was serving a greater purpose and we needed support (and not criticism) when that lack of consistency left us individually flat footed and sometimes frustrated.

Moral To The Story:

Leaders, new leaders specifically, need to be careful when the purposes of change focus on consistency and conformity. These things are serving the wrong master. They take people’s attention away from the end result and have people focus on the process. They give people a checklist mentality which can make them more comfortable — they think they are doing things right if they are marking things off the checklist — but unfortunately they may be missing the bigger picture and not doing the right things.

Instead of conformity and consistency, leaders may have to look to support people through the uncertainty of achieving something which they or the organization may not have done before.

And, while this example is set in a business setting, the same can be said of other organizations like churches. Churches often lose their way when their leaders focus on the specific rituals instead of the often less easy to grasp challenges of living within the faith. A church leader can lay out a template, and tell people when to sit, kneel, and stand so that people can follow and feel that they are comfortably doing what they are supposed to do as practitioners of the faith. They may look around to see if everyone else is doing it “right” which then adds the additional elements of judgment and pressure to conform to the group. The leader may feel good looking out at the congregation of faithfully, organized, obedient parishioners. But they have lost their way and are worshiping and paying attention to the wrong things.

Their attention has been taken away from the true end result — following the way that Jesus laid out for us in today’s society (a goal that is filled with uncertainty and challenges). This is truly a struggle and human nature being what it is, people may welcome the distraction of strict rules and rituals. They avoid the uncertainty and challenges that faith sometimes requires.

These examples demonstrate the ease in which we can lead others into or be led into situations which may make us feel better but which lead us astray from the end result we want. It is easy to do. That minute by minute reassurance is enticing. We like predictability. There is a comfort and security that comes with it. We gravitate to it like a moth to a flame. We need to be aware of this tendency and challenge ourselves to take the true path. The path that may seem a little more challenging but will ultimately give us the results we need or want.

Lisa Thinks…

Written by

I work to understand how we are influenced. I have written Mind, Media and Madness, Embrace Life/Embrace Change (by Lisa Snow)

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