5 Big change mistakes – 2 Not involving people

So often senior managers start working on change without involving the people who know most about what needs to happen and how to implement it.

Yes, sometimes you can’t tell people what’s going on for all kinds of reasons, but too often this is used as an excuse – or perhaps it’s just a habit.

If you can explain to people what you need to achieve to your team, very often you will be surprised at the ideas they come up with.
The change

In one company where I was working, during a previous and tough recession, we were really struggling. It may seem like a minor thing, but we, (the management team) decided that we just could not spare any money at all to pay for the traditional Christmas lunch normally funded by the company so we made a change and cancelled the event.

I announced this to the employees and apologised. They all knew how bad things were (sales had dropped like a stone, a familiar story).

The delegation

But later that day a small delegation came to see me. I was told that they had decided the Christmas lunch was too important for morale to miss. So they had decided it was going ahead.

They had already planned how they were going to do it with everyone making a small contribution and bringing in food.

The tradition

Part of the tradition was that everyone got a present from the company. So some money was scraped together through donations, enough for £2 per person.

One of the senior supervisors and I went into Nottingham and spent the afternoon getting a present for every single person, from the cleaner to the managing director. Each for £2 or less.

The successful event

The chief test engineer dressed up as Father Christmas and gave out each present after an excellent lunch that had not cost the company a penny.

It is still one of my most treasured memories. It made me realise what could be done if you just shared things with people and gave them a chance to contribute.

Include people

If you implement changes without including people you will almost always discover that things could have been done much more efficiently, better and cheaper if you involved them.

This is particularly annoying for those on the receiving end. In turn this leads to de-motivation and all kinds of other unnecessary problems. So why not save yourself the trouble?

For a summary of five big mistakes when implementing change see this article
5 Big mistakes to avoid when making change

5 Big change mistakes - 1 The wrong objective

5 Big mistakes when implementing change - 1 The wrong objective

One of the big mistakes people make when they are implementing change is not getting the objective right at the beginning.

Make sure you have a SMART objective

Make sure you are clear on what it is you need to achieve through the changes you are planning. The wrong objective (or no objective at all) will lead you down the wrong path.

Time spent on this can seem like a waste when you are keen to get on or there is an emergency – perhaps when the creditors are banging on the door. But it will be worth it.

Ask yourself some questions:

• What do we need to achieve?
• How would we know we had achieved it?
• How would you know you were making progress?
• When do we need to achieve it by?
• What would it look like?
• How do we need it to be in six months?
• How do we need it to be in a year?

Don’t just do this on your own. Ask your team. Run it by others to see if it makes sense.

Don’t worry about how you are going to achieve it at this stage, just what it is you need to achieve.

For example:
Imagine your sales have dropped and the revenue is reduced.
You might start with an objective like:

“Reduce costs.”

This objective is not very specific. What is it you need to achieve?

“Run the company within a new budget”
“Increase revenue”

What budget and what revenue do you need?

“Run the company within a budget of £XX this year”
“Increase the revenue to £YY per year by end 2014”

There are many other objectives that come under these and you need to discuss them with those involved. Don’t start working out how you are going to achieve it at this stage. I know it’s very tempting, but it’s a distraction from getting your objectives clear.

The next posting on big mistakes in implementing change – not involving people early enough – comes out on Thursday 19th May.

For a summary of five big mistakes when implementing change see this article:

5 Big mistakes to avoid when making change

Are you wasting money on events?

Have you ever been to a conference and come away wondering why you went?

I’ve spoken at conferences like that myself and been to quite a few. They are the ones where there seems to be a vast budget, lots of ‘goodies’ that get handed to you, but no clear idea what the purpose of the event is.

They are not so frequent now, but they still happen.

One of our clients told me about a discussion with one of his clients recently. They wanted him to make a film for this event. When he asked them what the objective of the film was, they had no idea – but they were planning to spend thousands on it.

The cost of events

Events cost a fortune to organise and to carry out. But that’s not the only cost. There is also the cost of the people attending the event. For in-company events, this can be huge, but it’s rarely considered.

How to avoid extra costs and make events worthwhile

You need to have clear objectives.

Try asking yourself these questions:

• What do I want to be different at the end of this event?
• What do I want people to do differently?
• What do I want them to say when they leave?
• What do I want them to say about the event when they get back to the office?

And, most importantly:

• Why are we holding this event?
• How would we know that it was successful?

Are we really all responsible for bullying?

President Obama has recently launched a new campaign against bullying. He suggests that we are all responsible for stopping it.

Many years ago I remember the head teacher of my daughter’s school telling a parent that there was no bullying in his school.

I was completely astonished to hear this. I knew there was bullying in the school. So was it that he was simply unaware of the bullying that was going on? Or was it that he was lying?

School Bully

I personally saw him being bullied by the mother of a girl I knew at the school. The girl herself often bullied others at the school. It wasn’t hard to see why the girl behaved as she did.

So perhaps he didn’t really understand what bullying was. The trouble is that his lack of understanding meant he took no action to tackle bullying in the school.

We are all responsible for bullying.

What bullying is

Bullying is simply a behaviour – a way of treating others. But it’s a way that most of us don’t like when we are on the receiving end. Unfortunately many people stand by and do nothing when they see others being bullied.
When you are in a position of responsibility and you see this happening, I believe it is your responsibility to do something about it. Doing nothing is the same as condoning the bullying.

If you are a teacher you have an even greater responsibility because children and young people need to learn how to deal with these situations. If you allow the students in your care to bully each other and don’t set the right standards of behaviour, you are saying that bullying is acceptable.

You need to be demonstrating what is and what is not acceptable behaviour, and you should be showing children how they ought to behave. More than most other roles you are setting the standard.

Parents bullying

My hairdresser is Chinese. She believes in very strict standards for her daughters. But she was horrified that her husband thought that hitting his children was an acceptable form of discipline (she has corrected this misunderstanding now).

If you hit a child because they do something you don’t like, what lesson does that child learn? The child learns that you hit people to get your own way.

Sweden

Many years ago, Sweden made hitting children illegal. I saw a parent interviewed about his views on this. He said that he thought the law was completely wrong and he had to get some help to stop hitting his own children. Then he discovered that he only hit his children when he didn’t know how to talk to them.

Perhaps this is the root of a lot of bullying and to stop it we need to know how to talk to people.

In Sweden, they made it illegal but helped people to meet the new standard.
We all need to know how to help both people like the Swedish father and also those on the receiving end of bullying. And we need to have the courage to step in and help.

This is because anyone can encounter bullying. The only reason it survives as a behaviour and is so common is because we allow it.

For more help dealing with bullying get my downloadable ebook “How to Deal With Bullying”

An easy way to stop learning

Did you know that there is no learning without feedback? I heard Prof. Marian Diamond speak on this topic many years ago.  She’s an expert in the brain and is still working at 85.

She is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. I was lucky enough to meet her. Till I heard her talking about feedback, I had no idea how important it was. I thought it was dry and boring. Just something you had to do in a performance review or appraisal and perhaps once or twice a year.

Now I know better. The important thing to realise is that by not giving or getting enough feedback, you are not learning as much as you could be. You are making your life more difficult than it has to be. You are not moving forward and improving.

No learning

Have you seen people (or companies) who make the same mistake again and again? We all have.

One of the key reasons for this is just not checking information you already have about the results of your actions. You often don’t need to get feedback from others; you can get the information yourself. And that’s all feedback is: information.

It’s information that helps you to make a decision on what to do next time.

A small example of feedback working

I worked with Anne, a finance manager. She had a team member who was unreliable. He often did not complete tasks when they were required. Many of her requests were sent by email.

We printed them all out and she put them into two piles. The ones he had complete on time and the ones that had not been completed on time.

There was a clear different in the way she had asked him to complete the task. When she had given a specific time or date, the tasks were done promptly. Where she had said they were ‘urgent’ or ‘really important’ (with not date) they had not been completed on time.

So her feedback was clear – to get tasks completed on time, Anne needed to give a specific date.


Find out how to get feedback and make sure others get it.

Why books are bad for you

So often people fight against change and have all kinds of reasons for it. Apparently the ancient Greeks (Aristotle, Plato and friends) thought books were bad.

They thought that having books would stop people bothering to learn things off by heart.
Judging by the people who come along on my workshop “Improve your memory now and for the rest of your life” I would agree.

What surprised me the most recently was that on one of the workshops not a single person knew anything off by heart. Absolutely nothing. They professed to be amazed that I could recite an entire poem. So the Greeks were right.

Memory

The trouble is that not using your memory does mean that you get out of the habit of remembering things. Having a good memory is all about using tools and techniques to remember things.

If you use the right tools and practice them you can improve your memory quite drastically in a very short space of time. 

On the workshop there is a little memory test where you do your best to remember a series of 20 words. Most people who come on the workshop manage to improve their score substantially over the three hours. Some even double it.

It’s not magic, it’s just trying out a few techniques.

So are books really bad?
Of course books in themselves are not bad. What is bad is letting your faculties go, becoming lazy and allowing yourself to go into decline.

If they didn’t like books, what would the Greeks have said about TV? Personally I love watching something good on TV. But I wouldn’t want to sit all day every day watching TV, though it would be easy to do.

It would be easy to stop using my memory. I have a phone that does my shopping lists and reminds me to do just about everything. So it’s very tempting to get lazy. Then you find that, when you need it, your memory doesn’t work.

The trouble is that, if you are not careful, these useful tools become crutches.

Once you become totally reliant on them you are lost when they fail or are taken away.

I used to work with a chap who had had polio. He walked with two sticks. He told me once that he had been offered a wheelchair several times by well-meaning medical staff. But he never accepted. He said; “Once you get in a chair, you never get out.”

Improve your memory now. Get the recording of my teleseminar "How to Improve Your Memory"

How do you help people to deal with big changes?

Many organisations are having to deal with this situation at the moment. It's not easy, but there are things you can do to make it easier.

To help people deal with the shock and worry of thinking they might lose their job, go through some of the research on how your brain responds in these situations and what you need to do about it.

When we did this in a short workshop for one client they had people spontaneously thanking the HR department for running the workshop.

We got people to talk about how they felt (research shows that just doing this helps people to feel better immediately). We explained to them how they are likely to start behaving, how that isn’t going to help them in the long term.

Then we gave them some tools to help them in dealing with the situation including:

• A way to keep focussed on the long term
• Key actions to take to avoid getting depressed
• Ways of supporting each other

When you look at why some people survive major disasters and others don’t, you often see that those who survive knew what to do beforehand. They had been trained. It’s exactly the same here.

If you know and recognise the signals, you can take action to minimise the problems. You can be prepared for change, particularly unwelcome change, and put your plan into action as soon as it happens.

Often our clients have many employees that really don’t like change at all. Unfortunately many of these companies will be going through massive changes over the next year or so.

But some of their best people are the ones who don’t like change. So it’s really worth making an effort to help them.

For more on this People who don't like change - why they are so valuable