Leading Change: Make No Mistake !

When one in the leadership position, it can be very interesting. Sometimes it may put one become glamour. Why is it so? Glamourous may come from the ability of the leader to lead his team navigate through good and bad times.

Make no mistake! Why? It is apparent that on the other flip side of glamourous, to be in the position of leadership also has its minus points. What are they? Take note that the leader will be never escape from attempts to take him down especially during turbulence period. That is when the leader whom at the same time double hat as change agent(CA) must be very careful in leading change.

What can be used as a general guide to lead change that truly transforms?

1) The CA needs to ask his team to confront difficult and hard press issues; and at the same time they(the team members) have to let go rituals that long time ago has been dear to them.
2) There will be many attempts and plans to try to reduce CA's influence or even worst to eliminate him by hook or by crook.
3) Resistance group normally wish to derail CA's plan and prefer status quo to maintain. People will resist to accept changes and the new moves. Worst still they even come out loud denying that there is no problem.
4) Do not do it alone. The danger if you are doing it alone, there's no one to dilute your ideas or celebrate your success. Choose a partner who will protect you from baseless attacks. Your partner also act to point out possible flaws in your change mechanisms.

Yearn For a Return To Normalcy?

The world's economy is not fully emerge from recession after global meltdown. Post-crisis was creating many wishes and fantasies that thing will be going back to where it used to be. However, to be realistic, let's call it out here - that there will be no going home again for the average of us.

The surest thing now is that the business environment and its whole landscape has been forever altered. Many global companies(MNCs) and financial institutions not only affected badly, but some even wiped out from the market such as Lehman Brothers. Googling for and browsing at Lehman's website today creates a kind of loss and historical feeling; and it is as good to say - study about dinosaur extinction !

In the aftermath of this unprecedented crisis, regulators(Central Banks) and governments around the globe will now map out better control mechanism. Expectation on "rational behavior" that suppose to safeguard us from faulty or bad decisions economically is now no longer reliable.

In assessing this post-crisis issue, the psychology is now also going to be totally different. The new economic order is very interesting and promising, however, it is too early to yearn for "return to normalcy" after many months living in uncertainties.

Change Phobia

Today, we live in a time of rapid and massive change. The speed of change is really trying our soul. Many of us are very frightened to embrace change and learn about new things because of many assumptions, prejudices, and prejudgments which already solidly formed as our “mental baggage.” This mental baggage will make us moving very slow in our life journey.

Why is it so difficult to change?

Believe it or not, we acquire knowledge from the time we were born, and some medical experts and psychologists suggested perhaps even before our birth when we still inside our mother’s womb. We also acquire the stocks of words that formed our thinking patterns, the convention or norm of our culture, the beliefs of our parents, and the philosophy that pleasure us or make us resist to things that rattle our thoughts.

During our childhood, we enter formal education in school. If our parents can afford it, we might be lucky to attend good school with the best brains – best teachers and smart students around us. There we learn many subjects the way our teachers and textbooks teach them. Further, we start to learn on how the world is functioning according to the society’s acceptance or rejection on what right and wrong. From there, we will express ourselves in an established manner to succeed in our studies and mix with our colleagues.

As we get older, we move to higher level of education, more and more knowledge acquired by us, then more and more “mental baggage” being loaded into our already-weighty “mental trolley.” We should be lucky if we receipt positive and good values. In some occasions, if we are not paid extra attention to so many inputs, we might receive negative or bad values along the way that can put us into a situation called “educated incapacity.”

Those values that we learned will become our thinking, our beliefs, and our problem-solving tools, and that will determine our level of acceptance to any unprecedented or possible change that come our path.

It is about the individual...

When you first get to know a person, you will easily recognize the content of his or her heart and mind by just listening to few words he or she speak. The whole intent and body of his or her life can be found in their speeches. The inner defeat easily can be detected from the negativity signs glowing from the speech.

In my course of working many years, I met many personalities and there was this one particular individual who always lashes on circumstances, friends, systems, processes, bosses, management, government, nation, and the list will goes on and on. Day in and day out this individual will live by the culture of self-pity, victimization, blaming, and scapegoating. I hardly witness any acts of take the ownership and accountability for all the tensions and circumstances caused by the negativity.

I found that many times, all the unnecessary tensions very unlikely to do with the circumstances or other people, but always can be traced down to the person negative attitudes. It is about the individual.

There is a very famous saying; "if you cannot change the world, change yourself."

Chameleon

As we just started the first working day in 2008, today's tough challenge is: do we have to do things the same old ways in the past?

How could we do differently in 2008 to produce better results in all of our life spheres?

• Personal life
• Family life
• Business/work/career life
• Financial life
• Community/global life
• Spiritual life

Why do certain segments of people very successful in one or any combination of the above spheres year after year, and others just didn't made it?

What could be the differentiator between this two extremes?

Actually it was differentiated by a very thin line. The secret was the ability of the successful groups to accept changes, acclimatize, and camouflage themselves to any 'situational change' with new tactics and strategies to delibrately move on. The main problem with the unsuccessful groups was the resistance to change the way they had been doing things, and so they suffer the consequences which could lead to self-extinction!

One has to accept the fact that life itself is living. Nothing is stagnant - not even the planet earth and the whole universe. To live means need to change!

Ask yourself this question: How many instances when you refused change just because it was not compelling enough to you? If any, those were times when procrastination ruining your free right to unlimited success possibilities for fear of failure.

What kind of storyline you want to write for yourself if you knew that life could offers you with thousand unprecedented possibilities? It is about time that you start to envision your own destiny - a destiny to live by design and plan, but not by default and accident.

Note:

• Be a chameleon.
• How about dinosaur?
• Change management.
• When is your episode to succeed - could it be in 2008 or beyond?