Change may begin with declaration, but change efforts sputter until leaders change their own behaviors.
4 steps on the path to the highest good:
#1. Paint a picture of the medium-term highest good. Make it near enough to be attainable and distant enough to be aspirational.
- Engage others. If you expect engagement, you must leverage engagement.
- Focus on pain-points.
- Include facts.
- Breathe into aspirations.
- Use language that touches heads and hearts. Tell stories.
- Don’t unnecessarily offend current efforts.
- Evaluate assumptions. What assumptions have outlived their usefulness?
#2. Determine new leadership behaviors.
In the process of vision casting, ineffective leaders exempt themselves and focus on how others need to change.
- What must leaders and managers do differently? Change is first about leadership, then others.
- How must you think differently about leadership and followership?
- Evaluate the present with the future in mind. What systems and processes need to adapt or end because they don’t serve the change?
#3. Hold each other accountable for the highest good.
Design observable, measurable, shared behaviors. Leadership is a fantasy until ideas are distilled into something you can see. Three questions are essential.
- How might you be transparent with efforts? Change-efforts sputter and stall when secrecy prevails.
- How might you be transparent with results? Resistance slumbers while people talk. It digs in when the rubber hits the road.
- How will you respond to success and failure?
Successful leaders challenge the wrong-headed assumption that new results can be achieved by repeating old behaviors with greater sincerity and intensity.
#4. Equip people for success.
What new skills and systems support and sustain medium-term change.
What is essential for effectively leading change?
What makes change efforts sputter and stall?