“Personal Change Management” (PCM) Programs

“Personal Change Management” (PCM) programs were developed by The Leadership Alliance Inc. [TLAINC] because, in our experience, successful implementation of organizational change is always significantly dependent on non-rational “people-factors” that are present in the organizations workforce at all levels; however, these “people-factors” are ignored in virtually every change initiative.

These people-factors include personal perceptions, attitudes and feelings that exist below the surface of formal organizational contact, and they are disregarded because organizations largely operate under a cultural cloak of rationality, ignoring or deeply underestimating non-rational realities such as emotion. The result is tragic — workforce energy that could be applied productively becomes a destructive force that undercuts the anticipated change-related performance enhancement. Remember, the people that will resist the change are the very people relied on to implement the change!

Organizations that are serious about successfully implementing change must strike an adequate balance between promoting rationality/technical efficiency and exploring non-rational factors if the anticipated benefits are to be captured. They certainly cannot afford to do otherwise if the planned change is highly disruptive and/or expensive. So how might this be accomplished?

Although an organization may attempt to ensure a successful change initiative by collaboratively developing an exciting vision statement, and satisfying employees’ various basic physiological needs, really significant leverage for successful  change lies in upgrading each individual’s understanding of their own unique personal and inter-personal “people-factors”, and by surfacing them, help the individual deal with them appropriately. To address these needs, TLAINC developed the Personal Change Management (PCM) approach – performance-based programs that facilitate personal identification, understanding, clarification, and resolution of significant non-rational people-factors that may impact the success or failure of a given change initiative, independent of the type of change envisaged.

The PCM approach is based on the notion that to ensure a successful change effort, each individual in the organization must have their own evolving PCM “kitbag”; one that they personally continuously fill and refresh with knowledge about the organizational change envisaged, what it means to them, and how to bring it about at their local level or how to address barriers to implementation. Furthermore, all employees, including managers, must populate their PCM kitbags with understanding and skills related to people-factors. This is achieved using programs that assist managers and staff change local peer-peer and senior-subordinate interactions to enhance authenticity, create emotional openness, and ease the process of “letting go” of the past and making sense of the new context.

The Roger Gaunt Action Learning process is an ideal vehicle to achieve these ends when exploited as part of an intensive workshop and coaching program involving small groups. This style of action learning was pioneered by Roger to help participants deal with their change-related concerns, without delving into any deep-seated emotional issues that are better treated via 1:1 health-professional interventions. This model is favored over the more familiar “project model”, advocated by Professor Reg Revans, because it encourages individuals to define and work with their own areas of interest and emotional concerns, thus building increased capacity for ownership, insight and effective implementation of identified solutions.

Each small group is called a PCM Group (PCMG). In TLAINC’s program PCMG members undergo a process that is enriched with counseling and group-work skills that draw on psycho-dynamic, Gestalt, and client-centric theory. Group members act as collective “counselor” to each “presenter” of an issue, enabling exploration and clarification of her/his situation, plus identification of options, solutions, or “next steps”; at a follow-up meeting the presenter reports to the group her/his progress regarding subsequent “action” taken.

TLAINC supplies highly skilled facilitation for PCMGs to ensure participants develop the discipline to work openly with the group process, and to set aside their own agendas when addressing the concerns of others. The facilitator trains the PCMG in the Gaunt Action Learning techniques, models the skills, and provides a “holding environment” for the group within which challenging and thinking can happen without threat. The aim is to enable a PCMG to become self-facilitating and responsible for its own development.

To explore PCM programs and PCMGs in more detail please contact me at pasmith@tlainc.com – and NO we won’t follow up with you afterward unless agreed with you!

Successfully Developing Triple Bottom Line Sustainability: #6

This is the last of six Blogs dealing with TBL Sustainability. All six Blogs have been co-developed with my colleague and TLA Associate Tia Carr Williams.

“Give a man a fish, you have fed him for today.  When a man learns to fish, he will feed himself for a lifetime.” – Author unknown

In earlier Blogs of this series, we noted that both Sustainable Advantage (SA) and Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) are based on achieving superior market position. We also noted that SCA is toxic in that it pits both employees and organizations against one another in a never ending competitive “survival of the fittest”, whereas SA strategy and implementation are based on a much more desirable win-win collaboration of all parties. In other words, SCA tries to push on the rope of change whereas SA pulls change into being. Organizational Sustainable Advantage™ (OSA™) was introduced and defined in Blog #4 of this series, and is an improvement on SA since the OSA™ approach certifies that strategy and implementation plans are based not only on a profitable win-win collaboration of all parties, but that they are ethical, and without negative impact on relevant ecological and sociological systems. In other words, OSA™ is still pulling change into being, but it goes to a new level by adding the essential triple bottom line elements (social, ecological, financial) as a significant component of sense making and decision making.

To ensure and encourage the necessary organizational climate of innovation and TBL focus, monitoring, and reporting, when an organization begins to navigate the transition from SCA or SA to triple bottom line OSA™, The Leadership Alliance Inc. [TLAINC] has led the way in creating an easily understood seamless performance-based process. This process is one that an organization can readily morph into. It reduces the organizational complexity typically involved in such a large scale change; promotes formation of a fractal organization; fosters common TBL OSA™ understanding and values across all organizational levels; nurtures a culture with innovation at its heart; encourages collegial, participative, open business systems; promotes and leverages networks and social interaction; and provides systems to measure and report progress continuously.

In order to easily understand and rapidly adopt TLAINC’s seamless performance-based process to navigate the transition from SCA or SA to triple bottom line OSA™, organizations must cultivate a culture having sustainable business principles, learning and innovation at its heart. There must be a motivational visionary strategy allied with a deep human context structure; workforce integration systems of high efficiency, capability and efficacy; a synergistic co-operative culture that fosters thinking on how everything can be improved and costs reduced; and there must be task agility for optimal productivity.

This is a tall order, but to achieve these ends, TLAINC supports its clients in undertaking two processes concurrently. One process involves creation of an organizational “attractor” – a central core of strategic business concepts, business processes, and social norms to be refined and used by employee networks at all levels to mutually shape the organization in a dynamic manner; the second process is cultural, and involves creation of a socialized environment based on trust, true dialogue, and the lessening of the power struggles that exist in organizations.

These interventions may be optimally achieved based on TLAINC’s transformative approach. This involves forging a unique ‘solidarity network’ that is inclusive of all the important organizational networks. In this approach representatives of all the various key organizational and governance networks, including the CEO, hold dialogs together for the good of all the stakeholders. TLAINC has the proven capabilities to identify the representatives of the key organizational networks, and the real-life organizational experience to assist formation of the solidarity networks.

These solidarity networks re-design and re-develop the systemic organizational structure, business processes, roles, and tools, to specifically develop an environment where learning and adaption will be essential to successfully carrying out the work of every employee. In this pursuit, new structures and ways of working to adjust to, and to continue adjusting for, a changing set of conditions are created by the continuous dynamic process of co-evolution with a changing environment that is underpinned by learning. This approach leverages a distinctive characteristic of complex systems which is their ability to create new order; that is, a different way of working, thinking and relating. OSA™ is this continuous process of co-evolution. It is neither a one-off change which remains static, nor a reversion or adherence to the status quo. This means understanding and working with (not constraining) the characteristics of organizations as complex social systems.

In promoting organizational learning and adaption, TLAINC through its Associates can accommodate the integration of peer and supervisory coaching, where required, with a highly experienced team of coaches with proven track records. This ensures adaption to a specific strategic or tactical behavioral assessment that obviates hierarchical appraisal in favor of self appraisal procedures. Milestones are configured from qualitative and quantitative measurements aggregated from contributions and co-operative peer review.

The corporate-structure model for the decentralized enterprise described in earlier Blogs in this series demands strategic leadership, corporate identity, capabilities distribution and access, low-cost capital access, and enterprise-wide control. Implementation must be based on socialization, knowledge management, and coherence. The measurement, monitoring, and reporting of these pivotal features are critical to success. TLAINC will collaborate with a client to provide a customized version of TLAINC’s Sustainability Scorecard™ to truly reveal the advances that indicate improvements are being realized, and to highlight next steps.

If you are serious about having your organization navigate the transition from SCA or SA to triple bottom line OSA™, TLAINC is the consultancy to help you make it a reality – why not give us a call?

Successfully Developing Triple Bottom Line Sustainability: #5

This is the fifth of six Blogs dealing with TBL Sustainability to be published over the next few weeks. All these Blogs are being co-developed with my colleague and TLA Associate Tia Carr Williams.

“In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations” – The Great Law of The Iroquois Confederacy

Organizational Sustainable Advantage™ (OSA™) was introduced and defined in Blog #4 of this series. OSA™ results from following a Right for Market™ (R4M™) approach. R4M™ is an improvement on the Right to Market™ (R2M™) approach associated with Sustainable Advantage (SA) that was discussed in an earlier blog, and which involves the more basic method of introducing the right products and/or services at the right time in the right contexts with the right supply chains, and then continually updating, optimizing, and retiring them as necessary. An R4M™ approach makes sure that R2M™ strategy and implementation plans are based not only on profitable win-win collaboration of all parties, but on strategy and implementation plans that are ethical, and without negative impact on relevant ecological and sociological systems. In other words, OSA™ is still pulling change into being, but it goes to a new level by adding the triple bottom line elements (social, ecological, financial) as a significant component of sense making and decision making.

The difference between SA and  OSA™ is particularly important because in our contemporary social-media savvy culture, how a corporate entity performs in environmental, social and economic dimensions has begun to have significant impact, either positively or negatively with respect to the judgments of all stakeholders, including shareholders, consumers, customers, and clients. Whilst there is a clear understanding that businesses are about making profit, firms may no longer profit at the expense of populations or resources at risk. Such a profligate mindset alienates an increasingly aware market-base that is continuously making choices based on their sophisticated understanding and informed awareness of today’s corporate activities. Their perceptions are globally relevant, acute, timely and dynamic, gratis of the Web and the popular groundswell of interest in, and concern for, social and ecological issues.

To further facilitate tracking the impact of commercial activities, the triple bottom line (TBL) monitoring regime has been introduced into the business world. The TBL is sometimes known as ‘people, planet, profit’, and is a commercial measurement and reporting approach that is intended to capture a new set of values and criteria for measuring organizational success in social, ecological and financial parameters. TBL monitoring is directly related to OSA™, and is more rigorous and inclusive re: people, planet and profit than has so far been achieved via Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting.

In essence, the triple bottom line expands the traditional accounting framework to truly include and give equal weight to the new ecological compliances and social responsibilities, as well as traditional financial performance. In the past, in the private sector, a commitment to CSR has only incurred commitment to some form of ecological and financial reporting; however, research has shown that CSR has typically been used as a smoke screen behind which companies carried out “business as usual”. TBL measurement and reporting are intended to provide more rigorous and robust monitoring of a corporation’s demonstrated desire for accountability and transparency in regard to people, planet and profit, and its progress toward attaining OSA™.

To ensure and encourage the necessary organizational climate of innovation and TBL focus, monitoring and reporting, The Leadership Alliance Inc. [TLAINC] has led the way in creating an easily understood seamless performance-based process that an organization can morph into as it begins to navigate the transition from Sustainable Competitive Advantage to the triple bottom line driven OSA™.

This process reduces the organizational complexity typically involved in such a large scale change; promotes formation of a fractal organization; fosters common TBL OSA™ understanding and values across all organizational levels; nurtures a culture with innovation at its heart; encourages collegial, participative, open business systems; promotes and leverages networks and social interaction; and provides systems to measure and report progress continuously. We will expand on this process in Blog # 6 of this series.

In the upcoming sixth and final Blog of this series, practical processes will be described that are used by The Leadership Alliance Inc. and its partners to assist client organizations develop triple bottom line OSA™ capability.