Five Powerful Profitable Pre-Requisites For Leading Transformation-Attention Leaders, Coaches, and Consultants What You Say Is W

Introduction

Why do we keep hearing that 70% of mergers and acquisitions fail?

Why do wrenching stories of failed mergers, like Time Warner and AOL, linger for years?

Why do you risk huge loss of your best talent if you do not lead change with spirit and skill?

A client executive with an emotionally charged merger on his hands asked for my help. His employees were very negative, and he was nervous! So was his boss! Both of their careers hinged on the outcome of this merger and they were all too aware of that!

These are the five pre-requisites we worked with to make the merger such a huge success that the employees said, “Go do what you want. You have our full input. We trust you. We have work to do, stop bothering us with this merger and re-organization; we have project timelines to meet!"
My client’s boss was incredulous when he heard that—he turned to my client and me and said, “How in the world did you pull this off? This was a tinderbox waiting to explode!” All of us had huge smiles!

Here are the five powerful profitable pre-requisites for great change that I offer client leaders. If you understand these before you make your change, your profit will increase and the usual huge losses in poorly led change, such as downtime, delays, conflicts, upsets and talent loss, will decrease hugely. If you ignore these five laws of change, you will lost profits and raise your costs. Not what you want!

Many leaders are out of touch or just do not know what great change requires. If you master these you will be hailed as a hero and can write your own career ticket, because your results will be much better.

Five Powerful Profitable Pre-Requisites

1. As you create the new change, organization and culture, you also create simultaneously the context for the change process.

Context includes the relationships, values, mission, beliefs, priorities, and degree of honesty and trust you build into your organizational life.

Change is implemented through relationships. Transformation requires greater attention to the context and process of change, because the depth and consequences of the changes are greater.

Remembering and acting on this principle will help you implement change in healthier more efficient ways. Forgetting this or ignoring it will cost you time, money, stress and good people.

2. The better your teamwork, the more important it is to keep the connections strong during change.

Otherwise, good teams will feel rent asunder, and not be productive. Remember your best talent is the most marketable. They can find other jobs more easily. Make sure they are happy during change.

For all of your teams, the weaker your connections and relationships are during change, the greater your chances are for misunderstandings and mishaps. There is less trust and thus less slack, so negative interpretations and resulting behavior are more likely.

This is too expensive, don’t risk it.

3. Change is in the nature of things—business cycles and shifts are always with us.

Ignoring or disregarding them sets us up for experiencing change as a shock to the system. Doing our change homework all along prepares us for the peaks and valleys of change.

For example, instead of waiting for a mid-life crisis, look, deeply at your priorities every year on your birthday, and make sure you are living your own life. Instead of waiting for crises to show up, do preventive maintenance in your teams like you do for your car!

Keep your ear to the ground, listen for problems and catch them when they first arise, not after they have mushroomed into a major issue.

4. Negative or challenging circumstances may make change necessary, yet only positive approaches make successful change possible.

Change can bring exciting new possibilities, a chance to grow, to push out the envelope. It calls for the best and wisest in us, yet tempts us to react less wisely. Learning to act from our wisdom while working through difficult emotions is a key change skill.

Looking for the positive, not just the negative in change, is a crucial skill for leaders and employees. Clients have said countless times how much pressure lifts from them when I show them how to view events more positively, not just negatively.

Celebration, affirmation, appreciation, and positive planning and communication strategies are fundamental to successful change. In fact, every aspect of change leadership should be based on positive, not negative, aspects of change.

This requires a consistent interdependent systems approach to positive change leadership, which is the foundation of all of the positive leadership systems I have built with clients’ feedback, road-tested for over 25 years, including planning, delegation, teams/meetings, planning and managing change, startups, endings, and much more. See the More Resources section for a list of products and books.

5. Everyone goes through change physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Taking good care of ourselves and each other at all four levels creates healthier, faster, more productive and profitable change experiences. Be prepared to discover different change styles and needs among your leaders and employees. They are not all the same, but some commonly expressed needs of and winning strategies for clients are described in my Leadership Guide Series E-Book, Four Secret Sources of Positive Power and Profit for Leaders, Coaches and Consultants, at www.youpublish.com/whatyousayiswhatyouget, in partnership with Mark Victor Hansen.

Summary

Knowing and using these five powerful profitable pre-requisites for successful change can increase your profits and minimize your losses.
Ignore them at your own peril. Be a success story, not a bad news story, in the media!