The wave of democratic change that started in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia and has since hit the rest of the arab world carries significant lessons not only for autocratic state leaders but also for business leaders.
The Arab dictators are being removed from power because they haven’t been able to foresee and implement an unavoidable and massive change: the democratization of their regime. It will only have taken this single additional act of tyranny in Sidi Bouzid to start an unstoppable process: the change supporters, who had until then stayed passive, suddenly decided to become active, starting a group dynamic, encouraged by the belief that there would now be far more to lose staying silent than taking action. Suddenly the barriers to change don’t seem unremovable anymore; change is at hands. Things can then turn into chaos, such as in Lybia, or into a (relatively) smooth transition if a sufficiently supported leadership or coalition emerges, such as in Egypt or Tunisia.

Business leaders, although some of whom may show signs of autocracy, are luckily far from mad and dangerous dictators. They can even be inspiring and brilliant. Nevertheless, the same rationale is absolutely applicable to a leader who has neither the vision nor the courage to implement unavoidable change. The organization is then in danger of losing touch with its people who suffer from the situation. Until an apparently unimportant event occurs that triggers an uncontrolable chain of events, ultimately bringing a change that would have been much less painful and chaotic, had it been anticipated and prepared in time. What lessons can be drawn? I suggest the following three.

First that no strategy nor modus operandi is sustainable without a critical number of people supporting it. This may seem naive or idealistic to a GM whose unpopular task is to cut costs by 20%. Well the danger is precisely to by-pass the necessary dialog, and I mean not one-way communication but real two-ways conversations, that will help establish clarity, a necessary first step to adhesion.

The second lesson would be: watch out for signs of change, by listening to your stakeholders: clients, employees, local authorities, suppliers, labour unions, ONG’s,… Of course a leader would have to clone himself several times to achieve all that by her/himself; so another solution is to organise this process , make sure to spend selected time on the field and share this state of mind with her/his teams.

Third, there is no limit to the energy created by a group of people who have taken full ownership of a change that touches them individually as well as collectively. Too often change leadership fail because leaders don’t sincerely apply those principles that they are very well aware of: involvement, dialog, empowerment, transparency to name a few.

In a growing number of organizations, leaders are applying these lessons to drive a change that proves to be more and more inevitable: Corporate Social Responsibility.

Pretty much any recently democratically elected head of state made it to the top thanks to their ability to convince voters they would bring the best CHANGE: change of politics, change of style, change of people. Ironically, this is also true for re-elected candidates: they were able to convince they would bring change in continuity! I have already offered some views in French about Sarkozy’s efforts and here I’d like to mention a few HBR posts that I recently read about President Obama’s ability to implement the change he promised. Of course, the challenge, while commenting politics from a purely “technical” viewpoint is precisely to not be politically biased, which, let’s face it, is a difficult task; so I’m quite happy to give you these two contradicting views on the success of Obama’s change leadership efforts:

The first relates to Obama’s face-to-face meeting with some of his sharpest critics at the Republican party conference in Baltimore, which, according to John Baldoni’s post, was a demonstration of how to face critics and lead under fire, providing 7 key learning points to business leaders:

1. Show up
2. Be open
3. Be cool
4. Acknowledge your shortcomings
5. Criticize gently
6. Smile frequently
7. Leave them wanting more

What hits me the most in this video is how Obama is desparately trying to keep the discussion on a non-political and non-ideological level. It is an interesting situation that a business leader could well meet when facing union representatives, some of which (at least here in Europe and particularly France) are heavily influenced by an ideology.

The second post, by Ron Ashkenas, uses a change management report card framework based on 4 key ingredients (he mentions that it was created by ” a team of top-academics and consultants” but it probably didn’t require too much creativity as it appears to be a simple selection or rewording of Kotter’s 8 steps model) to assess Obama’s performance:

• Make the case for change: is precisely what Obama spent his campaign doing, successfully so
• Create a vision of what will be different: a task in which the president seems to have had mixed results, at least according to Ron Ashkenas, because of his inability to be more specific on the policies he is trying to implement
• Mobilize commitment to change: the plan that was to build a wide bi-partisan coalition of support, has not been successfully applied yet, despite Obama’s efforts that we just saw. One has to admit that this is probably a much more difficult task in a political context, where behaviours are dictated by the elections agenda and lines of hierarchy are party-based, than in a company where one man is in charge.
• Generate early successes that build momentum and learning: this is definately a key change success factor that is also compatible with a political agenda because the earlier people will see benefits of new policies the more likely they are to continue to support the people in charge. Again, Ron Askenas’ view is that Obama could have done much better.

Polls as well as the recent democratic Massachusetts senate seat loss confirm that americans expect more tangible results.  More engagement with the republicans and the ability to generate and communicate positive results are certainly required for Obama to regain support.

What do you think he could do better?

I couldn’t seriously have this change leadership blog without mentioning the work of John Kotter. His 8 steps for leading change model formed the basis of the knowledge and experience I personaly gathered in the field, first during my MBA, then in the consulting firm where I was employed. For those who are not familiar yet with these 8 steps, based on research about why transformation efforts fail, here they are :

1. Create a sense of urgency
2. Creating the guiding coalition
3. Developing a change vision
4. Communicating the vision for buy-in
5. Empowering people and removing barriers
6. Generating short-term wins
7. Don’t let up
8. Make change stick

This recipe for success has always been present in the change projects I worked on through various ways: to help designing the change program, to help analysing problems and identifying their solutions, to get new ideas and simply to use as a checklist during the change effort. My personal learning from applying the model and from hearing senior professionals advices, has told me that:

• The steps don’t necessarily have to be chronological, ie you can do step 3 while you’re doing step 1 and in fact…
• Step 1, creating the sense of urgency is continuous, it hardly ever ends because feeling this urgency during the whole process is what fuels people to action; and so as Kotter explains himself below, it is probably the most important of all steps

It seems to me (please tell me if you think I’m wrong) that no other framework has had such an impact on the way change is lead. A lot of people, consultants firms have come up with their own model, many of which are adaptations of Kotters in 3, 5 or 9 steps.

From knowing to doing

Nevertheless, one could argue that despite the widespread use of the model, the organistations’ ability to lead change hasn’t really improved:  success rate remains stuck at a worrying 30% . What does it mean? Is the model outdated? Do we need something new?

In his excellent online community of change mangement professionals, Rick Maurer, while looking for ideas for his next book, sparked a very interesting debate about what people felt was missing in the current literature. The conclusion was: nothing is, but what people need to do is to close the gap between knowing and doing. In other words, moving from doing the right thing to doing it right. To me that fits very much with what I’ve seen happening in organisations recently. An example of that is the necessity to generate quick wins. A lot of managers talk about quick wins but there are enormous differences in what they each call a quick win and how they actually make it happen. The same thing applies to  ”involving”: “we need to involve those guys” is what we hear all the time; yes that’s easily said but how? Do you consult them, do you empower them or do you just inform them?

This knowing-doing gap is probably one of the biggest challenges everybody faces today, because all the ideas, models, recipes, tools, methodologies are available, but what do we do, practically, what actions do we take and how? This is precisely why external help is still necessary but perhaps in different ways (many of you will be more qualified than me to verify that statement): more than knowledge it’s about skills like creativity, analysis, communication, rigour, energy and drive.

Kotter 2.0

So what does this leave us with, with regards to Kotter? The model is still valid as Kotter’s own research seems to prove and we need to get better at applying it by closing this knowing-doing gap. As we enter the entreprise 2.0 era, we have lots of new possibilities to communicate more interactively, to empower and collaborate, all of which are key levers to help us implement the strategy dictated by the 8 step model.

New year, new decade, new changes: M&A’s, strategy changes, new markets, new products, new customers, new sustainable development policies, new ERP/Information systems. Everywhere is more change. Here are 5 new year’s resolutions for better anticipating, preparing, leading and managing change in 2010:

1. Assess your Change Capacity: to prepare change implementation, analyse its strategic compatibility, attractiveness and impact
2. Listen to your stakeholders; don’t try to push the change too hard, show empathy, a quality that every change leader should have.
3. Decode resistance to change by identifying first of all if it comes from a lack of will or a lack of skill; time spent doing this will be time saved during implementation
4. Make people want to change by conveying a message that emphasises the threats of inertia as well as the opportunities of change
5. Enter the change 2.0 era, by making use of the so-called 2.0 communication and collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, forums, tweets etc.); these are already radically transforming the sales & marketing functions and to a certain extent the way people work together. These tools are a fantastic way of involving people and generating new ideas and bottom-up initiatives, that are so essential to the success of change.
6. Any other suggestions?

My pick of this weeks change leadership related web content:

• GM: cultural changes are apparently under way according to this article from the Detroit Free Press. A less formal dress code, “dress appropriately”, has been decided to encourage personal decision-making; it’s probably a good initiative when you think that one person called HR 2 or 3 times to ask if he could wear jeans! Other changes include new names for conference rooms such as “groovy room” or “zen room” apparently to encourage risk-taking. One wonders though whether there is real change beyond the cosmetical side of these new decisions? Yes, according to Susan Docherty, VP of US Sales, who describes how the decision to cancel a new product after bad initial customer feedback, was taken fast by a small number of top executives.
• 3M: On Paul Williams’ excellent innovation blog, which I’ve already mentioned, an interesting insider look at 3M’s innovation story and its 6 pillars of innovation: R&D, Corporate Culture, Diversified Technologies, Networking, Recognition, Measurement, Connection to the Customer. What I like about these pillars is the way they cover a wide range of technological, management and more human aspects of business