Think About It… the e-book version

by Todd Youngblood

In early January, no customer’s brain is quite ready to dive back into the day-to-day business battle. They’re just not interested in hearing about the wonders of your products and services right out of the holiday chute. You need to have something to talk about that’s useful and relevant, but a little off the beaten path. Something that will set you apart from the “well here we go again with another new year” approach of your competitors.

All business people know that change is inevitable. All managers know that resistance to it is the single most formidable barrier to breakthrough performance. So how does a decision-making leader (with your able assistance of course) deal with it? John Kotter laid out an excellent strategy in his book “Leading Change,” and summarized it as follows:

• Establishing a sense of urgency
  • Examining the market and competitive realities
  • Identifying and discussing crises, potential crises or major opportunities

• Creating the guiding coalition
  • Putting together a group with enough power to lead the change
  • Getting the group to work together like a team

• Developing a vision and strategy
  • Creating a vision to help direct the change effort
  • Developing strategies for achieving that vision

• Communicating the change vision
  • Using every vehicle possible to constantly communicate the new vision and strategies
  • Having the guiding coalition role model the behavior expected of employees

• Empowering broad based action
  • Getting rid of obstacles
  • Changing systems or structure that undermine the change vision
  • Encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities and actions

• Generating short term wins
  • Planning for visible improvements in performance or “wins”
  • Creating those wins
  • Visibly recognizing and rewarding people who make the wins possible

• Consolidating gains and producing more change
  • Using increased credibility to change all system, structure and policies that don’t fit together and don’t fit the transformation vision
  • Hiring, promoting and developing people who can implement the change vision
  • Reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes and change agents

• Anchoring new approaches in the culture
  • Creating better performance through customer- and productivity-oriented behavior, more and better leadership and more effective management
  • Articulating the connections between new behaviors and organizational success
  • Developing means to ensure leadership development and succession

Get your mind around this approach. Talk to your customers about how you can help them wrestle the resistance-to-change monster to the ground. How they can leverage your knowledge about this critical topic to enhance their own performance and effectiveness. It’ll be a way more stimulating kick-off-the-year conversation than reviewing yet another set of features and benefits. Go buy the book! Or at least read and re-read the above outline and then…