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Workplace Coach: Leaders can make change easier

Maureen Moriarity's articles provide exceptional insight every week, but this column should cause every struggling team leader (owner, leader, manager) reason to analyze their skills. Especially those in retail, hospitality, food service, or any business offering products or services to customers eyeball-to-eyeball.

Workplace Coach: Leaders can make change easier

"Harvard change management guru John Kotter has just released a timely book, "A Sense of Urgency." He equates leading successful change with the ability to establish a sense of urgency with employees. As a coach I know by experience that behavior change doesn't happen easily.

Most humans resist change unless they have a compelling reason to change, or put another way, until the pain of not changing exceeds the pain of changing. Leaders who establish urgency around workplace changes provide an incentive for people to act now versus acting when it's convenient or "when I can get to it." In this economy, embracing and acting on this urgency may well define the difference between success and failure.

The words, "in this economy" should be a leader/manager mind-set that motivates them to look at every part of their organization in order to  "do things right." The problem however, as John Kotter points out, is that many businesses, leaders, or managers only change when results are so mediocre that they absolutely must do something.

And then it's too late

Circuit City files for bankruptcy protection

Changes should have been made earlier, but ignorant leadership and management didn't know how.  It could be the result of laziness or stupidity, but most often it is simply a matter of not knowing what should be done, when to do it, and how to execute.

They don't have efficient leadership, management, engagement, communication, education, and motivation systems. 

Workplace Coach: Leaders can make change easier

My partner and I are finally ready to get our business going full steam. The days of "going to" are behind us, so I have been trying to come up with a way to explain what the OneByOne Team Achievement "simple, fun, and everyone" team leadership/management system can do for a leader, manager, or business in today's challenging economy.

 So when I read the first sentence in Maureen Moriarty's weekly column in Monday's P-I, I was a real happy camper.The article is speaks to solving problems with solutions that should already be a part of an effective leadership/management system. 

Workplace Coach: Leaders can make change easier

THE CURRENT ECONOMY has created an unprecedented need for companies to adapt and change. From the big automotive companies to Wall Street to small Main Street businesses, this is no time for "business as usual."

To succeed, companies big or small will need leaders who can support and manage the necessary change successfully. Resilient teams get through tough times because they have leaders who are effective in getting their teams off the dime with focus, creativity, commitment and alignment (everyone rowing in the same direction), and actively engaged in problem solving and "making it happen."

We have a management system that gets everyone to buy into the cause. And that cause is to become one of the best of the best, if not "The Best of the Best" whether you team is on the front-line, a district, a region, or the entire company.

Our problem is that our system is simple, fun, and it involves everyone. It is cheap and easy to understand. It makes change a passion that everyone buys into because they are not only changing the productivity of the team, but they are improving themselves as well.

In other words, our challenge is finding people so focused on excellence and achievement that they will take a chance on our actually being able to create high levels of productivity and an employment experience that employees remember for the rest of their lives as one of the most enjoyable and educational experiences of their lives.