Destination: Success | Don't Stop Leading Change
Change never stops, so our opportunity this week (and moving forward) is to never stop engaging in and leading that change.
As we wrap up this Destination Success blog series on Leading Change, I want to challenge you to never stop!
Never stop seeing possibilities for change everywhere. The opportunity for positive, proactive change exists everywhere, we have only to engage!
Never stop thinking differently, disruptively. Don’t limit your thinking. Don’t let past failures or resigning to the status quo kill your passion to make a significant difference.
Never stop creating options and offering your recommendations for change. We don’t need 100% solutions, we just need options. Don’t get discouraged when your first, second, or even your tenth option gets rejected, it very easily could be the eleventh time that changes everything!
Never stop acting with urgency. Complacency is the near-death experience to change. Don’t wait. Act, then adjust if necessary, but don’t stop moving forward rapidly. Change never waits, and neither should you.
And finally, never stop leading right where you are.
Your Destination Success: Go Lead Change!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Act With Urgency
Compliancy is a near death experience for leading change!
To lead change, you see possibilities in everything, think disruptively about those possibilities, turn possibility into options, and now you must act with urgency! Don’t wait to lead your change, act now and get started on making your change options happen. Use our CARE framework to act. Start with C which is clarity. Are you clear on what success looks like in your change effort? Do you have alignment, the A in our framework? Are you aligned with others, having a mutual definition of success?
Do you have resources (the R), or a plan to gain the resources, to achieve change success? And finally, how are you going to enable your change success (that's the E). Look to measure, reward/recognize, and provide ongoing reinforcement that enables change success for the long term.
As you can see, there is lot to do! Don’t let complacency or the whirlwind of your organization lessen your potential to lead impactful change right where you are. Go get started!
“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.”
Next week...Don't stop!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Create Options, Not Obstacles
The old adage of “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” was sage advice when the pace of change and the complexity of the issues and opportunities were dramatically different. In leading change by seeing possibilities in everything and thinking differently and disruptively, it’s not about coming to final, fully-vetted solutions that can take too much time to make when decision speed and agility are key. It is about creating insights, developing options, and determining impact.
From options, solutions will naturally begin to form, but it is imperative not to discount any options that might exist while trying to form a 100% solution.
Look at your list of change opportunities with disruptive thinking applied. What options are available? Based on those options, what insights can you form and what is the potential impact of each option? Then, develop your final recommendations but be open to explore other options and or a combination of options that might lead to the final solution.
“It is such an uncertain universe out there that you have to create what I call ‘real’ options and develop capabilities that will enable you to deal with an environment that will change anyway.”
Next week we will focus on the need for urgency in leading change.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Don't Let the Past Stop the Future
How many times have you heard, “We have already tried that,” “That doesn’t work in this organization,” “Some things will never change,” or “It has always been done that way."? Each of these statements are the past keeping the future from happening.
Often we accept the past as an excuse to change the future. We get conditioned and find it easier to continue accepting that the past can't or will never change so we accept or tolerate processes and systems that impede our success versus engaging in leading a change effort or even just a discussion on what could be. We tend to resign ourselves to showing up to meetings that maybe, at one time, had value but no longer add value. We show up just because we have a recurring appointment on our calendar. We don’t ask enough “why” we revert to “why bother”.
Your Destination: Success call to action this week? Think differently. Challenge the status quo in a productive way. Start with your calendar and meeting schedule (particularly those “recurring” meetings) and ask why, ask others why, and find a purpose. If there is no real purpose for the meeting, and most feel the same way, then cancel the meeting and find more efficient ways to convey the information.
In addition to the work on your individual change efforts, reach back out to your peers and from the work you might have done from last week’s blog, take your prioritized list and with the three opportunities identified think differently and disruptively on options for change. If you have not worked with your peers yet to identify what's working and what's not, try to this week. Also, explore core processes that often have opportunities for change but seem to exist for years without any focus on improvement. Look to sales, account management, budgeting, planning, forecasting, new product development, et cetera. Challenge the past in each area and see possibilities for change. Lead the change by encouraging different thinking. Be a positive, disruptive force of change that can transform, not just transact.
Don’t let the past inhibit the future.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | See Possibilities in Everything
In our last Destination: Success blog, we talked about leading personal and team engagement by not waiting for, or managing change, but by actively leading and engaging in change. We also introduced the 5-step model of leading effective change (shown in the graphic above). The first step in that model: Seeing Possibilities in Everything for change.
This week, you and your peers take 30 minutes to list 2-3 things that are working well around you and 2-3 things that are not working well. Then prioritize both lists by the potential positive or negative impact on the team. These prioritized lists are your employee-led change possibilities.
List things that ARE working.
List things that ARE NOT working.
Prioritize both lists by positive or negative impacts.
In addition to this group change engagement activity, just look around you. Is there ever blame and justification going on around you or in meetings you might be attending? If so, there is a possibility for change. Just intervene professionally and ask, “How can I help?” or “What would success look like if we got everyone aligned?”.
In addition, are there possibilities for you to build and cultivate more authentic relationships with your peers, your manager, or other parts of the organization? If so, those are possibilities for change. I could keep the list going but possibilities for change exist literally everywhere!
Now it is time to engage in change by trying step one in the change process this week. See the possibilities in everything!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Destination: Success | Chart Your Destination
Are you and or your organization faced with any or all of these:
- Low personal or overall employee engagement?
- Often resigning to the status quo?
- A lot is said about wanting to be innovative but little or no signs of actual innovation is going on?
- Nothing really changes?
If so, you are, unfortunately, in the majority of individuals and organizations trying to compete in the new world of change and disruption while using the same personal and organizational strategies and responses that worked in the past but just don't cut it anymore. Over the next several weeks we will highlight ways you can personally engage in change, making a profound and positive difference, instead of just embracing change.
We will provide actual examples where people, leading where they are, made a difference.
One thing we do know, complacency never changes anything.
Chart your destination to success: Change, lead it, don’t manage it.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.