Chapter 10

Leading People, Change and Strategy

In This Chapter

Leading in the midst of constant change

Helping your organisation flourish

Developing a mindful organisation

L eading people and change are arguably the two most demanding aspects of a leader’s work. This chapter explores how mindfulness can transform the leadership of people and change, and how the organisation can become more mindful while still keeping a keen eye on the bottom line.

Leading Mindfully when Change is the Norm

In the recent past, change projects at work were managed on the assumption that they had a distinct beginning, middle and end. Arguably the most widely known model says that after the initial shock and denial stage comes a feeling of loss, and in the final stage people start to experiment with the idea of doing something in a new way, eventually embrace it, and the new way of working becomes ‘business as usual’. This model is great to bear in mind when major change happens occasionally, and there’s time to embed changes and return to a state of business as usual.

Another commonly used model proposes that in the initial stages of change an organisation prepares for change by breaking down old structures and ways of working, which causes uncertainty. In the middle stage, employees work to resolve the uncertainty and look for new ways to do things, and start to support and embrace the desired change. In the final stage (when people have embraced the change) comes further work to embed the new way of doing things into everyday business.

The problem with both models is that the pace of change for many organisations is now so rapid that there’s rarely time to complete stage three (embedding and business as usual) before the next change is necessary. So just as the sense of loss and uncertainty starts to recede and people start to explore new ways of doing things, they’re plunged straight back into shock, denial and breaking down what they’ve only just built up.

With little time for ‘business as usual’, one change follows another and another, so little if any time exists to consolidate and embed each change. Constant, ‘bumpy change’ requires a new approach to leading change initiatives, centred on human processes of habit formation.

While many change management projects focus on the steps necessary for organisational change, the Prosci ADKAR model focuses on five actions and outcomes necessary for successful individual change, and therefore successful organisational change. In order for change to be effective, individuals need:

Knowledge and practice of mindfulness, together with some basic knowledge of how the brain works, on the part of both the leader and employees makes this model even more effective. In the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, father of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), ‘You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.’

Try these tips to make dealing with change less challenging:

Creating Strategies that Allow the Organisation to Flourish

In order to keep pace with change, you need to adapt your strategies. If you want to get ahead of change, a more strategic approach is needed. You have to anticipate trends and proactively define new and innovative ways to move forward. In order to do so, you must be agile and authentic.

Agility is now an essential leadership skill. The increasing speed of change demands that organisations need to become more nimble and flexible. Your ability to spot change on the horizon, anticipate what may happen next and develop strategies in advance is vital.

Authenticity is another essential skill in times of volatile, unpredictable change. Your ability to create clarity by describing your vision and painting a picture of the future is more important than ever. You need to be able to lead with confidence and have the courage to take a stand. You need to build trust and confidence within your teams and be genuine in your communications. Change tends to cause anxiety and confusion. Your role as a leader is to bring a level of certainty about the new direction and evoke a sense of purpose for your staff.

Identifying organisational culture

If you really want to make radical changes to the way your organisation operates, you need to gain a good understanding of its culture.

What’s your culture?

There are many tools and models available to help you identify the characteristics of your organisation’s culture.

You might wish to use ‘cultural dimensions’, a framework for cross-cultural communication pioneered by Geert Hofstede and discussed practically in ‘Riding the Waves of Culture’ by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. Alternatively, you might wish to consider the ‘Cultural Web’, a tool to help align your organisation’s culture with strategy, developed by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes in 1992.

An alternative way to work on cultural change is to identify sub-cultures that may exist within an organisation and investigate why they may find it difficult to inter-relate. Rapid and constant change has a huge impact on organisational culture and can result in a non-culture, which is a kind of vacuum left where a cohesive culture used to exist. This vacuum needs to be filled with a new collective coherence.

Mindfulness, as you know, helps you to step into the present moment and see what’s really going on. This ability is useful when seeking to identify sub-cultures. You need to map the sub-cultures that exist and how these relate to each other. For example, manufacturing may have a completely different sub-culture to finance. Once identified, take time to celebrate the sub-cultures and encourage them to flourish. The idea behind this move is that you bring them out into the open and thus have a better chance of understanding what you’re dealing with. Trying to make a sub-culture comply with a corporate ideal often pushes it further underground, which makes it impossible to change. Giving people a unique sub-culture that they can be proud of often encourages that sub-culture to move closer to corporate intent.

Where a weak and dysfunctional sub-culture exists, try to give it a helping hand. Weak sub-cultures can seriously undermine organisational cohesion. Identify why confidence has been lost and help the business area add value to the organisation again.

The final stage of the process involves weaving together the diverse sub-cultures. By getting members of staff from different cultures working together on areas of common purpose, more areas of shared beliefs emerge. The shared cultural beliefs encourage sub-cultures to bond and form a web of shared beliefs. These webs can become strong, and equally as effective as the tightly woven, singular company culture of the past.

Remember that cultural change initiatives take time to embed — no quick fixes exist. As a leader, getting to grips with organisational culture can be the deciding factor between a strategy’s or change initiative’s success and failure. Ignore organisational culture at your peril! Be mindful that not all organisational cultures may be to your liking. Unless they’re seriously detrimental to the organisation, you need to let go of your personal feelings on the matter and spend your energy on getting the different sub-cultures to work together and establish more areas of common ground.

Mindfully discovering common ground

Most researchers believe human beings are more hardwired to cooperate than to compete. Gather together workers from different sub-cultures to work together on areas of common ground. Start the meeting with a three-step focus break (refer to Chapter 4), explaining that participants will be working together for the next few hours, you want them to gain the most from this time and that this technique helps them clear their minds and enables them to do so. Get each participant to write down five things they feel need work — each written on a different piece of paper. Gather the pieces of paper and group them into themes and areas of commonality. These areas of common ground are the things to work on first.

Creating a collective vision for the future

Large organisations generally spend a considerable amount of time and effort on developing organisational visions. Branding and communication experts are drafted in to help the top team define their vision for the future in a manner that will motivate staff and inspire belief, confidence and desire in customers. Smaller organisations sometimes suffer from having no vision, or a vision that is too wordy, difficult to remember and feels unachievable. Visions are intended to paint a vivid picture of the organisation and where it’s heading. Less is often more! You need to make your organisational visions memorable and inspiring, but also achievable.

Try using the following steps to help you develop a vision for the future.

Step 1: Centring and visioning.

Step 2: Identifying things you need to start, stop and continue doing.

Step 3: Checking your gut instinct and intuition.

This activity works well with a group. You can lead the mindfulness exercises and segue into and out of planning activities.

Developing strategies mindfully

Having defined a high-level vision, it’s time to develop a strategy to make it happen. You need to gather key information into one place and summarise it into an easy-to-read format.

You can use the model shown in Figure 10-1 as a discussion tool.

Consider conducting a SWOT analysis for each of the segments in the model from Figure 10-1, whereby you identify each segment’s:

You can take a mindful approach to this task as follows:

Stage 1: Getting ready.

Stage 2: Mindfully preparing for productivity.

Stage 3: Mindfully establishing the status quo.

Stage 4: Mindfully creating a new strategy.

Embedding new values and behaviours

Now that you have a clear idea of your organisation’s culture and vision and a clear strategy for the future, you need to make the plan a reality. The vision and strategy may call for staff to embrace new values, and almost certainly to adopt new behaviours.

Be mindful that old ways of working and behaving are likely to be deeply embedded, especially if they worked well in the past and people have enjoyed and been rewarded (by pay, recognition or a sense of achievement) for working in this way. Don’t expect staff to embrace your proposed changes with the same enthusiasm as you. For one thing, you have a head start. You’ve already started to rewire the way your brain thinks about working. As you’ve worked on creating the strategy, your brain has been busily storing new information and making new connections. You’re aware of all the factors that led you to create the new strategy, but your team are not.

When you’re driving change you’re likely to embrace it more quickly, even if you’re not wildly enthusiastic about what it involves. Asking people to do things differently can generate all sorts of mental conflicts for them — many of which they may be completely unaware of. If accepted, new ways of doing things are eventually stored by the brain as habits, and these habits in time become more dominant than the work habit circuitry that they’re currently using. The process of habit formation can be really slow. The more opportunities that you can create to explore and practise new ways of working, the stronger the brain’s neural pathways (circuitry) become.

For some people, the perceived threat of the new way of working may prove too great and they default to old ways of thinking and behaving. Be mindful that they may not be defaulting on purpose as an act of anarchy; they may be largely unaware of how their thoughts, emotions and habits are driving their behaviour.

Mindfulness can be invaluable when you’re trying to embed new values and behaviours. It helps you to develop awareness of your hidden mental world. It helps you develop the skill to observe your thoughts, emotions and bodily responses. By developing this awareness, you’re able to choose a wise response. As a leader, being able to respond to people and situations mindfully helps you manage yourself better when driving through difficult changes. Mindfulness can help you manage your wellbeing and deal with any personal difficulties or inner conflicts that arise. In addition, you’ll be better able to observe when your team members are struggling and can then help them work better with their mind.

In times of change and uncertainty, be kind to yourself and your colleagues. As Chapter 4 describes, self-kindness can help you switch off your fight-or-flight response, making it easier to see things clearly and concentrate.

Remember that how you feel about things is likely to have an impact on your behaviour to others. Your behaviour is likely to have an impact on how others feel, which has an impact on how they behave. By acting as a mindful role model, you make things easier for those around you, and you’re likely to feel better too.

If you offer mindfulness training to your staff, it probably won’t make an unwelcome change any more palatable. What it can do is help them to become more aware of what’s going on in their mental landscape. This awareness gives them the opportunity to bring to the surface thoughts and behaviours that are making them unhappy, stressed or fearful. Knowledge of what’s going on in their minds allows them to take control of the situation. They can decide what to do next and focus their energy accordingly.

Creating a More Mindful Organisation

Introducing mindfulness into your organisation can lead to many benefits. Not only is mindfulness likely to improve employees’ wellbeing, it may also make them more productive and creative. But does such a thing as a ‘mindful organisation’ actually exist?

In the 1990s, the concept of the ‘learning organisation’ was popular. The idea was that an organisation would facilitate information sharing and learning for all members of staff and in this way continuously transform itself. Knowledge management systems were put in place to capture information and share it, and knowledge managers appointed to oversee the whole thing. The problem was that no one really knew what a ‘learning organisation’ looked like, so it was virtually impossible for organisations to know when they had metamorphosed into this mythical beast. While the idea was good, it became a never-ending journey — rather like that experienced by the crew in Star Trek — boldly going where no organisation had gone before … with no clear final destination.

The idea of becoming ‘a mindful organisation’ may fall into the same trap. You will probably find it easier and more meaningful to focus on incubating pockets of mindfulness within your organisation. Create spaces for staff to go and spend a few minutes in silence to refocus their efforts, and give staff permission to go to this place for short periods when they need to. Let mindfulness evolve within your organisation, and leave the future to sort itself out. Who knows? In a few years’ time many aspects of your organisation may be transformed by mindfulness, but it’s best to start with the present moment.

Looking beyond the bottom line is good for the bottom line

Research evidence suggests that mindfulness is likely to be good for your bottom line. Here are a few facts to consider:

The return on investment (ROI) of mindfulness

Little research evidence suggests that spending on personal effectiveness courses or many of the generic ‘interpersonal’ skills training actually has any impact on a company’s bottom line. In contrast, a significant volume of research demonstrates that mindfulness does improve a wide range of desirable work skills such as relationships with colleagues and customers, focus and concentration, strategic thinking, decision-making, and overall resilience. It can also increase staff engagement and productivity.

Setting the sums aside (although the bottom line is important) sometimes by looking beyond it and caring for your employees’ wellbeing and making the workplace a great place to be, you gain greater commitment and buy-in from your staff. Measuring the value of staff commitment and wellbeing is clearly impossible, but it can’t fail to produce a positive impact all round.

Mindfully improving employee engagement and retention

‘Engaged employees’ are fully involved in and enthusiastic about their work. This engagement motivates them to work in harmony with their organisation. An employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and the organisation as a whole is important. Employee engagement is distinctively different from employee satisfaction, motivation and organisational culture.

Mindfulness can improve employee engagement and retention. Practising mindfulness leads to improved work engagement because it elicits positive emotions and improves psychological functioning.

Mindfully engaging staff

If your company runs an annual staff survey that includes questions relating to employee engagement, you could use these questions as a baseline. Try running a mindfulness pilot (refer to Chapter 8) with the full support of the senior management team and line managers, and compare current responses to those of previous years. You may be surprised at the positivity expressed by staff who have completed the mindfulness course compared with the attitudes of colleagues who didn’t attend.

Creating the right work-life balance for all employees

As this book repeatedly stresses, working long hours doesn’t increase your productivity, it usually decreases it. The same is true for staff members. Some organisations develop a working culture in which long hours are the norm. Employees feel that they need to be seen to be in the office for more hours than they’re paid in order to fit in. Emails are often sent late at night, making other employees feel that they’re in some way deficient because they’re not working at that hour. In a similar way, some organisations expect staff to be in instant contact outside normal working hours.

As a leader, you have the power to support working practices that promote a healthy balance between people’s personal and working lives.

Mindfully balancing life and work

Constant connectivity is bad for performance. Try introducing ‘no contact times’ and encourage staff to switch off their mobile devices when away from work. Keep an eye on the times that you and other senior managers send emails. If the working style that best suits you involves rest and relaxation after normal working hours and then a little time working in peace late in the evening or first thing in the morning, set your emails to send in normal working hours (you can easily set this system up). By doing so, you’re not sending the message to others that they too have to be working late at night or early in the morning.

As Chapter 11 covers, lack of control over workload or working methods can be a major source of stress. Where possible, encourage workers to work in a manner that suits them. Encourage individuality, as long as core work hours are covered, work gets done and targets are met.

Offer staff mindfulness training to examine objectively their current work-life balance and to establish a way of working that is more nourishing and rewarding for them personally.

Offer staff a ‘quiet room’ to go to when they need 10 minutes of silence to regain their sense of balance and improve their productivity. Doing so sends a positive message to staff that their need for a few minutes of quiet mindfulness is recognised; providing this area is so much better than employees sneaking off to store cupboards or toilet cubicles.

Mindfulness can transform both your own and your employees’ perception of change and how to manage it. Fortunately, your organisation can become more mindful while still keeping a keen eye on the bottom line. Introducing mindful work practices into your organisation can be difficult when you occupy a junior role, but as a leader you can use your power and influence to change things for the better. You can choose to continue leading as you always have, or start to model some mindful behaviour and start a quiet revolution. You have the power — the choice is yours.