Gerry Randall in LO11087 shared his perspective on generating change in
senior managers in response to a question of approach. He said, in part:
> Years of trying to inculcate the skill of bringing about
> organisational change in senior managers, which it what it is, has
> lead me to a very simple view about where you start with them. It is
> training them, with the use of role plays and tutors, in how to ask
> open and probing questions, and training them out of the use of
> leading questions! (snip)
and then goes on to state the obvious -- to this they resist. Of course,
because "Nobody ever washes a rental car."
We've found another approach that doesn't involve the dreaded Role Plays
works well and that is to make Top Managers the trainers or facilitators.
The key to impact, or at least one of them I think, is to stop their
tendency to tell rather than involve; there seems to be this
self-fulfilling belief that they, as Leaders, need to know the answers.
A reality, methinks, is that these top people tend to get VERY isolated
from the realities of the day-in, day-out job so that they actually lose
touch with what is happening. This puts them in an uncomfortable
situation that they either avoid or "expert." Neither of these obviously
gathers any new data for them.
So, over the past 5 years, we've moved more and more toward "training"
them to use cartoons and lead discussions, transferring ownership ideas to
the groups through participative involvement and generating "sweat equity"
involvement in the program for themselves. If the materials are solid and
relatively bombproof, there is little perceived downside risk on their
part and a solid, tangible benefit to them. And if they lead the
sessions, one can expect their subordinates to also lead sessions with
their people, cascading the approach.
Looking back on almost 20 years of consulting, the greatest successes
occurred when others owned the process and the results; the greatest
failures occurred when the effort was called, "Scott's Program." Geting
senior managers to own the process and be directly involved is critical.
Now, we use cartoons (which make it hard to lecture) and teach an approach
to aid managers in generating active involvement with the learning process
and for generating ideas for improvement and change. What seems almost
comical is the number of "traditional trainers" that don't seem to
understand why the shift works,
For the Fun of It!
--Scott Simmerman Performance Management Company, 3 Old Oak Drive, Taylors SC USA 29687-6624 74170.1061@compuserve.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>