David Rigby, Author at Smart Coaching and Training | Business Support, Consultancy, Mentoring

23/11/2013 By David Rigby

The wolf in sheeps clothing: the ‘soft’ side of change is really the ‘hard’ side

While it is sometimes called the “soft” side of change, managing the people side of a change is often the most challenging and critical component of an organizational transformation. But, it is getting people on board and participating in the change that will make the difference. Individuals will have to do their jobs differently, and it is the degree to which they change their behaviours and work processes that will make or break the merger or acquisition. The “soft” side of change is many times actually the “harder” side of change. Change management is taking care of the people side of change. It does little good to create a new organization, design new work processes or implement new technologies if you leave the people behind. Financial success of these changes will be more dependent on how individuals in the organization embrace the change than how well you draw organization charts or process diagrams.

Change management is the process, tools and techniques to manage the people-side of change to achieve the required business outcomes It is the systematic management of employee engagement and adoption when the organization changes how work will be done. Ultimately, change management focuses on how to help employees embrace, adopt and utilize a change in their day-to-day work.

Change management is both a process and a competency.

· From a process perspective, it is the set of steps followed by a team member on a particular project or initiative. For the given transformational effort, it is the strategy and set of plans focused on moving people through the change. Preparing for change (where readiness assessments help guide the formulation of a strategy), Managing change (where five change management plans are created and integrated into the project plan) and Reinforcing change (where compliance is audited and mechanisms are deployed to cement the change).

· From a competency perspective, it is a leader or manager’s ability to “effectively lead my people through change.” The notion of a leadership competency is universal, but what that competency entails depends on a person’s relationship to change. While the competency varies based on one’s relationship to change, organizations are more effective and successful when they build change management competencies throughout their ranks.

Change management is not just communication or training. It is not just managing hardware or software versions (although it has been used in this context). It is not just managing resistance. Effective change management follows a structured process and uses a holistic set of tools to drive successful individual and organizational change.

There are numerous reasons to employ effective change management on both large and small scale efforts. Here, three main cases for change management are made.

1. Organizational change happens one person at a time

2. Poorly managing change has costs

3. Effective change management increases the likelihood of success

1. Organizational change happens one person at a time: It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking about change exclusively from an organizational perspective. However, organizational change of any kind actually occurs one person at a time. Success of an organization effort only occurs when each individual does their jobs differently. Organizations don’t change – people within organizations change. It is the cumulative impact of successful individual change that results in an organizational change being successful.

2. Poorly managing change has costs: There are countless consequences of ignoring the people side of a change. Productivity declines become much larger and longer in duration than they could have been. Managers are unwilling to devote the time or resources needed to support the change.. In some cases, the project itself is completely abandoned after large investments of capital and time. All of these consequences have tangible and real financial impact on the health of the organization and the project.

3. Effective change management increases the likelihood of success: There is a growing body of data that shows the impact that effective change management has on the probability that a project meets its objectives. Research shows that projects with excellent change management were six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. A 2002 McKinsey Quarterly article by LaClair and Rao found that projects with excellent change management delivered 143% of the expected Return on Investment, while those with poor change management delivered only 35% of expected ROI. Regardless of the change at hand – focusing on the people side of change increases the likelihood of being successful.

Effectively managing change requires two perspectives: an individual perspective and an organizational perspective.

The individual perspective is an understanding of how people experience change. Change is successful, when an individual has:

Awareness of the need for change
Desire to participate and support the change
Knowledge on how to change
Ability to implement required skills and behaviours
Reinforcement to sustain the change.

If an individual is missing any of the five building blocks, then the change will not be successful. The goal, then, in leading the people side of change is ensuring that individuals have Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement

While the change management resource on a project can work to develop the strategy and plans, much of the work of change management is done by senior leaders, managers and supervisors throughout the organization. Benchmarking data shows that in times of change, employees have two preferred senders of change messages: someone at the top of their organization and the person they report to. Change management practitioners are enablers of these employee-facing roles. And, in times of change, it is the effectiveness of senior leaders as sponsors of change, and of managers and supervisors as coaches of change that will determine if a project succeeds or fails.

So what can you do to become a more effective change leader? The bottom line is this: begin applying change management on your projects and begin building change management competencies in your organization. These are the first steps to ensuring projects deliver their intended results by taking care of the people side of change.

The people side of change is not the “soft” side of change; in reality it is the “harder” side of change. Investing the time and energy to manage the people side of your organizational efforts pays off in the end – in terms of success of the effort and avoidance of the numerous costs that plague poorly managed change.

23/11/2013 By David Rigby

Five essential attributes of excellent CEOs

There are many different views as to which attributes are essential to be an excellent CEO. Take a moment out from your busy urgent day-to-day business and consider some issues which are important for business leaders, issues which others rarely – or dare not – ask them, and that with the pressure of business, they may not often askthemselves: Awareness, Vision, Imagination, Responsibility, and Action.

Question yourself

Do I really know what is happening within my organisation, and outside? Can I make sense of it?
What is the extent and limit of my responsibility? Am I responsible for the common good?
Is this the right thing to do, and is there an alternative to the corporate governance model I am used to?
Who will I be in the next decade or two?

Working in organised facilitated groups with your peers and away from your day to day colleagues is a great way to find help from outside. Working with a coach is another way to help you find the inner recourses to help you face the challenges. This is not just about your business, this is about YOU.

You need to

Expand insight into the challenges responsible business leader and enterprises are likely to face in the future and leave with a point of view
Stimulate and reinvigorate your identity
Develop a vision to change your game

Consider these topics and ask yourself what you already know

Awareness

Follow the path from the outside world of the corporation to the inner world of the top executive

How others view what a top executive’s job is today, or what your job is
Leadership in uncertain times
Assessing one’s own top management paradigm

Managing contention, short-term changes vs long-term transformation: top-level practices

Vision

Visualise tomorrow’s managers, organisations and global economy

Alternative models of the business-society interface
The global corporation and its critics: coping with critics from outside and developing a dialogue integrated into strategic logics
Investing another world vision, another paradigm and imagining its implications
Corporate governance and its future

Imagination

Be bold and creative but selective

The role of imagination in strategic thinking
Size of pie and not only share of pie
Beyond confrontation: learning from our contradictions, managing “dualities”
Alternative competitive logics

Responsibility

Redefine what it means to be a CEO (different CEO vs. better CEO)

Delivering high performance
Developing organisational capital and executive talent
Accountability and responsibility – where to start and where to stop?
The corporation and the common good: implications for corporate leaders

Action

Commit to the discipline to act

The implementation challenge
Re-invention and the relevance of ‘practical’ theories for action
Articulating commitment and engaging with coaches for follow-through

Rather than simply attending a classroom based course, take a series of structured workshops challenging alternative answers through a variety of interactive methods including: roundtable discussions, team work, panel discussions and interpersonal peer exchanges, or for more intensity use 1-1 coaching to increase your executives’ capacity to master the complexity of the CEO’s job in the context of an ever-changing global environment. Ask us for more details

17/11/2013 By David Rigby

Test your Emotional Intelligence

Test your Emotional Intelligence
Take our Emotional Intelligence Test below by marking yourself out of 10 for each of the 16 statements.
For statements 1-10 mark yourself up to 10 if you think you are good at this
For statements 11-16 mark yourself up to 10 if you fall in the middle veering to 0 if you are at the extremes.
If you scored less than 100 perhaps you could benefit from some coaching from our Confidence and Positive Psychology coaches – even more relevant in Business than in your private live.
Emotional Intelligence Test
It is hard to develop Emotional Intelligence (EQ) if you do not value yourself and others. These Core attitudes underpin development in all aspects of Emotional Intelligence.

Regard
1. Self Regard: The degree to which you accept and value yourself
2. Regard for others: The degree to which you accept and value others as people, as distinct from liking or approving what they may do
Relative Regard: this compares your Self regard with your Regard for others and reveals the degree to which you value yourself more or less than you value others.

Awareness
Self and other awareness are the foundation to developing Emotional Intelligence. Our feelings tell us what we want, like and need, and what we perceive of others feelings lets us know what they want and need
3. Self Awareness: The degree to which you are in touch with your body, your feeling and your intuitions
4. Awareness of others: the degree to which you are in touch with the felling states of others

Self Management
This is about how effectively you manage yourself
5. Emotional resilience: The degree to which you are able to pick yourself up and bounce back when things go badly for you
6. Personal Power: The degree to which you are in charge and take sole responsibility for your outcomes in life
7. Goal Directedness: The degree to which you relate your behaviour to long term goals
8. Flexibility: The degree to which you feel free to adapt your thinking and your behaviour to match the changing situations of life
9. Personal connectedness: The extent and ease with which you are able to make significant connections with other people by sharing yourself with them
10. Invitation to trust: The degree to which you invite the trust of others by being principled, reliable, consistent and known.
Relationship Management
This reflects your patterns of behaviour and how well you relate to others. With these it is possible to have ‘too much’ as well as ‘too little’ Emotional Intelligence. For example, feelings which burst out uncontrollably (too little control) are often the results of bottling feeling up (too much control). The emotionally intelligent position is to be high in the middle of the scale
11. Trust: Your tendency to trust others (mistrustful/Carefully trusting/over trusting)
12. Balanced outlook: How well you manage balance optimism with realism (Pessimistic/Realistically optimistic/Over optimistic)
13. Emotional expression and control: The degree to which you are emotionally controlled. (Under controlled/Free and in charge/Over controlled
14. Conflict Handling: How well you handle conflict: how assertive you are (Passive/Assertive/Aggressive)
15. Interdependence: How well you manage to balance taking yourself and taking others into account, and work well with other people. (dependent/interdependent/over dependent)
16. Reflective Learning: The degree to which you enhance your Emotional Intelligence by reflecting on what you and others fell, think and do, noting the outcomes these produce, and altering your patterns as necessary

17/11/2013 By David Rigby

People Like Us – Networking

People like us …… by David Rigby

SCT director David Rigby will be addressing the Ignite group on Nov 27^th 2013 in Bristol on the topic of networking called ‘People Like Us’. As it is fully booked here is thegist of the presentation

When you walk into a room of strangers, whether at a party or a networking event, who do you seek out to talk too? Do you take the PLU approach (‘people like us’ used by Lady Astor in the 1920s) and approach those who look like you, dress like you and hopefully have the same views as you?

Or do you take clues from the words people use to classify into a U and non-U to distinguish between the upper and middle classes. A term invented by Alan S C Ross professor of linguistics in 1954 and taken up by Nancy Mitford

Do you choose the best looking or most attractive people in the room to talk to – hoping they will talk to you?

Or are you prepared to talk to anyone who doesn’t fit the above? How do you feel about talking to the non PLU’s – people outside the group you feel most comfortable with? It’s much more of a challenge.

The case for diversity

We all know that everyone is unique – even though people have things in common with each other they are also different in all sorts of ways. Differences include visible and non-visible factors, for example, personal characteristics such as background, culture, personality, and work-style, size, accent, language.

Some of these are covered by discrimination law to protect against being treated unfairly – things like race, disability, sexual orientation, age,gender reassignment, sex, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion and belief.

Managing diversity is valuing everyone as an individual – valuing people as employees, customers and clients. Even within a narrow band people have different needs, and so even people who appear to be in the same group within a PLU have different needs, values and beliefs. Equally individuals within different ‘diversity groups’ may have many characteristics in common.

Equal opportunities?

It is important to recognise that a ‘one-size-fits all’ approach to managing people does not achieve fairness and equality of opportunity for everyone.

Equal opportunity is often seen as meaning treating everyone in exactly the same way. But to provide real equality of opportunity, people need to be treated differently in ways that are fair and tailored to their needs but in ways that are aligned to business needs and objectives.

There are three main strands to the business case for going beyond what is required by legislation: people issues, market competitiveness, and corporate reputation.

The law is there to enforce diversity, but the most successful organisations embrace diversity as a means of best utilising skills from different groups, if nothing else as a means of reaching out to those groups.

Equally, having worked in 17 countries I have learnt to combine the accepted wisdoms of national characteristics with treating people as individuals. I have always sought to broaden my experiences and know how to do so. But I still have to ‘catch myself’ for avoiding particular groups.

But what about you? Next time you go to party or networking – will it be more PLUs or the excitement of gaining new experiences and friends? You may recognise that while you may be scared of meeting complete strangers they could equally be scared of meeting you.

Our coaches can help you rise to the challenge to make life more exciting and rewarding and lead to opportunities you never dreamed possible.

19/12/2011 By David Rigby

Swindon Coaching Team: Swindon Coaching Team on the Radio again

Among the topics we discussed was the differences between customer service in the UAE and UK. I believe a key difference is job security. In the UAE jobs and visas last very little time and it is difficult to change jobs. And its not in job descriptions to ‘go the extra mile’ and delegation is not encouraged. Customer service is ‘following the rules’ .

From personal experience it required (non forthcoming) authorisation to give me the additional £50 it had cost me to get a battery replaced, together with three visits to the hire company, the cost of my and their time far outweighed the amounts disputed. This happened time and time again.
When a hotel receptionist mischarged me for my room, her fear for her job was palpable, and I spent most of my time reassuring her that we all make mistakes and that she would be OK.
A good way to judge any organisation is how it rectifies mistakes. With increasing job insecurity in the UK, the same reactions are likely to happen here, unless management takes retains its positive approach to delegation and acknowledges that we all make mistakes. Not in keeping with the 6 sigma brigade I know – so “let he who is without sin, cast the first stone”.

The wolf in sheeps clothing: the ‘soft’ side of change is really the ‘hard’ side

Five essential attributes of excellent CEOs

Test your Emotional Intelligence

People Like Us – Networking

Swindon Coaching Team: Swindon Coaching Team on the Radio again

Contact Info

Recent Featured Posts click on pic to see title and connect to article

They say it’s your birthday

How I discovered Meaning and Purpose

Social Media

We mostly post to David Rigby’s Linked In and Facebook

Instagram

Facebook