Engine For Change

You’ll save yourself hours of effort and years of frustration if you publish minutes for all your team meetings.

Minutes include:

• Who attended
• What topics you discussed
• What decisions you made
• Who will take action (and by when)
• When you’ll meet again

[I like to use a standard format, with a fixed font and set of typical headers and footers, but I'm a detail freak for those sorts of things.]

Your minutes can be rough, can be fragments instead of sentences and can only be kept in a 3-ring binder in your office, but they are an invaluable record of your team’s work.

When you’re questioned, when you’re praise or when you’re ignored you’ll have your minutes to remind you, celebrate you and keep you claiming your forward momentum.

Don’t ignore your minutes.  Your hours invested are too important not to document.

…and I’m sticking to it.

This one is simple: Publish an agenda for every meeting and follow your agenda every time. Even if you include a portion in the agenda for open discussion/final thoughts/last nuggets, have an agenda!

You’ll think you don’t need an agenda because everyone knows the order of your meetings.

You’ll think you don’t need an agenda because you know how to control a meeting.

You do know your order and you can control a meeting, but you’ll get observably better results when you have an agenda.

Have an agenda. Publish it. Stick to it.  You’ll thank me later.

“They” won’t let us.

“They” tried that before.

“They” don’t care.

Whenever you hear someone use “they” you must ask,

Who’s “they”?

Usually “they” is an untested assumption that some group or some person may be against your change.

Once you know the group or person, by code or by name, you can call them up and ask them, “Can you support this change?”  I’m cheerfully shocked how often when calling and asking I get a “Yes” in response.

Don’t let “they” get in your way.

Ask “who?” and keep driving change.

Toyota paid out big money over their sticking accelerator pedal problem.

Turns out, according to initial reports, that the actual cause of the accidents was operator error.  It seems drivers thought they were hitting the brake when they were actually pushing the gas all the way to the floor.

While driving change I see the opposite, brake-for-gas confusion, all the time.

Our sticky pedal story starts with the perpetrators of the sticky pedal myth.  For today I’ll target as perpetrators an unnamed sum of Harvard Business Review article authors.  If you’re a leader who reads the Harvard Business Review you’d assume (because the article authors seem to all agree) that while the leader is pushing the gas for change, the employees have their feet firmly on the brake.   Consider the employees our sticky pedal.

Yet, just like the data recorders in those totaled Toyotas, if you could pull the data recorder on failed change efforts I bet you’d find a different story.

The work force is not the modern organization’s sticky pedal.  Instead, the organization’s leadership is introducing operator error, and causing terrible results.

Here’s the way our failed change story unfolds:

Leaders pour on the messages about the need to innovate, to save money or to do more with less.  It seems to all that their foot is on the gas and employees notice.

Next the employees act, often creating amazing, impressive change.

But, at the first hint that the change is getting out in front of the knowledge/control/interests of the leader (notice I didn’t say of the organization), the leader promptly, firmly, and seemingly with no regret slams on the brakes.

How will you know the brakes have been engaged (i.e., stomped, locked up)?

You’ll hear things like, “Who told you to do that?” or “Slow down or we’ll run out of work.” or the worst “Put it back the way it was.”

As a leader, you’re foot is on the gas when you are clearing the obstacles that stand in the employees’ way and when you are constantly feeding them reinforcement that they are moving in the direction you want at the pace you want (or even challenging them to go faster).  Leaders, you must be okay with speed before you start the engine, or you risk catastrophically engaging the brake.

Leaders, please keep straight which is the gas and which is the brake.

Your organization can’t afford to be totaled.