Engine For Change

You are the engine for change.

Don’t look to your co-workers, your fellow volunteers, your boss or anyone else.

You must choose the change for yourself first.

Are willing to do that?

If you are willing to choose the change for yourself and become the engine for change, then the first thing you must learn is how to work this engine you’ve started.  Learning how is a very personal experience.  You must know your strengths and your weaknesses, what energizes you and what drains you, what fills you with joy and what drives you up the wall.

Then you must learn how to help others discover those same things in themselves and you must understand how you can provide opportunities for them to feel those joyful, energizing feelings.

This week I got an e-mail that said something like, “Thank you for re-energizing me.”  She’d actually re-energized herself.  I just knew how to give her the opportunity to feel that energy again.

Start with yourself, then practice with others.  How do you start?  Some of those details are found at this blog; most aren’t. You may have to break a path all your own.

This is your journey.

You’re the engine.

It’s all…YOU!

[Sorry to those of you who came looking Thursday night/Friday morning for a post.  I took a much needed rest Thursday night.  All is well now.]

Here’s a tip for dealing with the frustration that often comes with prolonged stretches of driving change:

Allow yourself to say, “I don’t know.”

When you’re driving change, you’ll often be asked very hard questions about what will happen in a specific area because of your change.  It’s okay to say, “I don’t know that right now, but I’ll figure that out and get back to you.”

When you’re driving change, as you’re tossing around the ideas in your head wondering which is best to tackle first, it’s okay to let yourself off the hook for the day with an “I don’t know right now, but I’ll choose tomorrow.”

When you’re driving change, and you want the world/organization/work group to change faster, you may ask yourself, “When will this ever get better?” It’s okay to say “I don’t know, but I’ll keep trying.”

Say, “I don’t know,” and keep driving change.

Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark

Our coming and look brighter when we come.”

-Lord Byron, “Don Juan”

If I were to step into a room where you were briefing a new change, I could tell in an instant whether you were driving change or driving people to change.

Remember, driving change means choosing a change for yourself and clearing the obstacles for others to internally choose the change too.  Driving people to change means you are using some coercion (e.g., orders, fear of negative consequences, removal of positive consequences) to externally compel someone to change.

I could tell in an instant because I’d be able to see the difference on the faces of your audience.   If you’re driving people to change, here’s what I’d see:

As I pan the room, no eyes meet mine;’ the audience is staring at the floor or at their shoes. They slump their shoulders, tap their pens and mutter to themselves, wholly disconnected from your message.  If anyone in the room is attentive, I can reasonably guess that he’ll be the one soon asking you the terrible, leading question of, “When will you have enough data to decide this change is a failure?”

Contrast that audience to the one I’d find if you were driving change:

As I pan the room, no eyes meet mine because they are all focused on you as you lay out the next stage of the change.  Many people are leaned into the conference table, their elbows resting on the tabletop, their heads nodding as you tick off the steps toward implementation.  A few people are feverishly writing notes.  Questions and comments come rapidly, with the guy in the corner piling on with, “I’ve seen this work before and I know we can do this.  This is going to be fun.” [Yes, I actually heard a comment just like that in a meeting recently.]

You can see from these two scenarios the obvious difference driving change makes over driving people to change.  Why would the difference be so great?  Because people look fondly upon those who provide them happy opportunities.  Driving change is all about bringing people the opportunity to be, to do, to become something more.  Driving people to change is all about making people be someone else, someplace else doing something else.  It shouldn’t be surprising that people prefer more of themselves to forcibly less of themselves.

Drive change and eyes will look brighter when you come.

Note: If you’re new to Engine for Change, review the important details of driving change at these posts.

Insiders: If you’ve got a great example of how a driving change meeting looks, add your observations in the comments.