Leadership - the space to fail?

In my previous leadership experience, one thing I struggled with was: how do you develop people - allowing them space to fail and learn and grow but at the same time not jeopardise your project / client / funding ? Where do you draw the line? Where do you allow space for failure so that your ‘mentee’ can learn and where do you act with the sustainability of your organisation in mind?

At the previous employer I worked for I was an External Relations Manager, in charge of a department of seven people and of a project that brought in 70% of the annual budget of our organization. Moreover, on the success of this project depended the future budget over the coming years as well.

One of the people in my department I was mentoring was elected the leader of this project. The crucial element for the success of the project was excellent marketing: attracting the right audience and footfall to the event and meeting the KPIs according to the sponsors. My mentee’s key challenge was to motivate volunteers to get them to recruit the right number and type of people to attend the event.

At the beginning of the project I was very nervous about this person’s performance- it was clear to me that he was failing. His planning was not good, he was not keeping volunteers motivated and as a result, the project was suffering. I wanted to step in all the time and I couldn’t let go of the way I normally dealt with things. I kept thinking that if I did things myself it would be easier, faster and better. I had to keep myself from taking charge all the time.

In the end I decided that I had to sit back and give him space to lead and fail. I made myself a ‘Servant Leader’ (as Stephen Covey describes the concept in his works) and waited for him to call upon my help. When he finally did, he wanted me on the ground, with the volunteers. I called in the rest of the experienced team and created a fun, friendly competition to pull in the audience.

The result of the project was not the best we ever had, but the project leader’s self esteem was intact, the team pulled together to achieve the impossible so they were motivated and the funders was happy as the project came within the KPIs of the contract.

The reason why I am thinking of this now is because I am now in the mentee position. It’ s my turn to be coached to step into the next role- the shoe is on the other foot. I am now the one scared to fail and disappoint.

One of the leaders I admire said to me: “Fail early and fail a lot so that you can learn quickly, adapt to a new environment and evolve fast”. So I find myself asking now- in order to learn quickly and gain experience: is failure an option? Will people still support me if I fail? Can I recover from it? Or as Noam put it on a recent 'Raid' session: How can I learn to fail better?

C

Change - how often do you get to write the story?

I was reading an article from the McKinsey Quarterly on change management which was discussing how despite the huge amounts of work done on understanding and implementing change programmes, only a 1/3 of them were successful.

This struck me as a very low percentage given how much expertise and resource has been dedicated to change management in theoretical and practical terms. In the article it’s argued that there are 4 basic areas that need to be considered to make change successful, there needs to be: a compelling story, role modelling, reinforcing mechanisms, and capacity building.

They go onto talk through these 4 points arguing that there needs to be a re-evaluation of them, they aren’t wrong per se but the thinking within these areas needs to be reflected upon. The piece that really stuck for me was with regards the compelling story, as they argue that often the story is of the change manager and not of the employees, what motivates them will not necessarily motivate the employees.

A famous behavioural experiment was undertaken using lottery tickets. Half the group were given random “Lucky Dip” tickets and the other half were asked to choose their numbers. They were about to draw the winning numbers (cue images of a minor celebrity starting the National Lottery draw), when they offered to buy back the tickets. They found that regardless of geographical or demographic matters, those that chose their numbers had to be offered 5 times as much to sell them than those who had a Lucky Dip.

So what?

This suggests that when you chose yourselves you are much more committed to the outcome.
What does this mean for change management?

That to succeed you need those involved and affected by the change to play a part in creating the compelling story, and to own the change through investing their time, thoughts and energies in it.

This really resonated with me with change I am going through, in terms of making sure that everyone involved is writing the story, which in turn, fingers and toes crossed, will make it an effective and smooth transition.

I have heard a lot of people's personal experiences of change, and it's often said that the issue with the change is that is has been implemented from the top to the bottom, and that it doesn't resonate with anyone apart from those that designed it. Poor communication of the compelling story doesn't help either, but would the dissonance be lessened if they had let others write the story?

How often do you get to write the story? How often are you involved in the change? How often are your motivations taken into account?

A

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14545157/The-McKinsey-QuarterlyThe-irrational-side-of-change-management