Change, Choice and Accountability
Change, Choice and Accountability: A Personal Story
I do a considerable amount of volunteer work with young adults and help them forge their life plans. Change is difficult. Young adulthood is a time of great transition. One of them has been having a great deal of difficulty with a family member who is struggling with a serious addiction problem and it has been going on for over 10 years. It is very hard for them. It has been very hard for me. I am no addiction specialist. The family continues to offer help and feels increasingly frustrated. Nothing they do makes a difference. This situation started me thinking about change, choice and accountability in the work place.
The Platoon Mentality
Change in the workplace should not be as difficult as the previous situation. Yet some things are starkly similar. Sometimes we are oblivious to change, we blame others, we make excuses and we wait and hope someone else will just take care of it and make it go away. Sometimes we accept change, we own it, we make things happen as a result of it. A number of years ago I was helping a large life sciences company work through their employee engagement survey results. An interesting story formed. There seemed to be little confidence in senior management, but absolute confidence in the immediate supervisor in a number of work groups. This organization was going through significant and constant change. After exhaustive analysis a story began to unfold. In my mind a sort of “platoon mentality” had developed. John Cole, an officer in the US Army had this to say about what he called the Lieutenant Paradox which I think well illuminates my point.
“The expectations of new lieutenants in the Army vary wildly. At one end of the spectrum, a lieutenant is responsible for everything their platoon does or fails to do. At the other end of the spectrum, a lieutenant can be viewed with suspicion and treated like a child — a man or a woman that retains lingering habits from their college years and has not yet realized the responsibilities of leading men and women into combat.
A new lieutenant, through their actions, can choose to meet one of those expectations, but not both. They rise to meet positive expectations and become a leader that men and women can rely on, or be a burden on subordinate NCO leadership and the chain of command.”
In the case of the workgroups above, the managers were in the trenches with their people and describing change as “something those people up there at the top are doing to us.” They were hunkered down rather than leading their group to execute. They were being victims of change. As engagement scores were reviewed, one might be inclined to say those managers receiving the highest scores were great leaders! However, if you also saw an inverse relationship to scores about top management or change agility in the same work group, it gave me cause to pause.
Change, Choice & Accountability
How does choice and accountability relate to change in the work place? If you think about someone climbing a ladder as representing change, do you see your role as a leader (or in the case of a co-dependent family member) as giving them a boost up the ladder? Do you see yourself at the top, already having arrived at the destination and you are reaching down to lift them up? Do you see them climbing on their own, but with you giving them a new rung to the ladder as they make the requisite effort to climb by themselves? William Bridges in his groundbreaking work around leading transitions stated that “change happens in an instant, but people transition to that change at their own pace.” In a nutshell, our people can choose whether to implement change, how fast to implement change and even help or inhibit others from changing. You might think of people during change as early adopters, skeptics and cynics. I have often seen these three profiles play out in my many years of leading and interpreting engagement survey results in organizations undergoing dramatic change.
The Right of Choice, the Responsibility of Choice and the Results of Choice
We all own the right of choice, the responsibility of choice and the results of choice. A well founded change effort will recognize that people are adults and they can choose. Our people also have the responsibility to choose. In my opinion there is no neutral or middle ground. The company lays out a vision for what needs to be done and there is a gap that must be overcome. There is an imperative. One firm I used to work with (Senn Delaney) laid out effectively how we choose to respond to change in what they called the Ladder of Accountability.
This now draws us into a discussion around the results of choice. As you look at each rung of the ladder, it is a choice as to how we respond to a change. We can also see there is a consequence to each rung in that in the “victim” area and in the “accountable” area. In the lower rungs we feel powerless whereas at the upper region we begin to feel powerful. The results of our choices can be summarized below. We can choose to be accountable or we can choose to be a victim.
Victim Accountable
Payoffs Prices Prices Payoffs
Sympathy No Control Admit Wrong Control
Not Wrong No Growth Look Imperfect Learn
No Risk No Respect Risk Grow
Attention Results Suffer Take Action to Fix Better Results
I believe that given the right tools, time, proper coaching and leadership most people will eventually get to the change. It is not easy and far too many executives are completely dismissive of the amount of effort it takes to really change something. A culture must be overwhelmed if it is to change. You cannot sneak up on it.