All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Making change happen is easy. Making the change that happens the one you want is quite a bit more difficult.

But first a tangent … not much of a tangent, but a tangent nonetheless … meat. And not just any meat. Unicorn meat, as discussed by a fascinating piece in The Atlantic (“Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat,” Annie Lowrey, 7/9/2023).

I say fascinating, not because it’s particularly surprising, but because it lays out all of the complexities those who want us to substitute non-meat meat for meat in our collective diets have to contend with.

The core message: Such a substitution would be better for both the planet’s and our personal health, but promoting it on the basis of its planetary and personal health advantages is a non-starter.

Want people to eat non-meat meat? Make non-meat meat whose taste and texture are indistinguishable from meat, or, even better, more enjoyable (unicorn meat).

This is why the Impossible Burger has been more successful than the black bean patties that preceded it.

Which gets us back to what intentional organizational change takes and why too many leaders fail at it. And so, here are a few tips, and anti-tips if there is such a thing, business leaders leading a change should keep in mind:

Insist that “It’s really very simple.” No, it isn’t. I don’t even know what you’re trying to accomplish, but if it’s an important change in how your organization does something, it isn’t simple, any more than creating a recipe for non-meat meat and then scaling that recipe up to factory-scale production is simple.

The closest to simplicity you can come is agility. Which is to say, there’s no such thing as a perfect spec. What there is instead is a well-managed backlog – an iterative and incremental list of change ingredients whose priorities are set based on the law of diminishing returns.

“What do you mean, ‘persuade’?” Like the dark side of the Force, there’s something seductive about authority and the power it confers. Far too many executives and managers figure that telling is better than persuading. And it is, if your definition of “better” is “requires less effort.”

So if you’re among those who prefers to rely on their authority to make things happen, keep in mind that power comes in five levels – change leaders can control, tell, persuade, influence, or be a victim.

Those whose habit is to control or tell turn those they control or tell into victims, defined as those who have no power. Wiser and more effective change leaders rely on their ability to persuade, and, should they lack sufficient authority for persuasion to work, to influence.

Bob’s last word: Which gets us to the meat of the issue: If you want to push a desirable change into your organization and don’t want your organization to push it back out, make sure you’ve defined the change so you can broadcast it, as the old joke goes, on the radio station every employee listens to on the way into work every day: WIIFM, which stands for “What’s In It For Me?”

Don’t, that is, design the change so it’s good for the organization and then try to figure out how to get employees to like it, or at least to not dislike it so much that they’re willing to sabotage it.

Design the change as something employees see as, first and foremost, something they’d want for themselves. Then and only then is the time to fiddle with it so it benefits the organization as a whole, too.

Make your change taste, that is, like unicorn meat.

Bob’s sales pitch: Want something book length on the subject? Check out Bare Bones Change Management and There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project.

They’re complementary takes on how to make intentional change happen.

Now on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: The ‘IT Business Office’: Doing IT’s admin work right.”

What it’s about is that you shouldn’t run IT like a business. And it’s about what you should do instead – how to run it in a businesslike way, by establishing an administrative group within IT to shoulder much of IT’s bureaucratic burden.

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|In: Organizational Design|Last Updated:

In my defense, I was much younger then, and maybe less skeptical about consultants’ recommendations.

Also in my defense, I lacked the political capital to challenge the idea anyway – it would have happened with or without me.

And, still in my defense, when I found myself, as a consultant, leading a client’s IT reorganization, I didn’t commit the same crime.

Which was having employees apply for the jobs they’d been doing since long before we came on the scene.

Let’s start by going back a step or two, to the difference between a reorganization and a restructuring. Sometimes, the difference is that “restructuring” sounds fancier than “reorganization.” Going for the snazzier word can be seductive, even when it’s at the expense of accuracy. With that in mind, a reorganization leaves the work intact, along with the workgroups that do it and who lives in each workgroup. What it changes is who reports to whom.

A restructuring, in contrast, changes how work gets done – it divvies it up into different pieces, and by extension, which workgroup does each piece.

Which gets us to IT: Except, perhaps, for shops transitioning from waterfall methodologies to one of the Agile variants, most of the work that has to get done in IT doesn’t lend itself to restructuring: programming, software quality assurance, systems administration and so on, don’t change in ways fundamental enough to change the job titles needed to get IT’s jobs done.

The buried lede

A correspondent related their situation: IT is “restructuring,” but really reorganizing, and everyone in it will have the “opportunity” (in scare quotes for obvious reasons) to apply for a job in the new organization.

In a true restructuring this might make sense. After all, if many of the jobs in an organization are going to change in fundamental ways it might not be obvious who should hold each of them.

But in a reorganization the jobs don’t change in fundamental ways. And if they don’t, IT’s leaders need to ask themselves a question that, once asked, is self-answering: Will asking employees to apply and compete for the jobs they currently hold be superior for figuring out who in the organization will be most likely to succeed in each of the jobs that aren’t going to change? Or is basing job assignments on the deep knowledge managers should have of how each IT employee currently performs more reliable?

Bob’s last word: If it isn’t already clear why having IT’s current employees apply for positions in the new org chart is inferior to appointing them, just ask yourself how good you are … how anyone is … in basing hiring decisions on how well each applicant interviews.

Depending on your source (mine is a study by Leadership IQ), about half of all new hires fail within a year and a half.

My advice: Slot employees to jobs based on what you know about what they are and aren’t good at, not on having them apply for internal jobs as if they’re unknown quantities.

Bob’s sales pitch: My friend Thomas Bertels and his co-author David Henkin have written an engaging business fable about how to improve the employee experience and, by improving it, how to make a business more effective and competitive.

It’s titled Fixing Work and does a fine job of focusing on the authors’ goal – connecting the dots that connect making how work gets done better for both employees and their employers.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The ‘IT Business Office’: Doing IT’s admin work right.” It’s a prosaic piece on how to handle IT administrivia.

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