In This Issue

What’s New: Extreme Meetings® Sets A New Agenda
Upcoming Workshops
Effective Tips: Solar Motivation
Ask Tom: How does each Style respond to change?
Feedback

What’s New

Extreme Meetings® Sets A New Agenda

Companies from Microsoft to WaMu to Pepsico have discovered they can focus and engage their employees on key messages related to corporate changes, branding, mission and vision through the power of video. By applying their unique, high-impact communication strategies, Brian Walter and his Extreme Meetings ® team are stretching beyond their live action mega-meetings to develop original, compelling and even humorous corporate videos on topics ranging from employee benefits to sales.

These videos and other multi-media communication techniques raise the interest of employees in key topics and spur them to take action related to important organizational initiatives. The Extreme Meetings® team recently produced an entertaining informational film designed to build urgency and commitment for cross-selling in a Fortune 500 sales organization. It has made a quantifiable difference, as the company has seen a surge in cross-business unit leads and sales.

If you are looking for a high impact way to engage your employees, consider using Extreme Meeting® strategies to take your communications to the next level.

Upcoming Workshops

November 6-7 – People Skills
November 19 – People Skills (One-Day)
November 26-27 – The Leadership Challenge
December 11-12 – People Skills
December 18 – Leadership is Everyone’s Business
January 8-9 – People Skills
January 15 – Integrating Conflict
January 25 – Coaching for High Performance

All workshops are held at the Effectiveness Institute Conference Center, 2249 152nd Ave NE, Redmond, Washington, unless otherwise specified.

Effective Tips

Solar Motivation
By George Myers, Managing Partner, Effectiveness Institute

One of my favorite stories as a child was Aesop’s fable about a competition between the Wind and the Sun. The challenge between the two was to make a passing traveler take off his cloak. So the Wind went first and blew as hard as possible, but the traveler only clutched his cloak more tightly around himself. Then the Sun took a turn and shone with so much warmth that the traveler gladly took off his cloak.

It’s a simple little story, but it’s always inspired me whenever I think of trying to motivate others to change their behavior. One simple way to illustrate the truth of this story is to ask someone to hold up their hand in front of them, and then take your hand and push on theirs. Most of the time people will immediately push back, much like the reaction of the traveler to the efforts of the Wind. People naturally resist changing their behavior when they feel they are being forced to change.

The statistics about the success rate of organizational change efforts are rather dismal, which leads me to wonder how much of our change management practices are more like the Wind and less like the Sun. In his book “Leading Change,” John Kotter outlines an eight stage process for successful change that begins with establishing a sense of urgency for the change. This critical action reminds me of what the Sun did to the traveler. Instead of trying to force him to change his behavior the Sun created a sense of urgency for the traveler to change his own behavior.

There are many ways organizations can create this sense of urgency, but to be effective every effort needs to focus on creating an environment where people feel the need to make a change. Talking about the reasons for making a change is important, but talk alone can feel like a lot of Wind. When we allow others to personally see and experience the need and importance for making achange, we play the role of the Sun and provide them with what I like to call Solar Motivation.
Although there are many important steps involved in creating a successful change in an organization, by starting off on the right foot we generate buy-in and the critical level of urgency required to move forward.

Ask Tom

How does each style respond to change? And how can you get them to accept and integrate big change faster??

This would be a wonderful topic for an entire book, but due to the space limitations of this newsletter, I will need to be as concise as possible.

Analyzers take the longest of all the styles to come to terms with change. It’s important to give them the reasons for the change, how the change impacts the big picture as well as their own jobs, and to give them as many details as you can about how the change will be implemented. They would feel most comfortable with change if, after knowing everything about the why’s, what’s and how’s, the implementation of the change were chunked into logical steps. Then they know what’s to come, why it’s coming, and how it’s coming, and they can process the change logically step by step.

Stabilizers could be very helpful in communicating and implementing changes because they would do so in a way that is sensitive to team members. The more they feel they know what is going on, and what is expected of them in the change, the more comfortable they can be with it. They may take a while to accept change, especially if there are many changes in a short period of time that affect the team members. If the changes cause tension or conflict among the group, it’s unsettling to Stabilizers and will affect their ability to integrate the changes. Bring them in to help bring the team along with the change.

Persuaders will be more likely to accept change if they are allowed to voice their opinions and ideas on how to implement the changes, or how to mark the stages of change: for example, having a ceremony to honor the past, holding a kickoff celebration, or other fun and motivational ideas for getting team members to embrace and integrate the changes. Persuaders have little problem adapting to change if the changes are communicated well, and they know who the changes will affect.

Controllers like to cause change in order to get results. However, if they are not in control of the change and do not see how it can get results for the organization, they may resist the change. Show them how the change will get more results, add to the bottom line, and make things better faster.

Feedback

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Do you have any suggestions for us regarding workshops or other offerings? Please send any suggestions, questions, comments, or questions for Tom, to sally@effectivenessinstitute.com.

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