Canadian HR Reporter

STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK'S PANEL of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada's business community. eir commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies. CANADIAN HR REPORTER CANADIAN HR REPORTER June 16, 2014 June 16, 2014 EXECUTIVE SERIES EXECUTIVE SERIES 9 www.scnetwork.ca No one ever expects to have cancer. When it strikes, having CAREpath as part of your benefit package shows your employees and their families how much you really care. Employees diagnosed with cancer are assigned a personal oncology nurse providing guidance and support throughout every stage of their cancer journey. CAREpath is the only complete cancer navigation provider in Canada. cancer? Does one of your employees have We'll be there. 1-866-599-2720 www.carepath.ca THE CANCER ASSISTANCE PROGRAM Anita McGowan, RN, CON(C), OCN Head Oncology Nurse Manager Join our professional community of Canadian HR & Organizational Leaders: • Connecting @ monthly events • Collaborating with peers • Challenging conventional thinking The Power of Human Capital CULTIVATING LEADERSHIP FOR 35 YEARS Great Leaders GROW www.scnetwork.ca Eff ective leaders Eff ective leaders eliminate fear eliminate fear CHANGE OR PERISH. Adapt or die. Charles Darwin wrote of this in 1859. It was as true then for the world's species as it is now for our organizations. And the rate of change keeps accelerating — just look at your new, already outdated smartphone. Knowing these axioms, why do organizations continue to resist change? Management is the main reason, because they fear personal loss. With change comes risk, and risk insinuates loss — loss of posi- tion, loss of power, infl uence, con- trol, prestige and title. In a nutshell, they don't feel safe — so neither can anyone else. So how can we encourage lead- ers to embrace change? By show- ing them change is actually good for them, their personal risks are low and the upside is high. Look what Google has done in its brief 15-year history: Google Search, Google Earth, Google Energy, Google Glass, Google Apps, et al (more than 100 in total). Has all this change caused much risk? Sure. But most of it has resulted in positive consequences. While risk remains the biggest inhibitor to change in most organ- izations, it can be mitigated. Jamie Gruman rightly states the best way to achieve this is to create a safe en- vironment, in which all employees can voice their opinions and ideas, knowing what they say will be lis- tened to and judged on its merits, with no negative repercussions. When employees are treated as mature, responsible adults, they be- have as such. Most of them can self- manage very well, given the chance. Most of them want to contribute and most can contribute signifi cant- ly. When a climate of trust, respect and co-operation is established, in- itiative becomes the norm. This means abolishing the old command-and-control, hierarch- ical structure. is outdated frame- work is notorious for forcing an em- ployee's great idea to navigate from concept to reality only after receiv- ing 1,000 "yeses" along the way, and it can easily be squashed by one "no." While at it, get rid of the word "chief " in job titles. Toss "offi cer" too — unless you work in a police sta- tion. eir days are done. Retiring these old-guard, authoritative sym- bols sends a clear signal that change is indeed starting. Several other cultural and organizational chan- ges must also be made as Gruman mentions but, whatever you do, act fast before the Millennials catch you napping. "A business… has two basic func- tions — marketing and innovation. ey produce results. All the rest are costs," said management consultant Peter Drucker. So, what will it be — change agent or cost item? Morgan Smyth is an SCNetwork thought leader and a change man- agement consultant who launched his own IT services company which soared to Profi t Magazine's 50 Fast- est Growing Companies. He can be reached at msmyth@braegen.com. Morgan Smyth Leadership in Action Conclusions not Conclusions not necessarily novel necessarily novel JA MIE GRUM AN'S presentation was intriguing and entertaining, but his conclu- sions are not as novel as he suggests. Gruman took us down a path that began with the unpredict- able universe and concluded that managing change is best done by creating conditions that encourage emergent change. Along the way, we heard that today's organiza- tions are dinosaurs, hierarchy is un- natural, planned change is hopeless and the stubborn legacy systems of the industrial age are "ghosts that haunt us." But a funny thing happened along the way: Gruman's conclusions on leading and managing change are already known to those with experi- ence in organizational eff ectiveness. Nodding along with Gruman's iconoclastic, anti-hierarchy presen- tation with requisite skepticism, I surprised myself by suddenly being in agreement with his concluding thesis — "FramCap." His change leadership model — framing change and creating capacity — has existed by other names (including "com- mon sense") for almost as long as we've known about quantum me- chanics. Further, FramCap implic- itly contains hierarchy, command and control and planned change. I do have to congratulate Gruman, though, for using chaos theory to confi rm common sense. e truth of the matter is that hierarchy occurs in nature, as does complexity. Organizational effec- tiveness practitioners are weary of mavericks decrying the hierarchy boogeyman. e mistake is assum- ing hierarchy means command and control, and that command and control is a bad thing. In my experience, hierarchy is only a problem when there is a lack of coherent strategy and structural misalignment. Command and con- trol is only a problem when it comes with a dearth of eff ective leadership. With the FramCap model, Gru- man is espousing what successful managerial leaders intuit naturally. at the model "feels" right is the hallmark of it being common sense. "Sense-making" in the FramCap model is actually the universal func- tion of leadership. It is setting direc- tion and setting context. Creating disruption is also part of eff ective managerial leadership. Holding stability and instability in tension is the only means to learn (to change), to eff ectively and effi - ciently grow an increasingly capable team and to accelerate continuous improvement. Boundaries in an eff ective orga- nization mean role clarity. It is an exercise in liberating employees with parameters. It is creating sand- boxes big enough to give employees enough room for them to use all the tools provided and then expecting the sandcastles to be built. Manag- ers are saying, "Here you go. We've agreed upon what it is you are go- ing to do. Come back if you have a problem or a suggestion. Otherwise, on your way". e fi nal aspect of FramCap — trust — is the foundation of being able to do all these things. As any eff ective manager knows, without walking the walk and creating en- vironments of open and honest dialogue, trust isn't going to happen. Without trust, transformational change is impossible. Despite the claims of the earlier part of his presentation, Gruman conceded that planned change and emergent change likely need to complement each other. It seems that there is a place for both control and chaos. It's true, then, that we have our organizational ghosts. But, for organization eff ectiveness prac- titioners, they are more like Casper than poltergeists. Michael Clark is a thought leader with the Strategic Capability Network and direc- tor of sales and marketing at Forrest & Company in Toronto, an organizational transformation fi rm. Michael Clark Organizational Effectiveness

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