Small Steps… Big Leaps…

Recently I coached an executive that is struggling to build a culture of accountability and high-performance. In an organization, everyone, from the ground level to the board room, contributes to the organization’s culture. However, as leaders and senior executives, we carry the most influence. Through our actions, conversations, performance and results, we demonstrate what our values are and their importance to the organization.

Yes, cultural change, or any change for that matter, is hard and requires effort. Lets face it, anytime we are asking an organization to improve quality, increase productivity or boost creativity, we are asking people to make a change to what they were doing and how they were doing it. Robert Maurer (One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way) argues that our brains are wired to resist change. Any new change, whether it is a challenge, opportunity or desire, immediately triggers our amygdala response creating the desire to fight-or-flight.

In many cases, the mountains we create for ourselves appear bigger than they really are. Regardless, just like you can only eat an elephant one bite at a time, remember that a journey of a thousand miles must being with a single step (Lao Tzu.) Robert indicates that kaizen, small steps for continual improvement, is the key to achieving enduring change, where small steps become giant leaps. His kaizen strategy includes:

• asking small questions to dispel fear and inspire creativity;
• thinking small thoughts to develop new skills and habits, without moving a muscle;
• taking small actions that guarantee success;
• solving small problems, even when you are faced with an overwhelming crisis;
• bestowing small rewards to yourself or others to produce the best results;
• recognizing the small but crucial moments that everyone else ignores;

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne (Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant) further emphasizes this with their concept for tipping point leadership. Tipping point leadership is about recognizing and focusing on the extremes: people, acts and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance to achieve a strategic shift, a change. In other words, goal is to identify small changes that will eventually create the needed tipping point to shift the organizational behavior at a lower cost and faster. As tipping point leadership highlights, one small step taken towards the right direction can become giant leaps.

Great leaders know that they can’t do it alone. Recruiting and growing leaders around us is crucial to the successful execution of our vision. Yes, managing change is hard. But, with every small step and by using tipping point leadership principles, we can all create giant leaps.

Technorati Tags: change management, leadership