I had the pleasure of working with Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) as part of an update to their Harvard Manage Mentor (HMM) learning and development platform. Their goal was to work with authors, leaders, and change agents to create articles, interactives, and videos that highlight the importance of leaders shifting their mindset to actively harnessing change. The following interview was included as part of the Initiating Change topic. A copy of the transcript is included below the video.
Let me know if you have any comments or questions. You can reach out to me via email at FrankS@FreeStandingAgility.com
Thank you for watching.
The art of being a change agent is kind of interesting, because you do always have to be on the lookout for opportunities. Both obstacles and opportunities provide you a chance to create change, or to harness change. For managers, there’s a lot of ways in which we need to learn into change, as opposed to just lean into change.
When I’m working with them, I try to help them understand the difference between how you’ve worked in the past and how you work in the future. They’re really comfortable saying that the problem I have can’t be solved because it belongs to somebody else. And that’s kind of the end of curiosity at that point. Opportunities and obstacles work best when we get a group of people in the room to discuss them.
The right people in the room isn’t always the people at the same level. It’s often a collaboration of people from different levels and different perspectives. We need to listen. We need to engage people in conversations. We need to ask open questions, rather than dictate answers. We need to remember that options—not just answers—are important, and that it’s very important to get to next steps, where we can actually start to take action.
What teams can often need to do, as a result, is create an experiment. What are we trying to prove? Who’s going to be involved? How long is it going to run? And then, when can we start the experiment? We would be guessing without involving the customer, but we would also be guessing if we only listened to just the customer. The experiment will allow us to go get a little bit more data that we can go off, and then find out if what we assumed or what we detected is right for pursuing.
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