SKOPOS Consulting Blog

Article by Marwa Farouq

“Nothing grows well without space and air.” Patricia Monaghan (pioneer of the contemporary woman’s spirituality movement)

One of the most pressing leadership challenges for organizations today is how to find and grow the right talents. Concerns regarding which organizational mechanism to use in surfacing potential talents are frequently top of mind for many leaders.

In many cases, executives and managers from all types of organizations resort to easy solutions of creating linear systems and mechanisms that place all employees into one mold. By formal assessments and filtering of each person using the same criteria, only a lucky few actually rise to the top and are deemed as worthwhile investments for development. These are what I like to call the organizational bees.

Organizational bees are hard working employees that do exactly as they are told and work well inside closed systems with well-defined deliverables and boundaries. They manage their time well and focus on getting their own job done all the time. They are not interested in what’s outside the system because to them it is irrelevant except if asked otherwise. Operationally, organizational bees are excellent planners, managers as well as performers. As a matter of fact, their importance goes beyond merely hard work, as they are talents that maintain stability within the organization, keep track of its performance, and manage its resources in the most efficient ways possible.

The question thus becomes whether these are sufficient. Are these the kinds of talents that would facilitate the opening of new markets, seek hidden opportunities and be entrepreneurial enough to leverage those opportunities? Are they the type who are able to bring out the best of their teams and work towards creating a future that no one has even imagined? Can your organization survive only on the contribution of its bees?

Historically, the most transformational leaders were those that flew beyond the boundaries of their own system. They are those that did more than what was expected of them, and did it in the most non-traditional fashion possible. They are the colorful, creative innovators of the future. They are what I like to call organizational butterflies.

Organizational butterflies enjoy moving randomly around the organizational landscape. They take pleasure from rotating through the organization in different functions as well as different assignments. They thrive on diversity and change. Organizational butterflies are, in most cases, daring, different and first. They are the organization’s most promising leaders.

Unlike bees that have five eyes in order to see specific flower species, butterflies have 12,000 eyes and the ability to see ultra-violet light. This wide range of vision enables organizational butterflies to easily spot hidden opportunities for growth and development.

Today’s business world present organizations with key challenges, such as convergence, making smarter risk decisions, reducing costs, operating globally and maintaining sustainability. Hence the need for organizations to nurture and grow leaders that are simultaneously innovative, strategic and creative. Organizations need butterflies willing and able to work alongside bees to go beyond business sustainability and operational success.

Organizations and leaders across the board are in dire need for the types of talents that are willing and able to set aggressive goals, as well as develop creative ways to execute them. In parallel, organizational butterflies will build strong self-motivated and self-driven teams that will go the extra mile to achieve organizational success.

The question now becomes how can leaders find those organizational butterflies within their landscape? Furthermore, what are the right mechanisms to develop and grow these butterflies, but in the same sense not lose the valuable contribution of the bees?

The answer is simpler than you may have expected: create a cultural garden with enough sun, space and flowers.

Sun

An organization’s mission, vision, values and strategic directions are, like the sun, crucial drivers for the existence of both bees and butterflies. The presence, communication and institutionalization of these drivers give both butterflies and bees an end in mind, a clear direction of where to go, a sense of the priorities of the organization, as well as how they can contribute. When this direction is provided and understood, it ignites the passion and energy of both to fly. When the organizational intent is clearly communicated, the right talents are attracted, inspired and nurtured to contribute to the organization in diverse and innovative ways.

Space

Within empowerment and engagement lie the strength of any organization. Building an organization that gives enough space for talents to make mistakes, try new things, and voice their views will enable both bees and specially butterflies to grow and develop. It will enable them to learn in the most non-linear ways possible and hence speed their growth and shape the uniqueness of their contribution. On the contrary, when an organization is created around closed systems that focus on controlling behavior and surrounding it with rigid structures and boundaries that are narrowly-defined, talents become

confined, slowed down, and restrained. Hence the organization loses its agility, execution power, and its internal reservoir of innovation and creativity. Building an organization culture that empowers its talents and gives them space to execute and deliver in creative ways enables your organization to cultivate innovation as well as non-traditional leadership.

Flowers

If you diversify your landscape with differing flowers full of a variety of colors, you will almost always attract different butterfly and bee species into your garden. In creating a dynamic and diverse organizational culture, you will enable different talents within your organization to come together and try new things, and by doing so you will always get creative solutions to your organizational pains. Furthermore, you will enable those talents to get a more holistic view of your business, its challenges, and opportunities for growth. In doing so you, in turn, nurture, grow and keep those talents within your organizational landscape.

One very effective type of organization culture is that designed to encourage various talents to come together while respecting each individual contribution as well as appreciating the diversity of their backgrounds. you ensure organizational sustainability and competitiveness by synergizing both butterflies and bees to fly towards your organizational sun.

Article by Ben Peterson

‘’Change Management’’ has become one of the most over-used management terms over the past few decades. Change management continues to pose major challenges to most organizations up to the present day. Such challenge, in keeping with its counter management term ‘‘opportunity’’ has resulted in numerous ideas from management theorists, academics and practitioners in how change management can be addressed by organizations. However, in spite of this plethora of advice in tackling change management, an estimated 70% of all change initiatives still are reported to fail.

So what really is Change Management and why does it continue to pose seemingly insurmountable challenge to organizations?

In my experience, there commonly has been a major failure in recognizing change for what it really is; what true impacts they pose and consequently what can be done to optimize the chances of managing change successfully.

Let us consider these three sample instances illustrating how change management is typically interpreted. In a major global service organization, employees understood and related change management to an in-house methodology, devised to manage all significant projects and programs initiated in the organization.  In another instance, an executive in another organization conveyed her view on change management as follows: ‘’I like change very much. I like to try new things and have different experiences. So I really yearn for and positively look forward to change’’. Lastly in many other instances, people loosely refer to or associate any tertiary situation that moves or needs altering within an organization as change management.

These three instances illustrate fundamental misconceptions that people attach to the meaning and impact of Change Management in an organizational setting. The result is that the following key contexts, important to appreciate what change management really means, get missed:

• Change management cannot be reduced to some enterprise methodology or tool. Change Management is rather about people and the complex set of emotions that individuals face during each episode of change.
• True change management, at least the strand of change that continues to pose significant challenges to organizations, is almost always not palatable to recipients of that change. Individuals who postulate that they positively look forward to major change are at best quite rare people, and at worst more likely to be just churning out tosh in the interest of political correctness.
• Loosely referring any tiny initiative in an organization as change dilutes the impact and serious consideration that each instance of true change management merits and demands.

 Considering the traditional types of organizational change, apart from Developmental Change, most instances of significant Transitional or Transformational Change commonly result in severe emotional impacts to the recipients of that change.  These emotions can often be likened to the typical stages of bereavement that people experience following the loss of a close sibling: 

• Numbness and Denial: particularly in the early period where they find it difficult to believe what has happened.
• Yearning: where they resort to a series of activities or signals in an attempt to restore the bond with the lost state or situation.
• Anger and Guilt: where they start to assign blame or reflect on what they could have done differently to circumvent the lost situation.
• Finally Acceptance: where the state of bereavement starts to fade, the change is accepted (often reluctantly) and people get prepared to reorganize themselves to cope with the change or begin to carve out a new life for themselves.

These emotions usually escape the Change Strategists, who typically come up with the grand visions and concepts governing the change. Such emotions also usually escape the Change Implementers who are often the middle level of the organization. But these emotions rarely escape a key stakeholder group, the Change Recipients; often the group most affected by that change and usually composed of the frontline staff. Ironically this is the group who are sometimes the most crucial in ensuring success of the change.

 Some major change management programs fail because the needs and sentiments of the change recipients are largely ignored, until the change is dumped or imposed on them.  Often carefully crafted advise from management literature on Change Management largely focus on the other two groups, namely the Change Strategists and Change Implementers, but less on the Change Recipients. Take some of the famous academic commandments for implementing successful change: Analyze the need for change; create a shared vision; create a sense of urgency; create a guiding coalition; line up political support etc. Most of these concepts, when attempted in practice largely focus on trying to harness agreement of the top layer (executives) and support from the implementers to push the change through.  There is little attention to the Change Recipients who typically are not involved at the concept or implementation stages.

Current approaches to change management need to be turned upside down to incorporate carefully considered principles and actions that address the emotional dimensions on Change Recipients, right from the strategy stage and through the implementation stage. This approach will go some way towards improving the rate of success currently experienced on major change programs.

SKOPOS Consulting is an Organizational Development consulting firm that helps organizations in the Middle East and Africa to define, develop and sustain a culture that promotes the achievement of growth and business success. SKOPOS Consulting provides their clients with expertise in Change Management and Organizational Development.