More than a hundred years ago, Leo Tolstoy wrote:
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Now this article in McKinsey Quarterly describes how anyone who wants to change an organisation first has to learn to look inside and change themselves.
Years of working in leadership and cultural transformation have convinced the authors that:
“… organizational change is inseparable from individual change. Simply put, change efforts often falter because individuals overlook the need to make fundamental changes in themselves… Organizations don’t change — people do.”
To create lasting organisational impact it is necessary to look both inwards and outwards:
“Integration of looking both inward and outward is the most powerful formula we know for creating long-term, high-impact organizational change.”
The Churning, Inner Leadership agrees — this is why the book was written.
So how can we achieve this combination of inner and outer change?
The McKinsey authors recommend that people develop two new skills. The first they call ‘profile awareness’, which means becoming aware of our own habitual thoughts and emotions and the effects these can have on other people. They call the second skill ‘state awareness’, by which they mean understanding the emotional states that drive us to behave in certain ways.
Then they suggest four ways that we can use these two types of awareness to create organisational change:
- Understand which archetypal role you are most comfortable in (CEO (inspirer), CFO (analyst), CHRO (enabler), or COO (implementer)) and learn to flex between these roles at different times
- Use greater awareness of your own emotional state to reduce the times when you act in disruptive ways
- Translate this greater self-awareness into better understanding of other people in the organisation — and use that to shape more change
- Realise that organisations don’t change, people do: so move forward one person or group of people at a time
All this makes logical sense. But this is where we disagree with McKinsey.
This analytical approach is exactly what we would expect from consultants. But not everybody thinks analytically — so making everyone in an organisation think this same way is likely to be both difficult and slow. And does the organisation really need everyone to become expert at all four archetypal roles (CEO, CFO, CHRO, COO)? Or do it really need people to become better at being who they are, doing what they do best, and improving the ways they then work with others to achieve the organisation’s shared purpose and goals?
In this time of change what we really need, surely, is not more analysis but rather new ways of taking better actions, faster.
This is why Inner Leadership’s approach to building lasting change is different:
- Increase self-awareness, yes — but do it in ways that enable people to become more of who they are, not more aware of who they aren’t, and definitely not more like McKinsey consultants.
Don’t ask people to work out which of the four roles they feel most comfortable in and then ask them to become better at the other three roles they find difficult. Instead, give people the tools they need to understand more deeply who they are and what matters most to them. Help them to become clearer and more confident about their values, their purpose, their priorities, expressed in their terms (Chapters 1, 4, 5). And then help them find ways to apply that better, in ways that develop them to become even more of who they are, and add even more value to the organisation.
. - Give people the tools they need to become more aware of the assumptions that they and other people can make in times of change, especially when under stress (Chapter 2). Use this to improve communication and problem-solving, both individually and as a team.
These assumptions are what the McKinsey authors called our “habitual thoughts and emotions.” So if people know how to identify, test, and resolve their own habitual assumptions, thoughts, and emotions then they automatically prevent the ‘unhelpful’ or disruptive behaviours that McKinsey describe.
. - Give people the tools they need, not to analyse what is happening but to find more opportunities to move forward and choose between them, even when data is scarce and outcomes are difficult to predict (Chapters 3 and 4).
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And then…
. - Help people to inspire themselves, and each other, to make the chosen way forward happen — better and faster than before (Chapters 6 and 7).
This, surely, is the outcome we seek: not more analysis but better actions, implemented faster, with more energy, enthusiasm, and inspiration.
We believe that this approach is more direct than McKinsey’s: not teaching people to become more like McKinsey consultants but teaching them to become more dynamic, more inspired and inspiring versions of themselves. And then applying this in the ways that most benefit themselves and the organisation.
The outcome will then be people who know how to use change to become stronger and more valuable versions of themselves, who know how to become antifragile, and who work with each other to make their whole organisation stronger and more valuable, antifragile.
We believe this is the most “powerful formula for creating long-term, high-impact organisational change”: the ability to change the world by changing ourselves — to become who we most want to become.
Are you focused on changing the world, or changing yourself, or both? Is your focus on becoming more of what you are not, or on expanding your ability to become and achieve whatever matters most to you?
Inner Leadership is a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)