Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

My last few articles for this column illustrated how leading organisations engage people with improvement goals through the way they set and manage accountabilities. I also covered how leading organisations maintain a "creative tension" to sustain continuous rather than start/episodic improvement, common in many good but not yet great organisations. Only around 1% of organisations are able to demonstrate these competencies, yet the route map to comprehensive engagement and sustained year-on-year improvement is fairly straightforward. The problem is that the tasks on this route map can be categorised as 'simple', not easy, because they involve changing behaviours. The first thing to recognise is that the behavioural change journey delivers a change in working relationships. And, for that to happen, the approach to managing working relationships must change. So, for managers who want to achieve change, in the words of the song, they need to start with the man (or woman) in the mirror. The second thing to note is that behaviours change through consistent actions to reinforce and encourage new behavioural patterns or habits. A good place to start is a conversation among managers to agree the pressure for change. If the management team cannot agree a common pressure for change, it won't happen. I remember buying a self-help book I when starting to play golf. The book set out a programme which it predicted would help me improve my score by a factor of 50%. I read it, understood what it was asking me to do, it all made sense but I didn't have the motivation to get past the first three chapters. If there is sufficient pressure for change, then design the future desired working relationships in detail. Start bottom up and define how to systematically develop the capability to deliver it. Ideally, create an agreed cultural change curriculum and the quality plan/milestones to describe the journey. When that is complete the first step/next step should be pretty obvious.