Chapter Eleven – Creating Sustainable Change

As the last chapter of the book, the focus here is on making sure the leader’s organizational changes are maintained over the long haul. They open with a very sensible acknowledgement that every organization will have pockets of resonance and pockets of dissonance. It is the ratio of resonance to dissonance that serves as a marker for its overall health. The key to moving that ratio in the right direction is distributing emotionally intelligent leaders throughout the organization. To this end, they say that true leadership development (not just a class or workshop here and there) needs to be “the strategic priority” for every company, which of course requires full buy in from the top. While I completely agree that leadership development should be among the top priorities for any organization to stay healthy, vibrant, and growing, I’m sure most organizations could find a few others that rank as high.

Some key elements they mention in making this training ‘stick’ are:

·     - It must be approached from a systems perspective, permeating every level of the organization.

·      -It must address emotionally intelligent systems at the individual, team, and organizational level.

·      -To learn something truly new, it must be both relevant and ‘frame-breaking.’

·      -You must manage the ‘weirdness index.’ In other words, it must be unique and thought-provoking, but it can’t be so far outside the norm of the culture that it scares people away.

·      -The learning should build on active, participatory work. It should involve experiential and action-based components.

They went through a case study at Unilever, where they built a change strategy over a several year period. It was a fairly comprehensive picture of the beginning to end journey they planned and executed. It involved multiple layers of involvement (retreats for the top 100 execs, then seminars for the top 500 leaders, then similar seminars for all leaders throughout the organization, followed by front line engagement with the new culture once the leadership had gotten a handle on how it worked and how they would incorporate it into their daily work lives). The process was collaborative and exploratory in nature so that it helped each person explore their own behavior, their own values, and find ways to emotionally connect with the new culture being developed. It also mentions having created learning communities so none of this was happening in a vacuum. These communities would support and challenge each other during and after the initial roll out. The most important element was getting everyone emotionally engaged. As they say, “people change when they are emotionally engaged and committed” (p 239). As ethereal as some of this soft skill work may sound, none of it was unplanned. They had a very strategic approach to how they would do it and who would be involved at which entry points into the culture shift process.

In a section referred to as maximizing the half-life of learning, the authors list a few key features of any successful plan to change a culture. The process must have:

·     - A tie in to the culture that exists in the organization

·     - Seminars built around individual change

·      -Learning about emotional intelligence competencies, not just business acumen

·      -Creative and potent learning experiences with a purpose

·      -Learning teams that support the learning during and after the initial roll out

After a quick review of what they covered in the book, they mention the idea that the need for this kind of learning and change is more important today than it has ever been. Knowledge and access to it is growing more rapidly than ever before in the history of human civilization. The speed of business is increasing. E commerce, diversification of the work place, and globalization of the economy are all factors that contribute to the need for companies to be dynamic, collaborative, and emotionally intelligent if they want to survive and hopefully thrive. Truly resonant leaders understand when to be collaborative, when to coach, when to be visionary, when to listen, and even when to command. They have the ability to articulate a mission and vision, and to attune it to the values and behaviors of the workforce they lead.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and found numerous places where it aligned with what I currently do at work. That alignment allowed me to assimilate a very large amount of new information and research, which I will incorporate into my programs. The only thing I would have liked to see more of were actionable tools to put these practices into place (workshop ideas, activity outlines, etc.). However, I can find these resources on my own elsewhere. Like most books or experiences that stimulate new thought, it has pointed me toward the next stop on my learning journey.