Vedere Consulting

You’ve probably been inundated with advice about how to weather economic turmoil. My friend and mentor, John Scherer (www.scherercenter.com), gave some of the best I’ve heard. He said that in tough times, we need to carpe diem, seize the day. That is, use the uncertainty to re-examine and re-invent. To think differently about old problems. John calls it breakthrough thinking. In his March 19 newsletter, The Scherer Report, he gave a great example of what this means. I’m going to let him tell you about it.

Recently a client company’s ‘Help Desk’ was falling far behind, taking 15 to 20 minutes to even answer the phone. The Breakthrough Action Team working on the problem was trying to figure out how to justify the cost of doubling the number of people answering the phones. They had tables of research and estimates of how many calls a person could handle in an hour, multiplied by the number of calls coming in each day, etc. I was consulting with the team and I suggested they were working very hard at ‘First Order Change’—that is change within the existing paradigm that doesn’t fundamentally change anything.

‘The way you SEE the problem is the problem,’ I said, quoting the ancient Yogic tradition.

What would happen, I challenged them, if they shifted to a breakthrough mindset? I asked them, ‘What would be the ideal number of calls coming into the Help Desk?’ They again started calculating the number of calls that could be handled by six people, then 12 people. I stopped them and asked again, ‘What would be the ideal number of calls coming into the Help Desk?’ Some team members started getting irritated with me. ‘We’re working on it, John!”

Finally one person said, ‘Well, the ideal number would be zero! But that could never happen.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘For one thing the sales team would have to do a much better job of selling, letting people know certain things they are reluctant to tell clients.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘someone write this stuff down.’

Another person chimed in, ‘Then the installation team that goes in to build the system would need to do a much better job of listening to the client and their needs. Oh, and the training team would need to take the time to make sure the participants actually understand the system. They just come in, do their program and leave.’

‘Ok,’ I said, ‘there’s your focus, not on the number of people you have in the Call Center Help Desk.

They went to work, invited people from sales, installation and training to be part of a special cross-functional breakthrough thinking team and came up with a set of innovative action recommendations for consideration by the key decision makers.

The result? Three months later I was there for a follow up meeting and I wandered downstairs to the Help Desk to see how many people they had hired. There sat a lone telephone operator at her desk, reading a book! I said, ‘How’s it going?’ She replied, ‘It’s a little boring sometimes . . . but I can’t say I miss those days when six of us were here, frantic and overstressed. I get about ten calls a day now, and they’re usually pretty easy problems to solve. I don’t know what you did, but it worked!’

Now, that’s finding the opportunity in a crisis. Whether you’re a CEO, a small business owner or someone who’s lost a job, this kind of thinking makes lemonade out of whatever lemon you were handed.

John has just published a great new book, Five Questions That Change Everything: Life Lessons at Work. Click here to learn about it (http://www.amazon.com/Five-Questions-That-Change-Everything/dp/0979531527/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242068594&sr=8-1 ). I’ll be reviewing it in a later post.

Plum Cluverius is an executive and leadership coach located in Richmond, Virginia.

Labels: Organizational Change

Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.

I’m dedicating this blog (my longest one yet!) to a fabulous group of people with whom I have been privileged to work the past several months, and to my esteemed colleague, Kathleen McSweeney.

Plum Cluverius

It was a tough week for the admissions department of a private university. As the director said: “Change is hard!” He should know. His department is undergoing a significant reorganization due to continued staffing shortages and financial constraints. As implementation of the new structure got underway, and even though staff was involved from the start, tempers flared, water cooler whispering resumed, and some of the hard won trust and cooperation within the group began slipping away.

This behavior has caught the managers and staff off guard because the group has worked so hard to create a collaborative environment. The reorganization occurred in part to rectify staff concerns about uneven distribution of work, less than efficient processes, and confusion about leadership roles. Everyone in the department had opportunities to share ideas for the new structure—in meetings, in writing and one-on-one. Changes and their reasons were explained. Staff and management learned together how to communicate, resolve conflicts, work together as a team. They talked together about the future they wanted for the department.

When this department had done so many things right, why did things seem to be going wrong? An answer, I think, lies in William Bridges seminal work on transitions, detailed books like Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, and Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. ( www.wmbridges.com ). Bridges helps us see that our emotional response to change, our adjustment to change, what he calls “transition,” is pivotal to the success of any change effort. Each person goes through, at their own pace, three stages of transition.

The first, which Bridges calls “endings,” is the process of saying goodbye to what we must leave behind in the change. Even with positive changes, there is some sense of loss—and loss produces a host of emotional reactions. In the admissions department, this meant saying goodbye to familiar work teams, processes, student groups, roles.

Once we recognize what’s going away, we enter a period that Bridges call “chaos” or “the neutral zone.” I’ve always preferred “chaos” because that’s what it often feels like! In the “chaos” stage, you know what you’ve left behind, but you don’t know where you’re going. Someone from the admissions department said, “you don’t have the picture yet, you don’t know what it’s going to look like.” You’re kind of groping around in the dark. All of us like some sense of certainty, and in “chaos” there usually isn’t much. People experience a variety of emotions—confusion, fear, anger, exhaustion. It can seem hard to get going. It doesn’t sound very pretty, does it? But there’s an upside. In “chaos,” all the old rules go away; it’s easier to be creative. When things are going smoothly, it’s easy to get into a rut. But in “chaos,” there is no rut. You can try new ideas, new ways of doing things.

In the third phase, which Bridges calls “new beginnings,” you begin to get the picture. You see where things are going; you understand what you need to do to thrive in the new world. You form new habits that work. It’s not always an easy phase, but you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Every individual, every group, every organization goes through these phases. We don’t go through them together—everyone has their own pace—and we don’t go through them in an orderly way. We wander all over the place—one day hopeful, the next day discouraged, the next day angry, the next day excited, etc. etc. Leaders, often because they are more involved in the planning, are often further along in the process than the staff, and they can forget what it’s like to not know, to be in the dark.

Bridges helps us see that all these reactions are normal. In a transition, both people and process benefit when individuals are tender with themselves, tender with each other and patient with the process. The admissions department has learned the value of discussing progress and setbacks with each other, celebrating successes, staying involved in planning the future, speaking up and offering solutions when something isn’t working.

Any team, department, or organization contemplating a change, or finding themselves in the midst of one can learn from the admission department’s experience. Change is hard. But when you understand the process of transition, you can move through it more smoothly and successfully.

Labels: Organizational Change

Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.

Labels: Organizational Change

Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.

Once upon a time—actually about 20 odd years ago, there was a lovely old public park which had fallen on hard times. It had been a jewel in the Richmond park system, but now its gardens were neglected, its trails were overgrown, its lakes polluted and trashy, its fields used as a dump.

I loved that old park. I walked there almost every day. It made me sad to see a beautiful place reduced to such sorry circumstances. Often, the only people I saw there were a few creepy men with unknown intentions. I believed no one cared.—and that nothing I or anyone could do would make a difference.

How wrong I was. Today, that same park is vibrant and alive. In good weather, the park is full of people --children play in the playground, people walk or bike the hiking trails, play tennis, soccer, or Frisbee golf, feed the geese, fish, picnic. It just feels good to be there, to see the transformation.

How did it happen? A group of people, the Friends of Bryan Park*, thought big when I thought small. They refused to believe nothing could be done. They started working on the park in small ways—clearing a trail here, weeding a bed there, advocating for more funds, creating partnerships with the city department of recreation and parks. Over time, their hard and work persistence paid off and the park slowly came back to life.

You know, when I took those lonely walks in the park years ago, I thought things there would only change for the worse. What time has given me is perspective. Things can change, people can make a difference, what seemed impossible is possible. I have the ability to see something that I couldn’t see 20 years ago. This new perspective gives me hope.

I believe that we can approach life more calmly because we’ve lived enough of it to see that what seems huge is really small, what seems hopeless is truly accomplishable, that what seems like forever is really a moment. Great leaders have this perspective. They help the people around them see it too. They make it possible for people work for the prize despite setbacks, hardships and disappointments.

What is your perspective? How do you share it with others so that they see it too?


P.S. Vedere means “to see” in Italian. I believe perspective is an important element of success. As a coach, it’s my job to help my clients examine their perspectives and discern where their viewpoints no longer serve them. If your perspective is small when it needs to be large, consider coaching as an opportunity for growth. My contact information is below.

P.P.S. If you want to learn more about the Friends of Bryan Park, visit their website at http://www.friendsofbryanpark.org/ .

Labels: Organizational Change

Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.