I’ve been reading a book given to me recently at the Association of Change Management Professional’s conference on delivering sustainable change in organisations. The very first chapter claims that ‘Leadership is intentional influence!” and next chapter starts by saying that there are three things effective leaders do to influence change:
- Focus on results and create influential measures.
- Identify vital behaviours that will create a cascade of change.
- Find a way to get people to adopt these vital behaviours.
When I read a little more into the very first item on this list, my blood started boiling and I am feeling frustrated. I did a doctorate because I felt that organisations could do better by having a common measurable agreement to work collaboratively and deliver citizens valuable services.
To read the mistakes that leaders make by failing to take measures, is frustrating because this is not something hard to fix. Here are the list of mistakes made:
- Having a firm grasp on the results that leaders care about. However, their conclusions are based on anecdotal evidence or ‘gut feeling’ rather than using reliable measurements.
- Being naïve about influence and what it takes to engage and motivate human beings.
- Accountability avoidance and reporting of achievement against the measures. (This is the reason I left government because I felt that politicians didn’t really want to be held accountable to measurable outcomes).
- Not a priority. It does take work to create influential measures. The excuse given is that everyone is too busy and we don’t have the resources to define SMART measures.
I passionately felt that leadership could do a much better job of setting a clear strategic vision for the team to follow. My own experience in the public and private sector is that either measures were non-existent, poorly worded, not measurable and/or people were not held accountable to deliver against them.
People performance management was a farce of leaders meeting once a year to assess staff performance based on ‘personalities’ and ‘popularity’ rather than what people actually did to deliver results.
The book ‘Çrucial Influence’ encourages us to look at the six sources of influence in organisations to find a way to get people to adopt the appropriate behaviours. These are:
- Personal motivation. Influence people to do the behaviours required.
- Personal ability. Skills matter so having a competent person supervise the activity can influence the right behaviours.
- Social motivation. Use formal leaders and influential community members carry the messages for the new behaviours.
- Social ability. Use influencers or friends to model the required behaviours and provide feedback.
- Structural motivation. Use token rewards for the right behaviours.
- Structural ability. Structure work and social systems that encourage the right behaviours.
I would love it if leaders looked at how they set the direction for us workers and invested more time in encouraging the behaviours that get the right results. Invest more in defining the right measures and teach people how to adopt them in the way we work. Stop looking at Shareholder Value and Customer Satisfaction as the only measures that are important. Start looking for measures that motivate meaningful work for everyone!
