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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A new lean and agile model for more effective change management Rapid Organizational Change gets right to the heart of the change initiative problem, and offers a time- and money-saving solution. The fact that so many change initiatives fail or underperform can be traced back to one major issue: pace. While most change management models stress the importance of timeliness, they remain bound to an organization-wide approach to execution.. By targeting change efforts at specific mid-level layers of management, this book helps you achieve the desired outcome more efficiently while saving time, effort and money. Full of practical advice and real-world examples, this book is your action guide to making change happen in a meaningful way. You'll learn how to continually develop great leadership at the institutional level, and gain real, actionable guidance on putting more women in management positions to help you grab that competitive advantage. Today's disruptive technologies and macro-economic patterns have elevated organizational agility to the rank of survival skill. Change is a constant in business, but it's now coming faster than ever; this book gives you the strategies you need to keep from being left behind. * Target mid-level managers for faster change * Institute perpetual leadership development outside of HR * Correct gender inequality in management positions * Utilize your best resources to gain competitive advantage Most change management models have the same inherent problem: by the time new processes and strategies trickle down to every manager and staff member, the opportunity has passed and the change can no longer be effective for its intended purpose. Rapid Organizational Change lays out a new shortcut to help your organization stay out in front.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER 1: The Refraction Layer
What is Refraction Anyway?
Leadership Proximity Trumps Leadership Rank
Layers of Sedimentary Rock
Dearth of Leadership Bench
Eliminating Refraction
Japan as a Crucible
CHAPTER 2: The Myth of Uniqueness
Busting the Galapagos Myth
National Culture Tempers Behavior but Company Culture Determines Behavior
What Makes People Tick—Even the Japanese!
The Problem is not the Local Culture—It's your Company's Culture!
Sucking Air through Teeth: The Big Deal about Risk and Failure in Japan
Where's the Bushido? Finding the Inner Warrior
CHAPTER 3: Growth‐Oriented Thinking – The Key to Anti‐Refraction
Action over Perfection
Viewing Failure as Learning
Desire for Personal Growth
Comfort with Ambiguity
How Can You Tell?
The Resilient Manager
CHAPTER 4: The Zen of Hiring
Hire the Three W's: The Worldly, the Weird, and Women
The Worldly: English Ability Is Great, but It's the Mindset That Counts!
The Weird: Tall Poppies and Protruding Nails
Salarywoman
Gaijin and Other Red‐Bearded Devils—Like Me!
Loyalty Is Overrated; It's Disloyal People You Want!
CHAPTER 5: Breaking the Iron Rice Bowl
Heisei Restoration
Not Lifetime Employment—Lifetime Employable
Pro Forma Meritocracies and Other Sesame Grinders
Windowsill Gangs
CHAPTER 6: From Process‐Driven Thinking to Thinking‐Driven Process
Shifting to Outcome‐Orientation, not just “Gambarimasu!”
I am a Cat, and Curiosity Does Not Kill Me
Innovation, Shminnovation
The Shminnovation Gap
Constructive Disharmony—the
Wa
of Confrontation
CHAPTER 7: Eliminating Performance Gaps
Identifying and Treating Cause
Steve's Three E's of Performance Gap Treatments: Education, Enlightenment, and Empowerment
Performance Improvement Decision Tree
CHAPTER 8: They Got It Wrong! It's NOT a Marathon, but Lots of Sprints!
The Strategy Sprint
Innovation Sprint
Business Case Sprint
Personal Growth Sprint
CHAPTER 9: Perpetual Leadership Bench
Mentor Culture
Encourage Failure
Pride and Arrogance are not the Same Thing: The Real Role of Humility
From Refraction Layer to Hunger for Success
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 3
TABLE 3.1 Growth‐oriented versus non growth‐oriented manager behaviors
Chapter 7
TABLE 7.1 Steve's three E's of performance gap treatments
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1.1 Deflecting, refracting, and dissipating waves of change
FIGURE 1.2 Principle of projection
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2.1 Behavior change cycle
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6.1 Optimization curve
FIGURE 6.2 Innovation curve
FIGURE 6.3 Bursts of innovation and periods of optimization
FIGURE 6.4 Shiminnovation limit
FIGURE 6.5 Shminnovation gap
Chapter 7
FIGURE 7.1 Empowerment's three essentials
FIGURE 7.2 Closing performance gaps
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Rapid Organizational Change
STEVEN BLEISTEIN
This edition first published 2017
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 978‐1‐119‐21903‐3 (hardback) ISBN 978‐1‐119‐21904‐0 (ePub)
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Preface
Since I was a teenager growing up in Denver, Colorado in the United States, I have had a love for foreign language and a fascination with other countries and people throughout the world. That fascination has taken me around the world, starting with France, where I did a year‐long study abroad at a high school in Lyon during my junior year.
In all the places I have lived, studied, worked, and done business, I have noticed that people are far more similar than dissimilar, particularly at a deeper level beyond the superficial behaviors that one can observe and call “culture.”
Culture in my view is nothing more than an alternative manifestation of the values we all share as human beings. Cultural difference need not matter if you can address the values rather than their manifestations. Much of my business is helping leaders do just that, whether in Japan or France, or elsewhere, regardless of the nationalities of the people whom the leader leads.
The goal of this book is to share some of that wisdom with you, so you can achieve the same success that I have enabled others to achieve. In my experience, there is nothing stopping you or anyone else.
Steven BleisteinTokyo, Japan
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my many clients who have been an extraordinary source of inspiration and learning for me, and Dr Alan Weiss, my personal mentor, for all his help and advice in making this book a reality.
I dedicate this book to Professor Norman Bleistein, my father and world famous geophysicist, who always saw what is possible and not just what is; to my mother Sandra Bleistein, who always inspired the best in everyone; and to my son Alexandre, my mother's namesake, who takes after her in ways he cannot know. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, the love of my life, who makes all my success possible.
About the Author
Dr Steven Jeffrey Bleistein is the founder and CEO of Relansa Inc., and is one of those rare international experts who bridges Western and Japanese business thinking. Fluent in Japanese and French, Steve has attracted clients from businesses such as Adidas Japan, Lenovo Japan, Reckitt Benckiser, Nikko Chemicals, NTT Data Group, and Mitsubishi Bank. Working with leaders and their teams, Steve helps both Japanese and international companies create their own new realities. Prior to Relansa, Steve represented the Balanced Scorecard Institute in Japan. Steve serves as Vice Chair of the Independent Business Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, where he takes an active role in supporting entrepreneurial and leadership capabilities inside Japanese companies. He runs the popular “Conversation With” luncheon series, where he leads an on‐stage conversation with a local business leader guest. In addition, Steve serves on the board of Tsukuba International School, supporting the school's leadership on the path toward full International Baccalaureate certification. Prior to returning to Japan in 2009, Steve drove innovation on a multimillion dollar project at Australia's premier government IT innovation think‐tank NICTA, forging collaborative relationships with Japanese IT giants. In addition, Steve assisted Japan's Cabinet Office on issues related to e‐government strategy, and organized joint meetings between the Japanese Government and Australian Commonwealth officials.
CHAPTER 1The Refraction Layer
Many CEOs of companies complain of resistance to change in their organizations. The problem of resistance to change appears to be particularly acute in Japan. In fact, many CEOs of companies in Japan lament that the Japanese are the most resistant to organizational change of any people in the world. I often hear this even from business leaders who are Japanese themselves!
Most CEOs have been able to build a leadership team around them whose members are change‐oriented and like‐minded in thinking. Sometimes that team extends to one or two layers of management below. Yet, it is frequently the rest of the organization that is viewed as remaining stubbornly recalcitrant. But is it really?
What is Refraction Anyway?
My father is one of the world's foremost experts on wave phenomena. A brilliant mathematician who found his calling in the field of geophysics, he developed methods for imaging the interior of the Earth using sound waves propagated from the surface. I remember seeing printouts on the walls of my father's study, showing the different geological layers deep in the interior of the Earth—where there is hard rock, soft rock, water, and even oil! Other printouts showed how the different layers bend, reflect, and dampen the sound waves.
It is the difference in substance from one layer to the next that alters the waves when they pass from a layer of one substance to another. A wave may be bent, and change direction. Or it may be partially deflected back up to the surface, with a weakened wave continuing downward. Some waves dissipate entirely. So the waves that reach deeper into the Earth are really distortions of the ones that came from the surface, perhaps weakened, if they reach the deeper layers at all. In the physical world, the bending of waves is called refraction.
The layers of management and staff within a company are not unlike the geological layers of the Earth, and refraction occurs in companies as well. However, it is not a difference in physical substance that refracts waves of change, but rather a difference in thinking at different levels of management. The waves of change a leader attempts to propagate down through the company behave much like sound waves propagating down through the layers of the Earth. They may bend and change direction, be partially deflected, or dissipate entirely. So the waves of change that reach deeper levels of the company become distortions of the change that a leader had intended, and sometimes never reach the deeper levels at all. See Figure 1.1.
FIGURE 1.1 Deflecting, refracting, and dissipating waves of change
In geophysics, interpreting the feedback of sound waves at the surface is a technically difficult problem, because refraction layers deep in the Earth mask what is below and alter waves that return to the surface. In companies, it can be just as tricky for a leader to interpret the feedback returning to the top, because refraction layers in management frequently mask what transpires below. From the top, it can look as if the entire organization is resistant to change. However, I have found that what can, at first glance, appear as widespread recalcitrance in the organization, is rarely actually the case. On the contrary, more often than not, most managers and staff are open to change.
In my experience, what may appear to be widespread resistance to change is in fact limited to a refraction layer of mid‐level managers. Resolve the issues with the refraction layer first, and the organization beneath is freed to change. Leave the refraction layer intact and, no matter how forceful your attempts to promote change, it is very likely that they will inevitably fail. The mistake that most leaders make is rolling out change to the company as a whole once the leadership team is aligned and on‐board, taking much time, effort, and energy, without first paying heed to refraction layers. Without addressing refraction layers first, the great energy and time spent on complex change efforts is squandered.
The problem is that most approaches to change treat a company as an entity of uniform substance, whereas an organization is more akin to the diversity of substance in geology. Typical approaches to organizational change tend to be elaborate and multi‐staged. We have become accustomed to change being a long, hard process, fraught with risk of failure, because this is what we have been told and what we have experienced. However, it does not need to be that way.
I have never met a CEO who talked about change as something less than an urgent priority. By identifying and eliminating refraction layers first, leaders can achieve change in their organizations with maximum speed and efficiency of effort, and dramatically increase likelihood of sustainability and success. This book provides not only tools for doing so, but also methods and processes to help ensure refraction layers do not develop in the first place.
Leadership Proximity Trumps Leadership Rank
Leadership starts at the top but lives or dies in the middle. Staff take their cues from their immediate managers, no matter what a CEO might proclaim or communicate from their lofty perch. After all, it is their immediate managers whom they must serve every day, who evaluate their performance, who hold sway over their remuneration and promotion, and who can make a workday exciting, uneventful, or otherwise an unbearable form of hell. While staff may be open to the change the CEO desires, they will tend to behave in accordance with the priorities of their immediate manager, or at least avoid behaving in a way that they might oppose.
All it takes is one recalcitrant mid‐level manager to block movement toward change of everyone down their reporting line. That can be a huge swath of the organization, depending on the level of the mid‐level manager, and how flat the organization is. The more levels of staff below the manager, the deeper the impact. The flatter the organization, the wider the impact. A recalcitrant manager is like an object blocking a source of light waves. The shadow cast depends on the proximity of the object to the source. In this case, the source is the leader and the light is waves of change. I call this the principle of projection. See Figure 1.2.
FIGURE 1.2 Principle of projection
Change simply does not work its way from the bottom up. The greatest mistake I see leaders make is focusing efforts on the more junior managers and staff when it is more senior‐level ones that hold sway. I have seen many companies go to great lengths to communicate new direction, new methods, and new thinking throughout the organization down to junior staff, seeking “buy‐in”—all of which is wasted because a handful of mid‐level managers simply don't buy‐in. CEO roadshows to explain the changes, the need for change, and the merits for changing are all for naught. Training and orientation workshops will have little effect. Even revised performance evaluation schemes will not be effective when it is the immediate manager who conducts the review. None of these tools are effective among staff and managers whose immediate manager is not on‐board.
Layers of Sedimentary Rock
Several managers at the same middle level who have relatively uniform thinking in resisting change form a layer of sedimentary rock within the organization that will block change for all layers below. When a group of managers think in a similar way, they reinforce each other's certainty in the correctness of their point of view, making the refraction layer only that much more difficult to penetrate.
Why do these layers of sedimentary rock form in the first place? I have often heard leaders lay the blame of recalcitrance at the feet of the mid‐level managers themselves. While individual recalcitrance is certainly an individual's choice, the causes of formation of refraction layers often lie with choices a leader may make, not with the mid‐level managers. Below are four such causes over which a leader has direct control.
Overprotection of labor—by choice!
In many countries, including Japan, there are strong protective labor laws and regulations. It is convenient to blame government for the results of overprotecting labor. Government regulation is more often an excuse for leaders to avoid the sometimes uncomfortable task of removing non‐performing managers, rather than an actual impediment.
CEOs in Japan, whether Japanese or foreign, often tell me that it is “illegal” to fire anyone in Japan. Yet, this is definitely not the case. Termination in Japan is a matter of procedure, time, and money—like everywhere else in the world, no matter how strict or liberal the labor laws. Even in countries like France, which has highly protective labor laws, it is possible to remove non‐performers, although it may require a longer process or cost more to do so than in countries with less restrictive laws.
When a Japanese CEO tells me that firing is illegal, I believe it is partly because of the tradition of lifetime employment from which they may come. Firing is distasteful for most people anywhere in the world, but particularly distasteful in Japan where employment for many had once been for life. In Japan, firing is viewed almost as an end‐of‐the‐world level calamity by many. There is a gravity to firing in Japan that does not exist elsewhere. The legal justification merely makes it easier to avoid confronting the uncomfortable idea that the business may be better off without someone—and perhaps the employee will be better off as well!
When I ask a foreign CEO what makes them think firing someone is illegal, the typical response is, “My Japanese HR director told me so!” I believe many Japanese HR directors are loath to deal with terminations for many of the same reasons as Japanese CEOs, and exaggerate the difficulties and risks of doing so, particularly to their non‐Japanese bosses.
As such, non‐performers and even destructive employees are often left in place, promoted, or transferred laterally so they become someone else's problem. Or in the case of Japan, they become part of “windowsill gangs”—non‐performing managers who are simply sidelined and given limited responsibility—and a metaphorical desk by the window so they can look outside and not become completely bored as they whittle the time away during a business day. However, these practices create layer upon layer of sedimentary rock within an organization and buttress refraction.
For example, an executive client of mine had actually proposed taking a non‐performing manager and promoting him to a position of head of strategic planning inside the company, the rationale being that the strategic planning group was not that important or influential (a view which, you will certainly agree, is an issue in itself!). However, the non‐performing manager would still have staff in the strategic planning group, some of whom were young, talented, and enthusiastic, and had potential to create a lot of value for the company. Any zeal for growth, ambitious targets, and excitement at the prospect of change emanating from above would never reach this group under that manager. And it gets worse … I pointed out to the executive how the staff under the non‐performing manager would wither. Their skills would atrophy. They would become demoralized and cynical. They would fail to grow and achieve their full potential, and might even leave the company! The company would be far better off paying the non‐performing manager to retire early and building up a productive strategic planning team, rather than condemn a group of potential next generation leaders to mediocrity or even possibly losing them to competitors! Financially alone, the business would be better off, not to mention the enthusiasm and emotional well‐being of the staff!
Keeping non‐performers creates refraction layers, even when the non‐performers are sidelined. Whatever the cause, overprotection of labor—beyond what is practical, fair, or required for regulatory compliance reasons—forms refraction layers.
Seniority‐Based Promotion
Similar to overprotection of labor is seniority‐based promotion. During the postwar era, seniority‐based promotion, as opposed to performance‐based promotion, was standard practice in most companies. Today, it is not uncommon for the leaders of Japanese companies to claim that their seniority‐based promotion system has been replaced with a meritocracy. However, in many companies, the meritocracy is more aspirational than actual, and seniority‐based promotion continues in practice if not in policy—even in foreign companies in Japan!
In one such company, I suggested to the CEO to promote a top‐performing sales manager to a senior‐level role. Despite agreeing that the candidate would be a top performer and create a lot of value for the company, he responded, “I could not possibly promote him! He would have subordinates who are older than he is! Think of how they would feel!”
My retort was, “Think of how your star performers will feel when you give priority to the fragile feelings of mediocre managers over business results! Your mediocre managers, even if their feelings are hurt, will stay with your company, but do you think your star performer will remain with you if his results are not rewarded?”
Seniority‐based promotion and lifetime employment may have been the pillars of Japanese corporate life for many years, but these practices are not unique to Japan. Other companies around the world have tended to reward years of service for promotion over performance. No matter where a business is in the world, any system that blocks the flow of innovative management talent creates refraction layers. Yet seniority‐based promotion is one of the most insidious causes of refraction layers, as it deliberately creates layers of calcified rock in a company, with uniform advancement based on years of service or age. In the end, it is the leader who decides how talent moves or does not move inside the company. An effective leader can scrap the system, or at least limit its extent within the organization by paying close attention to promotions one or two levels directly below him. Many leaders still fail to appreciate how toxic seniority‐based promotion can be and lack the resolve to change the status quo.
Leadership Fear of Staff
Leadership fear of staff is surprisingly common, particularly in foreign companies in Japan. It usually occurs between senior‐level sales directors and executive management. An executive, particularly an expat executive, is often afraid to push a veteran Japanese sales director too hard on change in sales strategy because they fear damaging or losing key customer relationships that a sales director supposedly owns. Instead, the executive turns their attention to retraining sales staff, which is utterly useless while the sales director is still in power, because as mentioned previously, leadership proximity trumps leadership rank.
Many mid‐level managers are aware of this power over their superiors—and some use it! In one the most brazen cases I have encountered, the CEO of a major foreign brand here told me how his head of sales deliberately implemented his own idea of strategy with a key account, doing the opposite of the decisions made with the CEO. When confronted by the CEO after the fact, the sales director threatened to resign. The CEO backed down for fear of losing the key customer account altogether.
The CEO later asked me what he should do. My advice was to fire the sales director, and he did. His Japanese HR director put up a fight—told him this was illegal (it was not), and even contacted the head of global HR in New York to try to rally support and get her boss to back down. In the end, the CEO did not back down, and the head of sales lost his job. The result? The company had a record year for growth, outpacing every other market where the brand is present.
The company did not lose a single key account, as the CEO had feared. The customers were making far too much money from the business relationship to be derailed by a personal spat! However, other leaders in similar cases have allowed such senior staff to remain out of fear, effectively creating a refraction layer themselves. Every person, leader or not, has control over his own fear, and should never be driven by fear when making decisions!
Rewarding Lack of Failure as Success
Growth‐oriented people view failure as learning, and as such are the most open to change. I once had the following discussion with the HR director of a major IT product business in Japan:
ME
HR DIRECTOR
It is impossible to succeed at anything without failure. People who cannot deal with failure won't learn. Those who won't learn, won't change or grow. They will postpone actions and decisions for fear of ruining their spotless records. They will wait for others to act, because the safest route to avoid responsibility for failure is to avoid responsibility altogether.
A culture that rewards lack of failure as success, whether explicitly or tacitly, creates refraction layers at all levels. Let me be clear here. I am not proposing that a leader should reward failure due to lack of competence or negligence. Nor am I suggesting that recklessness should be rewarded. In order to succeed in business, a manager must take on reasonable risk. Some endeavors will naturally fail. If failure is always penalized, even for a good idea that just did not work, managers will avoid taking on reasonable risk. Avoiding reasonable risk is in effect a highly risky behavior, as the business is bound to fail. The behavior of taking on reasonable risk is far more important to the success of the business than single successes or failures.
A leader has control over which behavior is rewarded and which is not. Reward behaviors, not just results. Give people permission to fail. Penalize inaction. Take control over reward criteria, rather than leaving it entirely to HR.
Any organization that penalizes failure when managers take on reasonable risk will naturally create a whole class of mid‐level leaders who avoid any type of risk. Change has inherent risk and, as such, a leader will have inadvertently created a refraction layer of mid‐level managers who will oppose change of any type.
A leader should not underestimate their own power to keep refraction layers from forming in the first place—or of their susceptibility to a refractive organization, should they allow it.
Dearth of Leadership Bench
An organization that is full of refraction layers typically also suffers from leadership dearth as the former begets the latter. A growing and changing organization has constant appetite for new leaders at all levels that must be satiated, and the fastest way to achieve that is from a pool of internal candidates. CEOs, however, often tell me how their pool is inadequate or otherwise non‐existent, this despite a plethora of people with the right titles and requisite years of experience! CEOs have complained to me how they feel that they have often had to compromise—placing a candidate who was not right for the role simply because no one else was available immediately, and there was no time to field external candidates, let alone allow an external hire process the time to ramp up to hire someone who was best‐in‐class.
When a mid‐level manager opposes the thinking and strategic direction of the firm, and decides to resist it, whether actively or passively, they prevent change from above reaching their staff. They will be overly worried about risk related to the new and the different, and as such often turn out to be a poor candidate for a more senior position where the ability to respond to change is critical. If many managers think similarly and decide to resist in the same way, then the pool of candidates narrows further. Because of the principle of proximity of leadership, the thinking and associated behaviors are projected below, leading to a dearth of leadership bench at more junior levels as well. The organization overall experiences a dearth of leadership bench at all levels, including for junior positions, not just senior ones. Attempting to develop more staff to become leaders is bound to fail because the reason for the dearth of leadership bench is not lack of talent, but rather a refraction layer above them.
For example, I coached four talented sales team leaders in an organization, each of whom had different sales directors, three of whom formed a refraction layer, and the fourth who was a top performer. All the team leaders had talent and enthusiastically absorbed learning and began to change behavior and improved performance while I was actively coaching them. However, the team leaders under the refraction layer directors quickly reverted to old ways, and dropped to previous performance levels after the end of my engagement. They simply could not spread their wings under their bosses. The fourth team leader, however, did sustain improvement and continued to improve performance under his boss, also a top performer. That team leader was promoted to an international director position himself not long after.
The other three managers were ultimately transferred and placed under the management of the fourth director. As soon as they were, performance improved. However, time was lost just when the company was in need of good mid‐level leaders. They are all on their way to a promotion, but their fourth colleague made director at least two years ahead of the time when they will first become eligible to do so.
