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Monday 8 October 2012

13 cool quotes on change…..

1. Slowness to change usually means fear of the new. Philip Crosby
2. Change before you have to. Jack Welch
3. People don’t resist change. They resist being changed! Peter Senge
4. The key to change ..... is to let go of fear. Rosanne Cash
5. If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Maya Angelou
6. Culture does not change because we desire to change it. Culture changes when the organisation is transformed – the culture reflects the realities of people working together every day. Frances Hesselbein
7. The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic. Peter Drucker
8. The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades. John P. Kotter
9. Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. John F. Kennedy
10. Your success in life isn’t based on your ability to simply change. It is based on your ability to change faster than your competition, customers and business. Mark Sanborn
11. Change your thoughts and you change your world. Norman Vincent Peale
12. If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. Lao Tzu
13. It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change. Charles Darwin

Sunday 8 July 2012

How will the Olympics change the way that you work?

This year’s Olympics and Paralympics will be the biggest sporting events to hit the UK in living memory and already Olympic fever is building. However the Olympics will present a number of challenges to managers and leaders. Not least the possibility of having to manage disrupted travel, increased absenteeism, loss of focus and dealing with heightened emotion. There will also be employees who may not be interested in the games but who could still be affected by the actions of others.

Whilst such a major event could pose problems none of them are insurmountable. Much has been written, and there is plenty of guidance available, to manage the logistics of having to travel into London, hosting virtual meetings, equipping people to work remotely and creating policies to manage unexplained sickness and absence. Everything that a good manager might need is out there somewhere waiting to be planned, organised and implemented. How about the leadership side of the equation? A useful model to use to consider that balance between management and leadership is the view presented by John P Kotter:

Management:
Consists of planning and budgeting; organising and staffing; controlling and problem solving in order to produce a degree of predictability and order. It has the potential to consistently produce the short-term results expected by various stakeholders (e.g., for customers, always being on time; for stockholders, always being on budget).

Leadership:
Consists of establishing direction; aligning people; motivating and inspiring in order to produce change, often to a dramatic degree. It has the potential to produce extremely useful change (e.g., new products that customers want, new approaches to labour relations that help make a firm more competitive).
Source: A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management. John P Kotter © 1990 The Free Press

Potential2Achieve have considerable experience in working with organisations to move to a more flexible way of working, see our case study Supporting cultural change through workspace design for more detail. We work with leaders and teams to create and build the culture that supports long-term change, often this can be as a result of needing to manage a short-term immediate need. Good leaders will use the Olympics as opportunity to engage positively with their people, setting a future direction, increasing engagement and encouraging mutual respect and goodwill.

The Olympics presents a unique occasion to bring about long term change in the way that people work and to create and embed a culture of engagement. If nothing else the Olympics provide an opportunity to lift the spirits of the UK during this tough economic climate and encourage people to come together. We say let’s embrace it, what do you think?