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Organisational Development and Managing Change
Practice Management and Business Skills
| What topic does this episode consider? | Organisation development, career development, training, coaching, innovation, leadership development, talent management, change management, leadership styles |
| Why is this topic relevant? | ‘Organisational development’ is an umbrella term that refers to different aspects of managing change and performance to support organisational growth. Effective organisational development can empower leaders and employees, create a positive culture, increase employee engagement and encourage honesty and transparency in feedback. But despite these benefits, many people (lawyers included) are not aware of the importance and advantages of a thoughtful and considered organisational development strategy. This episode explores the benefits of organisational development, providing recommendations and strategies that are relevant for law firms, lawyers and organisations more generally. |
| What models, case studies or concepts are references in this episode?
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| What are the main points? | What is organisational development?
Organisational development is fluid and will evolve overtime
What is change management?
How is change implemented?
Step 1: create a sense of urgency or what’s often referred to as a burning platform around the need for change. Step 2: build a core collation usually amongst leadership to help lead and act as champions for change. Step 3: focus on developing a strategic vision. Step 4: focus on communication of that vision and emphasises the need to communicate it frequently and powerfully and to embed it within the organisation. Step 5: focus on removing obstacles – identifying any processes or structures that are standing in the way of change. Step 6: focus on short term wins, giving people within the organisation a sense of accomplishment and victory early in the change process to increase motivation. Step 7: focus on building on momentum and making improvements. Step 8: focus on anchoring the changes into the corporate culture so it becomes part of the DNA of that organisation.
1. Awareness: of the need for change 2. Desire: to support the change 3. Knowledge: of how to change 4. Ability: to demonstrate skills and behaviour 5. Reinforcement: to make change stick What is the role of leadership?
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| What are the practical takeaways? |
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| Show notes | Sinek, Simon, Start With Why, (Penguin UK, 2011) Sinek, Simon, TED Talk: How great leaders inspire action Rhode, Deborah, Lawyers as Leaders, (Oxford University Press, 2013) Thompson, Anthony, Dangerous Leaders How & Why Lawyers Must Be Taught To Lead, (Stanford University Press, 2018) |
| David Turner:
1:00 | Hello and welcome to Hearsay, a podcast about Australian laws and lawyers for the Australian legal profession, my name is David Turner. As always, this podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, a boutique commercial law firm making complex simple. Organisational development is a discipline dealing with the practice of changing organisations, principally: how those organisations managed their people to encourage growth. It’s an umbrella term that covers many different disciplines and growth areas including career development, training, coaching, innovation, leadership development, talent management and change management. Effective organisational development can empower leaders and employees, create a positive culture, increase employee engagement and encourage honesty and transparency in feedback. These benefits can improve organisational efficiency, increase and improve service delivery to customers, create organisational flexibility and increase overall job satisfaction for employees. But despite these benefits, many lawyers aren’t aware of the importance and advantages of a thoughtful and considered organisational development strategy. Joining me today on Hearsay to talk about the many different aspects of organisational development is Milena Milojevic, organisational development specialist at the Uniting Church, Milena thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
| Milena Milojevic: | And thank you so much for having me David. |
| DT: | Now let’s start with the basics: what is organisational development? |
| MM: | Well first of all I think you covered it off really really well. |
| DT: | Oh well thank you! |
| MM: 2:00
3:00 | Essentially it’s a planned approach to how we develop organisations to be more effective, so this is done with a focus on developing things like as you mentioned you know people, we’ve also got systems, strategies and structures. And we look at all of those things to see how we can really improve the effectiveness of an organisation. Organisational development is also very much about taking a holistic approach, so this is around how we shift and also transform thoughts and behaviours. And as a result, organisational development can take time, or it does take time, when I’m talking about time it can take anywhere between one and three years to really truly implement and embed interventions and strategies right across an organisation. And when we do so, we really start to empower both leaders and our people. We’re giving leaders better access to drive their own results, by giving people more autonomy as to how they go about doing their jobs. TIP: Milena has mentioned that it can take between one and three years to implement this kind of major organisational change. While all types of organisational change are challenging, perhaps the most challenging of all is cultural change. This type of transformational change can take up to 10 years to implement which makes sense when you think about all the attitudes, assumptions and internal beliefs that you have to change. According to research completed by global consulting firm McKinsey, only 26% of transformational change initiatives are actually considered successful. The main takeaway from McKinsey’s survey is that successful initiatives focus on the people, not the project! Which is a recommendation that Melina will emphasize shortly. |
| DT:
4:00 | I really like that phrase you used right at the top; that at its core it’s a planned approach that it’s kind of a conscious approach to organic growth because of course growth is a great thing in an organisation but it’s also quite disruptive as well. And that idea that by having a planned approach you can, not just smooth some of that friction, but actually derive all the wonderful benefits that we were talking about right at the top of the episode. Now, specifically in the legal context our listeners are lawyers, they’re professional services workers, how would you describe effective organisational development? How does that differ from listeners who work in the private sector for example? |
| MM:
5:00 | Yep. So I think in any organisation, be it in a legal firm or an organisation that’s in the corporate environment or also in the not-for-profit, it really is all about figuring out how we organise ourselves and how we operate. So the big thing here is really to be able to ask ourselves and to answer why: do we exist? And who do we do it for? So who’s our audience? Who are our clientele? Who are our stakeholders? Then it’s about having a really clearly defined and articulated business strategy. And then what’s going to typically follow is a really clearly defined and again articulated operating strategy, because without those, how can we put the right governance frameworks in place? And when we’re talking about legal for example a legal firm that might be a little bit different to let’s say an entity or an arm within an organisation or even within the government sector, we add further complexities because when we’re part of a bigger organisation we need to also ensure that we’re part of the organisation, we need to be able to fit into that bigger picture. |
| DT: | That’s a really interesting idea to me because as I said growth is a good thing it’s something that we’re always charting and measuring, and I suppose that at first instance when we see that our organisation is growing we think well that’s a great thing and perhaps don’t inspect that much further. But what you’re talking about is that growth can actually take you away from your strategy or take you away from the organisation purpose and that’s important to have growth that’s aligned with that strategy. |
| MM: 6:00
7:00 | Yeah, absolutely. So it’s not going to work if it’s not aligned, and like you say if we stray too far, we start going on different tangents. So it’s really important to go back to why we’re here, who we’re doing it for and how we’re doing it and continually to inspect, to assess, to review and to refine as we go. TIP: What Melina’s emphasising here is organisational purpose. Why does this organisation exist? In his 2009 book called ‘Start With Why’ author Simon Sinek argued that people are inspired more by a sense of purpose (that’s the ‘why’) and that this should be conveyed prior to communicating the process (the ‘how’) and the outcome (the ‘what’). Sinek argues the two main ways to influence human behaviour are manipulation and inspiration, and it’s inspiration that is more powerful and sustainable. Now this comes back to Melina’s point, to continuously ask yourself, why does this organisation exist? We’ll include a reference to Simon Sinek’s book and a link to his Ted Talk ‘How great leaders inspire action’, one of the most viewed Ted Talks of all time, in the Show Notes. |
| DT: | Now, one of the aspects of that is the career development of the individuals within an organisation and their career progression really has to be aligned with the organisation’s growth and with the organisation’s strategy. How does that tie in? How do you make that fit together? |
| MM:
8:00 | Yeah, so as you mentioned again earlier, the people component is really critical to organisational development and when we think about the employee life cycle, the employee experience, this is really all around looking at that timeline, that pipeline from go to woe, so from the moment we’re attracting people, to how we recruit them, to how we onboard them, to how we induct them. And then obviously from there it’s around well how are we actually going to develop them? This is where our performance management comes into place and then it’s also around well how do we now retain? What’s our talent management strategy like? What does succession planning look like? So career progression is an absolute part – a big part, a huge part – of any strategy when it comes to organisational development. But it’s also around what is going to be fit for purpose for our organisation. They need to be able to align goals, aspirations to the organisation itself and where it needs to go and it’s when these things come together that we all are moving in the same direction. |
| DT: | We were speaking with another guest recently about how identifying with the purpose of your organisation drives engagement. Is that something that you look for when you’re hiring staff? Is that something that you try to cultivate once you’ve hired staff? Is it something that perhaps some employees never identify with the purpose of the organisation? Where is the role of organisational development in aligning the purpose of the employee with the purpose of the organisation? |
| MM: 9:00 | Yeah, I think it needs to start right from the beginning. So when we’re looking to attract that talent: who are we attracting? Who are the kind of employees we want to be working with us? It’s from this moment that we really should be starting to really sell that purpose, that vision, that mission. If there’s no buy-in at this stage, then they’re not the right people for us. But at the same time it doesn’t stop there so when they actually join us, what’s the culture like? What are the values like? Are we living them? And if someone can’t align to that, then perhaps they’re not the right person for the job. |
| DT:
10:00
11:00 | I think of a famous example, Zappos the footwear company that would pay employees to leave in their first week of induction because if they were there for the money then they weren’t the right pick. TIP: Now Zappos sells shoes, but it’s a business that is fanatical about customer service. In their call centre staff are told that their job is to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. Unlike most call centres, these employees aren’t required to follow a script or get through a certain quota of calls each shift, rather they’re completely focused on addressing whatever problem the customer is experiencing on that call. New employees of Zappos undertake a 4-week training program where they learn about Zappos strategy and culture, which is primarily focused on providing exceptional customer service. But interestingly, after week 1 of induction, Zappos gives new employees what they call “The Offer”. What is The Offer? “If you quit today, we’ll pay you for the time you’ve been here, plus we will give you a $1000 bonus”. Effectively, it’s a bribe for new employees to quit. Now you might ask why do that? Why would a company whose ultimate economic goal is to increase profit give their money away to brand new employees? The answer is simple, Zappos wants employees who are committed to the organisation. If an employee is willing to accept The Offer, then they don’t have the sense of commitment that Zappos requires, so they’d rather find that out now rather than later. Compared to the cost of hiring and retaining the wrong people, The Offer is actually a cost-effective way of ensuring that you are hiring and retaining the right people. Do you have other tips on how to find someone who’s aligned with the organisation’s purpose when you’re recruiting? |
| MM: | This comes down to the quality of, I guess, of the interview itself, the questions that we’re asking of the potential employee. And this is really about tying it into trying to get a sense of who they are, where they want to go and again coming back to well what are the values that we’re living here? What’s the kind of culture that we’re going to create? And to your example another really great one from earlier this year I think it was Atlassian came out I think it was mid-year and they said they were no longer going to be hiring brilliant jerks. |
| DT: | I love that term. |
| MM: 12:00 | I love that. So again these are the brilliant jerks that have wonderful, brilliant, technical capabilities, but it doesn’t mean that they’re the right fit for the organisation and for where it wants to go and who it wants to be. |
| DT: | Yeah I love that idea. That’s great. And returning to career progression I suppose once you’ve identified those people who hopefully aren’t brilliant jerks, hopefully just brilliant, they’re aligned with your purpose, but they have ambitious career goals, as many lawyers do. How do you help those employees, help those people achieve their career goals in a way that’s consistent with the development of the organisation? |
| MM:
13:00 | So first we need to be asking regularly what our people want. Then we need to be listening and seeing what we can do about it. But I think the really critical thing here is not to confuse personal goals with the organisation. So it’s all well and good to put systems in place or to send people on courses or to get further qualifications, but again it needs to be fit for purpose. So how are we throwing leadership development in there? How are we throwing real management skills in there? Or emotional intelligence? So we’re building out well-rounded lawyers, employees, right across the board. |
| DT: | Capability that matches what the people want to do but matches what the organisation needs as well. |
| MM: | Yeah absolutely it can be a really fine line, but if you sway too much to either of those sides you’re going to get a mismatch. |
| DT: | Can you tell me about an example of this that you’ve come across in your career? An example of an organisation that might not have had some of these systems in place around career progression? |
| MM:
14:00 | Yeah so, one of the organisations I worked with not so long ago didn’t have the right career structures or the right progression focus in place. It was an organisation with about two thousand people and about 80% of those employees were on the frontline. So if you’re coming in on the frontline there was a real sense of, where do I go from here? There was this real appetite to work in the head office. But yet we weren’t giving them the skills, the knowledge, the know-how on how they might be able to transition and move into those roles. So we were getting a lot of that feedback through things like pulse surveys, we’d run those a couple of times a year, you’d get that feedback from performance development plans, and you’d also get that from feedback in general. So we took a lot of that, we did a lot of digging, we did a lot of analysing to figure out well where do we go from here? How do we start to shift the narrative and give our people the opportunities that they’re obviously craving? |
| DT: | I mean you must’ve had to look beneath the craving for that opportunity I suppose because if 80% of your workers are on the front line you can’t have all of them go to head office even if that is the ambition of most. Were you able to look at those career progressions, ambitions and kind of find an underlying theme that you were able to satisfy at the frontline? |
| MM: 15:00
16:00
17:00 | Look I think the theme there is they just think the grass is greener on the other side. There are more opportunities there, they have more access to you know the excitement of what’s happening. And so what we really had to do was look at well what can we put in place? What are the interventions that we can really look to embed to give our people a chance to start to explore? And some of the things that we did there was, you know, we had this great initiative called ‘view from a different desk’. So this gave people an opportunity to put their hand up to say ‘hey, I’m really interested in IT’, or in people and culture, or in how products are created.’ And so what we were looking to do there is how do we bring those worlds together? So we’d create opportunities for our frontline people to come into support office, so head office, and work with different teams. And so by doing that what we found was that the frontline, so this is 80% of our people, well guess what: they’re closest to our customer, they know the challenges and imagine when you bring them into support office and all of a sudden they’re working with product teams. So these are the people that have got the expertise in building new products and services and yes whilst they have experience or information from our customers, the most invaluable insights they’re getting are from our frontline. I mean that was just one initiative. A few other things that we looked to do as well was what we called our ‘circle of service’. So this was all around continuous improvement. So it was helping people understand you don’t need a leadership position to be able to lead, to be able to influence, to be able to present new ideas, fresh ideas. And then of course we had other things like our ‘Future Leader Program’ which, it took us a couple of years to really get it right and really create a program that we could start to tap into and really develop the capabilities of our rising stars. And it was these sorts of initiatives that when they came together, all of a sudden we’re creating promotion-ready people. So whilst those promotions aren’t coming about on a regular basis, there’s secondments happening, there’s different ways of giving people exposure to new and interesting teams and different ways of working. And by doing all of those things we’re able to all of a sudden tap into even greater motivation, even greater discretionary effort, our people are happier, they really feel like they’re contributing. |
| DT:
18:00 | I like that idea of preparing people for those promotions. That the answer to a desire for career progression and ambition isn’t just to throw people into a job that they’re ill-equipped for, the infamous ‘Peter Principle’ that people reach the role that they’re least equipped to do. but that you prepare them to succeed in a role and that’s how you kind of answer that ambition. Some of the initiatives that you’ve described are initiatives that an organisation’s been able to benefit from by having an organisational development specialist such as yourself to execute them. Some of our listeners might practice in much smaller firms, they might have one or two partners, they might have ten to fifteen staff, what can smaller organisations do to promote good organisational development? |
| MM:
19:00 | Yeah, so you’ve probably heard of that really wonderful African proverb: it takes a village to raise a child. So that means that that whole community, the village is coming together to engage with that child so it can really grow in a healthy and safe environment. So I think where you don’t have some sort of OD specialist or in-house people and culture team, it’s knowing that it’s up to the leaders, up to the partners, to come together and to really create that community for their people to thrive. And it’s about keeping it front of mind. So OD’s not one of those things we do once a year or every now and again or when you-know-what hits the fan; it’s around how do we ensure it’s part of our agenda and we’re reviewing it on a regular basis. So it really needs to be a very conscious, a very deliberate effort on the part of leadership, on the part of partners to really keep it alive. |
| DT:
| I think a lot of lawyers in small firms would be familiar with that idea of it taking a village to run the practice and it small firms including in my own practice lawyers are responsible for a whole range of different things, they’re responsible for the development of the practice, they’re responsible for bringing in work, they’re responsible for chasing bills and making sure those have been paid, and equally with organisational development that’s something that will fall to every lawyer in the team I imagine to play a role in. But like generating a pipeline of work, like in business development, it’s often something that I imagine can fall by the wayside when faced with the frontline work that has to get done by five o’clock that day. Do you have any tips about how to prioritise organisational development? How to make sure that it is something that you’re doing every day and not something that you do when you’ve got the time? |
| MM: 20:00
21:00
| So here’s the thing. Lawyers aren’t set up to be leaders. I don’t think that they’re taught those essential leadership skills. And it’s something that they need to learn on the job and it’s something that they actually need to realise when it comes to the development not only of their pipelines, of the work coming through. TIP: Now as lawyers we might be a bit offended by this statement – that lawyers aren’t taught to be leaders – but let’s be honest, there is some truth to it. Undergraduate law students complete a lot of subjects that help teach us technical legal skills – but those subjects don’t teach us leadership or management skills. Research has shown that the legal profession attracts a large number of individuals with the ambition to lead, but the focus of legal education and the reward structure of legal practice undervalue the interpersonal skills necessary for successful leadership. Success is usually driven by being a great technician. Now this isn’t a new criticism and quite a few books have been published on this point including “Lawyers as Leaders” by Deborah L Rhode and “Dangerous Leaders How & Why Lawyers Must Be Taught to Lead” by Anthony C Thompson. We’ll include the citation for both of those books in our show notes. For me it’s a massive mindset shift because like you say there’s all this business-as-usual work that needs to happen, it’s paying the bills, it’s keeping the lights on, it’s bringing the work in. But again, who’s around us, who are the people around us to help us do all of these components? And if we’re not looking after our people well guess what, after a period of time they’re going to go somewhere else where they’re going to be looked after. So for me it comes down to mindset. You need to make it a priority just as you make all those other things a priority. |
| DT: 22:00 | Yeah well said. Now as I understand it there’s five stages of organisation development, and we’ll talk through each of them today and they’re: 1) birth, 2) growth, 3) maturity, 4) decline and 5) revival kind of a cycle, or hopefully a continuing upwards slope that as you reach that decline the revival takes you into another cycle. Now for new law firms that are at the birth stage of organisational development, how do they start building an organisational development strategy? |
| MM:
23:00 | Yeah great question. So if you’re coming back to what organisational development is all about, it comes to: how do we make sure that we’re being effective? So this is a really good time to start to review our systems, our processes, our structures, it’s a great time to start to look at well who do we have on our team? What are we doing for them? Where are we going? And coming back to why do we exist? What’s our purpose? Do we have the right skill sets, not only for today but also for tomorrow? What kind of culture are we creating? So this is a really great time to assess all of those components and again really look at your employee life cycle from the moment we bring people in, to the moment we may need to exit them or they leave on their own. How are each of those stages working for us? Do we need to modify? Do we need to tweak? |
| DT: | I suppose at that birth stage a lot of that prospective in the sense that you’re designing a culture or planning a culture and planning what that life cycle’s going to be. But if we talk about some of those later stages, a law firm that might be in the maturity stage or even declining, you know there are some law firms that have been around for hundreds of years in Australia. What can they do to get back on that upward slope of revival? |
| MM:
24:00 | Yeah, so companies or organisations or firms that are at this stage, we know that they’re less likely to be innovative. We know that they’re less likely to take risks. They’ve established themselves, they’ve been in the market for a really long time, they probably have an established client group. So this is really now all about well how do they start to pivot? How do they start to disrupt? So the world is constantly changing, how do we bring in those new clients? So really again it’s looking at how do we become more agile? Do we need to diversify what we’re doing and how we’re doing it? Are the skill sets that we have with us today the right skills to take us into tomorrow? How do we tap into what our competitors are doing? What’s their competitive advantage? So this is now a time when we’re in that perhaps decline stage of really looking at what else is happening out there? Because if we’re not diversifying, if we’re not evolving, we’re an organisation that’s really going to start to die. |
| DT: | I guess even on that return to the upwards slope, it’s that kind of growth we were talking about before that might be good in principle but disruptive growth, growth that creates friction in the organisation and that’s where change management that sort of sub-discipline of organisational development comes in. Can you tell me a bit about change management, what that is? |
| MM: 25:00 | Yeah so change management essentially is around how we’re going to prepare, support and help our people through any organisational transition that’s happening at any point in time. Really think about it as a formal way of communicating. So it’s around well what change needs to happen, because when we can take our people on a journey, they’re a lot more inclined to buy into the process and to help us get to where we need to go in a much quicker way. |
| DT: | It sounds like communication is really the heart of change management. That you can have a brilliant plan to transform the strategy for your business but if the people who are going to execute it aren’t on board it’s just never going to happen. |
| MM:
26:00
27:00 | Absolutely and guess what? Change management is really hard. It’s hard work and it takes a lot of commitment and dedication. Essentially there are about four to five well known change management models that organisations typically turn to. So one of the first ones I’m going to touch on is what we call ‘Kotter’s 8 Step Model’. So John Kotter himself was a professor of leadership at Harvard University and he analysed and looked into hundreds of transitions that organisations were going through. What he did with his model was not only look at the change but the most critical part I think there was for me was, and something that I really like that I really resonate as an OD practitioner, is how do people cope and manage with the change? So his 8 steps looked something like this: the first really is about how do we create a sense of urgency? And what this means is how do we help our audience, our people understand why the change is so important. And this is where leaders really start to engage in those conversations. What are the problems we’re trying to solve? Where is it that we’re trying to go and how do we bring everyone on board so we’re going in the right direction? The next one, and I think a lot of organisations get this one wrong, is around how do we start to build a core coalition? So this is where we invite various leaders and stakeholders from various areas of our business to really come together to help promote the change. And why I think a lot of organisations get it wrong is that it takes a lot of time to get even that coalition on board, on the same page and to really understand where we’re driving towards. Then it’s around developing a strategic vision. So this is all around, you know, what are the plans that we need to have in place to make it a reality? Then we need to start involving everyone in the plan. So this is again where that critical communication comes into play. It’s around how do we convince the organisation that the change is necessary. |
| DT: | And of combatting that status-quo bias. |
| MM:
28:00
29:00
30:00 | Yeah, absolutely and to do this we need to be super open to feedback from our people. So it’s not just about telling them what’s going to happen, but how do we iterate? How do we get them on board? How do we figure out the bits that are working and the bits that aren’t? And then also it’s for leaders to start to really reduce the obstacles and challenges that can get in our way. We also then start to focus on what are some of the short-term wins. So this is where leaders might start to create shorter, smaller little milestones for their people to reach to keep them motivated. And of course then it’s all around how do we keep the momentum going? And finally, how do we create something that’s really going to stick? And this might be around celebrating great behaviours, about putting some sort of a reward structure in place, you can do that in a whole bunch of ways. What I found through my experience over the years is that this model, the Kotter model, typically tends to lend itself to much larger transformational change management initiatives. TIP: Melina has just covered John Kotter’s 8 step change model, so let’s recap those steps. Step 1 is to create a sense of urgency, or what’s often referred to as the ‘burning platform’ around the need for change. Step 2 is to build a core collation to help lead and act as champions for change. Step 3 focuses on developing a strategic vision that people within the organisation can understand and remember. Step 4 then focuses on communicating that vision and emphasises the need to communicate it frequently and powerfully to embed it within everything that you do. This is followed by Step 5 which focuses on removing obstacles to change – identifying any processes or structures that are standing in the way of change. In Step 6 the focus in on short term wins, giving people within the organisation a sense of accomplishment and victory early on in the change process to increase motivation and buy-in. Step 7 focuses on building on momentum and making improvements. And in the last step, Step 8 we focus on anchoring the changes into the corporate culture so it becomes part of the DNA of that organisation. This is Kotter’s 8 step model which can be contracted to the ADKAR model created by Professor Jeff Hiatt which focuses on 5 outcomes needed to achieve lasting change that Melina will now explain. |
| MM:
31:00 | Whereas something like the Adkar model that I’ve seen in organisations, tends to focus on goals that leaders are trying to achieve, versus massive transformations. So when you think about it, leaders in this instance are trying to create awareness for their people. So coming back to that line of communication, they’re here trying to spread the word and really help their people understand why this change is coming, why it’s important. Then it’s around creating desire, so it’s tapping into both the logical and emotional side of our employees, and how it’s going to relate to their position, to what they do day in, day out. And then the next critical part is around knowledge. So how do we tell them what they need to do or what they need to know? And then, as a leader, it’s about really checking into capability. So it’s one thing to be able to carry something out and it’s another thing to know how to do it. So it’s ensuring that we’re able to, as leaders, to assess where our capability is and what else we might need to do to really help uplift it. And of course finally it comes down to that reinforcement. TIP: just to recap that, the 5 outcomes in the ADKAR model are: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. So this model typically lends itself where we’ve got more of a narrow view. I’ve seen it work really well where we’re introducing new processes for example. Perhaps it’s not so much suitable, again, for larger scale transformations. |
| DT: | So the latter model is better suited to those smaller incremental changes. |
| MM: | Yeah, absolutely. |
| DT: 32:00 | Hearing you describe that second model it reminds me a bit of kind of marketing models where you move from awareness, to interest, to desire and then finally to the acquisition of the product. Is it similar to kind of selling the change internally in the same way that you might sell or persuade a customer to buy a product? |
| MM: | Yeah very much so. We need to be really great storytellers here. People need to know why things are happening. Why do we need to change? It’s been working for me, I think I’ve been doing it this way all the time, so absolutely it is about the sale. It’s about getting that buy-in, getting that engagement, but getting genuine engagement into why the change is necessary. |
| DT:
33:00 | And I suppose whether you’re following the large-scale model or the more incremental model it’s a massive challenge, there’s a reason why 83% of CEO’s believe that the biggest challenge facing their organisation is change. And that tells us another story which is that enthusiasm for and promotion of change really needs to come from the top of an organisation. Can you tell me a bit about how leadership and leadership styles impact on change management? |
| MM:
34:00
35:00 | So leadership styles have a massive impact on how well a change takes place. There’s a lot of literature out there on different leadership styles. TIP: There are many leadership styles that sit on a spectrum ranging from autocratic, authoritative, pacesetting, democratic, coaching, affiliative, laissez-faire. A leadership style can change over time and it’s also common for leaders to flex their style to suit different situations. I’m just going to touch on perhaps a couple of the ones we may be familiar with. You know there’s some of us that have experienced or perhaps we notice within ourselves, the autocratic style. So this is very much the ‘do as I say’. And this type of command and control leadership style may have worked in the past, and perhaps there are days and moments where it might be okay, but the organisations of today have moved on. Our talent today does not want to be told what to do. Which leads us to the more visionary style of leadership. So the leaders here, and I’ve seen this work really well with some of the leaders I’ve had the opportunity to work with, here they’re starting to take their people on a journey. They’re starting to set expectations and the big one here is about the ‘why’ frame, why it needs to happen. These are the leaders that can really bust through any uncertainty and really break down any ambiguities and start to lift the fog for our people or for their people. They’re really able to help their people see where they need to go, and unlike the autocratic leader, they’re not telling people, they’re not giving orders, they’re giving their people an opportunity on how they help to get to where they need to go. You’ve also got leadership styles such as democratic styles. So again, these are going to be the leaders that are typically asking, ‘what do you think?’ And there’s a place and time for that. And then of course you’ve got the laissez-faire style of leadership. So here leaders typically tend to let their people go with the flow. But imagine if you’re doing that and your people are going in a completely different direction. |
| DT:
36:00 | Yeah absolutely. And even a democratic style, if there’s resistance to change initially you know there’s a good reason not to be democratic in a private organisation. Very valuable thing for our political system, maybe not for an organisation in flux. I think a leadership style that a lot of lawyers will be familiar with is the pace-setting style. TIP: We were talking about different kinds of ‘leadership’ styles earlier, and the pacesetting style describes a very driven and motivated leader who sets the pace for others. These leaders set a high bar and push their team to keep to their pace. It’s a style that’s effective in getting things done and we see it a lot in the legal profession. But it can cause discontent with team members who either can’t keep pace or feel burnt-out from trying to. Which is great for getting business as usual done on time. It can be quite a stressful style but one that a lot of lawyers either use or have experienced. Is there a role for the pace-setting style in change management? Or lawyers really need to switch their leadership style and try to adopt that visionary persona? |
| MM:
37:00
38:00 | I think it’s about how do we incorporate the best out of each of these leadership styles? So for context and situation. I think it’s really important for leaders to be agile enough to change up their leadership style depending on the situation and the context. So we’ve got to remember for as long as we’re employing people, we need to be taking them with us. I think it’s absolutely critical for all lawyers and all leaders to be able to have some of that visionary style in how they approach what they do. TIP: Daniel Goleman has conducted extensive evidence-based research on emotional intelligence and leadership. He argues that the most effective leaders embrace and adopt all of the leadership styles that we have mentioned based on situational, organisation and human cues. Goleman describes visionary leaders as having an ability to describe the destination but not how to get there – giving people free reign to innovate, experiment and take calculated risks by themselves. However, this style can leave people confused about detail, priorities and expectations. So the most effective way for leaders with a visionary style is to surround themselves with leaders and champions who favour a democratic, coaching or pacesetting style to complement their own style. |
| DT: | Can you tell us about an example from your experience as an organisational development specialist of a leadership style that negatively impacted on a change that was being introduced? |
| MM: | This happens all the time. |
| DT: | Probably more examples of that than the positive version. |
| MM: | Yes, yes. So I do find that this happens all the time. So an organisation that I’ve recently done some work with, there was a leader in quite a critical role, so in a people leadership role and the organisation itself was going through a massive culture transformation. So this particular leader was in some ways not to be seen for the things that mattered. This particular leader really tended to move towards that democratic style of ‘what do you think?’ And with the ‘what do you think?’ it wasn’t so much about really getting input from people, but again the negative effect it had was to continue buying into those silos. So it wasn’t taking the feedback on-board to do something with it, but again it was this particular leader’s way of continuing to resist the change itself. |
| DT: 39:00 | I see. |
| MM: | And I think the big one for this particular example comes down to leadership capability. It’s one thing to take on any sort of transformation but if we’re not equipping our own leaders to help move through that change, they’re going to have the resistance themselves and that comes out in behaviours day in and day out. And it really can be detrimental to where the organisation is attempting to go. |
| DT: | Can you tell us about one of those rare examples of a positive leadership style that was really conducive to change? |
| MM:
40:00 | So I was very fortunate to work with who I think was an extraordinarily visionary leader, some years ago now, so going back two or three years. And what this CEO was really great at doing was bringing people on that journey. He was able to really align; why we were doing any sort of change at any given time, what the impact of that was going to be, what the benefit of that was going to be and more importantly there was regular communication happening. He built a strong coalition around him, so he then had the support of the leadership teams around him to really help implement and drive. And it was also around ensuring that our people, so his people, had buy-in, they had opportunities and plenty of them along the way to put their hands up to say well ‘why’ or ‘how’, ‘that’s not going to work’, ‘what if?’. So he was, as I say, really truly quite visionary in that way, but then again it was ensuring that he had the right people and the right skill sets around him to help bring that vision to life. And again it comes down to communication. How do we ensure as that senior leader, that we’re not only a great storyteller and narrator, but we’re a really brilliant editor as well. |
| DT: 41:00 | It’s a great example of how it’s harder than it sounds. That at first blush the idea of well telling people the benefit of the change and how it’s going to impact them positively sounds easy. But if you’re not managing the stakeholders who are instinctively resistant to the change, if you’re not managing the negative communications about the change that are coming from those stakeholders, if you’re not letting the undecided stakeholders feel heard and giving them an opportunity to buy-in it can backfire tremendously. So that’s a great example. Now let’s bring those two concepts together, earlier on in the episode we spoke about organisational development, how it’s really a planned approach to growth. And we’ve also spoken about change management, how that’s really a planned approach to a necessary change to bring an organisation back to that revival stage in its life cycle. How do those two concepts interact? How is change management important to organisational development and vice versa? |
| MM: 42:00 | Yeah so if you think about them, they absolutely travel side-by-side. They go hand in hand. So if OD is all around ‘how do we ensure that we’re the most effective we can be?’, ‘how can we perform at that optimal level?’, ‘how can we grow in positive ways?’, change management is the approach that helps us transition through any of those changes, regardless of where we might be in that OD life cycle. You know the OD in some ways gives us the bigger picture, and again we can have many different types of change interventions along the way, some of them can be at a macro level, some of them can be at the micro level. But it’s around how do we ensure that the people looking after each of those areas are talking to one another, that there’s always alignment between the two. |
| DT:
43:00 | It’s a good point that you really can’t have growth without change at the moment. It’s not as simple as just growing market share than as you say because our business world is changing so rapidly it’s very difficult to capture more of the market without actually implementing some change to the organisation or the product. Can you tell me about a time where organisational development and change management maybe weren’t so well integrated with one another within an organisation? That they weren’t implemented well together? |
| MM:
44:00 | And again this happens a lot as well. So, and I find that it happens more so in larger organisations where you’ve got different divisions, you’ve got different teams, you’ve got different products and services and different areas doing their thing. And where they start to clash is where there is no communication. And when they really start to clash, so this is the OD and the change management, is where there’s poor line of sight. Where there’s poor visibility, poor communication by both parties. So I’ve seen this happen when for example we’ve looked to implement, roll out certain initiatives for our staff, yet we perhaps weren’t communicating as closely with our change management teams. Where there’s poor communication, they can really start to negatively impact, be it whichever strategy or whichever intervention you’re doing either in the OD side or the change side. So it really does come back to how do we keep our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the organisation by keeping those lines of communication open? |
| DT: | It brings to mind the old adage that ‘no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy’ and that you might have a very planned organisational development strategy, but it needs to be responsive or flexible to the unexpected challenges that you’re going to face. There’s an aspect of change management in that aspect I imagine. |
| MM: | Absolutely and look at where we are this year, so 2020, it has thrown changes left, right and centre. |
| DT: | Talk about one of those unknown unknowns, right? |
| MM:
45:00 | That’s right and you know even at the start of this year, again, had a very clear twelve month program in place as part of a culture transformation piece that I’ve been working on. All of a sudden this pandemic hit, and we had to change the way we did things completely. And not only that it comes back to well let’s not forget our people. So change is a massive thing. Not only are we now looking at organisational redesigns at what these values could look like, but we’ve got real emotions we’re dealing with because all of a sudden I might be worried do I have a job tomorrow? So it’s how do we balance all of those things. And the only way to do that is to stay fluid. It’s to keep your eyes and ears open and to respond in very flexible ways. |
| DT: | Now we’ve spoken about change management in the abstract I suppose but taking it back to the professional services context and I suppose even more generally a services business context, I’ve heard that it can actually be more difficult to implement change management in a services business compared to a product business. Do you think that’s the case? |
| MM: 46:00 | From my experience, I’d say no. Why I say no is I’ve worked in professional services and I’ve also worked for product-based businesses. And whilst we might think for the product based, change management is perhaps a little bit easier, and in some ways it can be in the sense that we deliver something to the end user on-time on-budget, what we fail or can fail to see is that in any business that we work with or work within, we’re dealing with people. |
| DT: | In the end it always comes back to people doesn’t it? |
| MM: | Absolutely. |
| DT: | Now we’ve given our listeners a lot to think about in this episode, we’ve spoken about change management, organisational development, a few different models for both how leadership styles impact on both and why change is really necessary and how they go hand in hand; growth and change. For our listeners who are just starting this journey, who are maybe they’re at the birth stage of organisational growth at their firm, maybe they’re at the decline stage. But for someone who’s just starting this process what’s the one tip you’d give them to get started? |
| MM: | Focus on your people. Focus on your people, focus on your purpose. Really be clear on where you’re going, and then who are you going to be, what is the character of your organisation going to be as you get there? |
| DT: 47:00 | Start with purpose and the rest falls into place. |
| MM: | That’s right. |
| DT: | Well said, thank you very much for joining us today on Hearsay Melina. |
| MM: | Thanks so much David. |
| DT:
48:00 | You’ve been listening to Hearsay The Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank our guest Milena Milojevic for coming on the show. Now if you liked this episode about organisational development and change management, try listening to my interview with Breda Diamond next which is about the related topic of employee engagement, which is especially related if the change you’re implementing is a cultural one by the way. Or for something different, listen to my interview with Wenee Yap about legal tech and her own unplanned career in it. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim 1 continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Now as you know, whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self-assessed, but we suggest that this episode constitutes an activity in the practice management and business skills field. If you’ve claimed 5 CPD points for audio content already this CPD year, you might need to access our multimedia content to claim further points from Hearsay. Visit htlp.com.au for more information on claiming and tracking your points on the Hearsay platform. The Hearsay team is Tim Edmeades, our audio engineer, Kirti Kumar our researcher, Araceli Robledo our business development manager, Zahra Wilson our social media coordinator, and me, David Turner. Nicola Cosgrove is our executive producer and we’d be lost without her. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions – making complex simple. You can find all of our episodes as well as summary papers, transcripts, quizzes and more at htlp.com.au. That’s HTLP for Hearsay The Legal Podcast.com.au. Thanks for listening. |
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