The Frozen Middle Didn’t Freeze Itself

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The all-hands meeting ends and the slides go dark. Dozens of mid-level managers shuffle into the hallway, and before the elevator doors close, the verdict is already in. Not spoken loudly, not written anywhere, just present in the slightly-too-long pause before someone says “interesting presentation” and the eye contact that doesn’t quite happen.

Up on the executive floor, the CEO is telling his senior team the rollout went well.

That gap between what leadership believes happened and what actually happened thirty seconds after the applause is where strategies go to die. They don’t die in the market or because of competition. They die in the hallway.

You Don’t Find the Frozen Middle. You Build It.

Every senior team that has ever complained about middle manager resistance has a version of the same story: vision was clear, strategy was sound, and communication was thorough. Yet somewhere between the boardroom and the front line, the whole thing lost its pulse.

So the diagnosis comes back: the frozen middle. Risk-averse, poorly motivated, chronic blockers of innovation and execution. The managers who were supposed to cascade the change and instead quietly suffocated it.

It’s a convenient diagnosis, and it’s also almost always wrong.

Middle managers don’t freeze because they lack ambition or capability. They freeze because they’ve learned, through years of accumulated evidence, that full commitment to a new direction is a bad personal bet. They’ve watched too many initiatives dissolve the moment they became inconvenient. They’ve seen too many leaders who claimed to want honest feedback and then subtly punished the people who provided it. Too many all-hands meetings promised transformation and delivered only a new set of talking points.

The frozen middle is not a talent problem. It’s a trust deficit wearing a talent problem’s clothes.

They’ve Already Seen This Movie

Overt resistance is actually manageable. The manager who pushes back openly, who asks hard questions in the room, who tells you directly that the plan won’t work, that person is doing you a favor. They’re giving you something true and something you can act on.

The manager you cannot afford is the one who nods.

They use the new vocabulary with fluency and show up to the right meetings saying the right things with enough conviction that nobody flags them as a problem. Then they walk back to their teams and run the exact same playbook they’ve always run, because nobody gave them a genuine reason to do anything different.

That version of non-commitment is almost impossible to detect until it’s already cost you six months and a market window. Your new product arrives late because the people responsible for execution were executing a different agenda. The cost initiative delivers incremental savings against a structural disadvantage that’s been quietly widening. Your quality program shows up just after the customer defections it was supposed to prevent.

You can’t fight what you can’t see, and a nodding manager is invisible until the damage is done.

The Bet They’ve Already Made

Middle managers sit at the most consequential real estate in any organization. Senior executives rotate through roles every few years, while middle managers often stay. They know where the bodies are buried and what actually makes things move inside the organization. They’ve also made a private calculation about whether this initiative is different from the last one, and that calculation is running constantly beneath every meeting, every presentation, and every cascade session you’ve carefully designed.

When they’re genuinely enrolled in a direction, they are your most powerful asset. They break silos and translate strategy into operational reality while absorbing the friction that would otherwise grind execution to a halt. An organization that looks politically dysfunctional on paper starts behaving like one coherent unit, not because the structure changed but because the people in the middle decided to make it work.

When they’re not enrolled, that same network becomes a passive immune system rejecting the change. Not aggressively, not visibly, just consistently.

The question leaders almost never ask is why, not in the abstract, but specifically, in this organization, with these people. The answer almost always comes back to the same four things, and none of them show up in a strategy deck.

Four Things They Need to See, Not Hear

Middle managers won’t commit to any strategy, however elegant, unless they’ve witnessed four specific things from the people asking them to execute it. Not been told, witnessed.

Sincerity. Not the polished narrative about why the new direction is exciting, but the real account of what’s broken and why this direction is genuinely necessary, including the parts that are uncomfortable to say out loud. Leaders who communicate only the comfortable version of the truth train their organizations to distrust every version of it. The moment a manager detects the gap between the story they’re being told and the reality they’re living, the calculation tips. They file the initiative under “things leadership says” and move on.

Courage. Visible willingness to hear hard things and make the hard calls those things require. A leader who signals, even subtly, that they prefer good news will receive only good news, right up until the moment they can no longer afford to. Middle managers watch this closely. They test it, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, by observing what happens to the people who tell the truth. If those people get quietly sidelined, the lesson lands fast and spreads faster.

Competence. Not a perfect plan, nobody has one, but demonstrated ability to manage a strategy through the inevitable messiness of real change. To stay the course when things get harder before they get better and follow through when following through is inconvenient. Middle managers have watched too many initiatives quietly shelved the moment difficulty arrived to keep investing in ones that show no signs of holding. What they’re looking for isn’t certainty. It’s evidence that leadership will still be running this play in eighteen months.

Concern. Genuine, visible regard for the human cost of the plan. Every new strategy creates disruption, and the managers absorbing that disruption on behalf of their teams are watching closely to see whether the people driving the change actually care what it costs. When they conclude it doesn’t, their commitment becomes performance. Polished and consistent, it will sustain itself indefinitely because hollow performance is indistinguishable from real commitment right up until the moment you need the organization to do something genuinely hard.

These four things cannot be communicated in a meeting. They accumulate through behavior over time, or they don’t accumulate at all.

What Actually Travels Downward

The most common mistake in large-scale transformation is the belief that alignment, once achieved at the top, naturally flows downward through the organization. Enroll the senior team and extend to the next tier, and the momentum carries itself from there.

It doesn’t.

Alignment has to be built deliberately at every level with every group of people being asked to execute it. Not because people are resistant by nature, but because commitment requires context and context requires real conversation, not a cascade deck and a follow-up survey. Most leaders don’t build that time into their transformation plans, and the gap shows up exactly where you’d expect: in the hallway, thirty seconds after the applause.

What actually travels downward without that deliberate investment is language. People learn the new vocabulary without internalizing the new direction. The words move through the organization and the belief stays behind. Leaders hear the right things being said and conclude the work is done, which is precisely the moment the hallway starts filling up with “un” words again.

The problem was never the frozen middle. It was leaders who treated enrollment as an event rather than a relationship, who measured success by what people said in the room rather than what happened in the hallway thirty seconds later, and who confused the cascade of language with the building of genuine commitment.

Middle managers are not blockers; they are mirrors. What looks like resistance is usually a precise and accurate reflection of what leadership has actually demonstrated, not what it has announced. The frozen middle thaws when it has genuine reasons to, when it has seen sincerity and courage and competence and concern accumulated through consistent behavior over time, not delivered in a single compelling presentation.

The CEO who wants to know why transformation stalled doesn’t need a better strategy or a more sophisticated cascade plan. He needs to go stand in the hallway and listen to what happens after the applause.

That’s where the real audit begins.

Stop Prioritizing If You Want a Breakthrough

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Stop prioritizing may sound reckless, even irresponsible. Not because focus does not matter. But because prioritizing has quietly become one of the most effective ways people avoid responsibility, protect themselves, and stay exactly where they are.

Prioritizing is often sold as mature responsibility. In reality, it frequently becomes a sophisticated cover for excuses.

Think about how prioritizing usually shows up. You list everything you want to do. Everything you should do. Everything you said you would do. Then you rank it. High priority. Medium priority. Low priority. You feel organized. Responsible. In control.

But what actually happens next?

  • “It was a lower priority.”
  • “Something more important came up.”
  • “Priorities shifted.”

Prioritizing gives you permission to fail without owning the failure. It allows you to stay circumstantial. To let conditions, time pressure, or competing demands dictate who you are being. It keeps your identity intact while results stagnate.

This is why prioritizing is deadly to transformation.

Breakthroughs do not come from managing importance. They come from taking a stand. If your transformation is merely one of your priorities, it is already in trouble.

Why? Because…

Priorities compete. Promises do not.

When transformation is a priority, it sits on a list next to everything else. It gets worked on when time allows. When energy is high. When circumstances cooperate. The moment pressure increases, transformation slides down the list. And when it does, you do not feel accountable. You feel justified.

That is how organizations talk themselves out of change.

Promising is different. When you promise, you step into responsibility. You put yourself on the hook. You no longer get to hide behind conditions. You cannot quietly deprioritize without consequence. A promise requires courage because it puts your word, your credibility, and your identity on the line.

Promising forces you to grow.

Every meaningful transformation I have seen began with a promise, explicit, bold, and non-negotiable.

  • “We will become this kind of organization.”
  • “We will deliver at this level.”
  • “We will change how we lead, no matter what.”
  • Not, “We will try.”
  • Not, “We will see how it goes.”
  • Not, “This is a priority this year.”

Those statements protect comfort. They do not produce breakthrough results.

Prioritizing keeps you small because it allows you to retreat without admitting it. Promising stretches you because retreat costs you something.

This is also why promising changes how people work together. Priorities are private. You decide them alone. You inform others after the fact. Promises are relational. The moment you promise, others are involved. Expectations are set. Conversations deepen. Ownership increases. Breakthroughs never happen in isolation.

They require shared commitment, mutual accountability, and the willingness to stay engaged when things get uncomfortable. Promising creates that field. Prioritizing dissolves it.

Let’s be honest. Most people do not fail at transformation because they lack strategy. They fail because they want progress without exposure. Change without risk. Results without vulnerability. Prioritizing offers that illusion. Promising removes it.

When you promise, you step into responsibility. You put yourself on the hook. You no longer get to hide behind conditions. You cannot quietly deprioritize without consequence. And yes, you could fail at delivering your promises. That is not the point. The point is that when a promise is at risk, real leaders step into dialogue early. They renegotiate consciously. They stay accountable. They protect trust. That behavior builds capacity and credibility even when outcomes take longer than expected.

Prioritizing avoids that conversation. Promising demands it.

So if you are serious about transformation, ask yourself this: Is your transformation a priority, or is it a promise?

If it is a priority, it will be negotiated away the moment pressure rises. If it is a promise, it will force you and your team to become someone new.

Breakthroughs do not belong to those who manage their priorities well. They belong to those who have the courage to promise and then grow into their word.

When failure is proof that you are on the right path

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Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

It is a simple sentence. It is also greatly misunderstood.

Most people hear this quote and assume it is about resilience, grit, or optimism. It is about something far more demanding. It is about how you interpret difficulty while you are in the middle of change.

Any meaningful breakthrough or transformation brings turbulence. Obstacles appear. Plans break down. Results dip. Progress feels slower than expected. Sometimes things get worse before they get better. Sometimes you fail outright along the way.

The difference between those who succeed and those who do not lies not in intelligence, strategy, or talent; it is in how they respond to these moments.

Many leaders interpret hardship as evidence that something is wrong. They treat setbacks as proof that the effort is failing. They see problems as signs they should quit. Eventually, they retreat. Often with good explanations.

Powerful leaders see the same events very differently.

They expect resistance. They understand that creating a new order of results disrupts the old one. They interpret obstacles as evidence that change is underway. They see mid-course failures as feedback and often as gateways to deeper breakthroughs.

They stay encouraged not because the path is smooth, but because the struggle confirms they are on the right path.

I worked with the CEO of a regional sales organization within a global telecommunications company. When he took on his role, his team was generating roughly $250 million in annual sales. On paper, the business looked strong. In reality, it was fragile.

The team struggled with forecast accuracy. Commitments were unreliable. Leaders lacked discipline around pipeline management. Results were inconsistent and unpredictable.

The CEO committed to a bold goal. Triple sales organically within three years. Not through acquisitions. Not through shortcuts. Through discipline, clarity, and execution.

This required a fundamental shift in behavior. Forecast rigor. Clear accountability. Hard conversations. New standards. For months, performance was uneven. Some quarters were disappointing. Some leaders questioned whether the changes were worth it.

It would have been easy to declare the effort a failure. He did not.

He stayed focused on the intention. He treated setbacks as part of the process. He kept reinforcing the new standards even when results lagged. He encouraged his leaders to stay present and learn rather than retreat.

Less than three years later, his region exceeded one billion dollars in annual sales.

Nothing magical happened. What changed was discipline, trust in the process, and the willingness to stay the course when the data was uncomfortable.

Now contrast that with another CEO.

This leader ran an electrical product-related manufacturing company and was committed to a breakthrough in quality, on-time delivery, and growth. The organization was highly siloed and political. Roles were unclear. Decisions were centralized. People protected themselves rather than the enterprise.

He initiated a transformation. Roles and responsibilities were clarified. Leaders were asked to step up and make decisions. Accountability was pushed down into the organization. People were excited about the change. But, as expected, things got messy.

Decisions took longer. Some mistakes were made. Performance improvements lagged behind the effort. The culture was shifting, but results had not yet caught up.

Halfway through the change, the CEO lost patience. He interpreted the turbulence as failure. He shut the initiative down. He returned to top-down command and control. Old silos returned. Cover-your-back behavior resurfaced. People were discouraged. The organization went back to what was familiar, and stagnation followed.

Both leaders faced difficulty. Both encountered setbacks. Both had moments where it would have been easier to quit. One saw the struggle as evidence of progress. The other saw it as proof of failure.

That is the difference Churchill was pointing to.

Giving up at the first or second sign of failure does not require courage. Staying positive, purpose-oriented, and committed while navigating uncertainty does.

If you want to succeed, you must be willing to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. Not blind enthusiasm. Grounded enthusiasm. The kind that comes from trusting your intention, your vision, and yourself.

Challenges are not a detour from transformation. They are the terrain.

The real question is not whether obstacles will show up. They always do. The real question is how you will interpret them when they arrive.

 

Six barriers you must overcome to achieve your transformation goals

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It takes extraordinary courage, determination, and faith to pursue a bold change initiative, stay the course and see it through.

No one in their right mind would dare to climb Mount Everest without preparation. Similarly, you shouldn’t embark on a bold transformation journey without adequate preparation either.

In a bold transformation process, there are always unpredictable events, circumstances, and challenges that cannot be anticipated or prepared for in advance. These unanticipated events often lead to the most significant changes and breakthroughs.

At the same time, however, some challenges always arise in one way or another. If you do not anticipate, expect, and prepare for them, they could easily become barriers that impede your ability to stay on course in transforming your organization to the next level. Here are six barriers that often disrupt and derail change initiatives:

Barrier 1: Not tolerating a temporary dip in performance and/or results:

When creating a new future, leaders enroll their leaders and managers to think beyond existing paradigms, solve problems differently and pursue opportunities in new ways. People are often genuinely excited to think from the future rather than continuing to approach work from the same past-based mindset and approaches.

For most leaders, “Think outside the box”, “Challenge the status quo”, and “Put yourself at the bottom of a new scale” are hollow slogans that they pay lip service to. But to leaders who are committed to change these are marching orders. However, as people pursue and practice these new marching orders things often get worse before they get better.

Unfortunately, most leaders can’t tolerate even the slightest temporary dip in performance. They get overly nervous at the first sign of a dip, and many leaders react negatively, setting the team back and sending a message that they don’t have the courage and faith to stay the course.

If you can’t tolerate this dynamic, you will keep returning to the status quo instead of pushing forward to overcome this barrier. The good news is that when leaders stay the course and reach the other side of this barrier, things always get better again. In fact, they often get even better than they were before.

Barrier 2: Not making the focus on generating the new future a high enough priority:

At the outset of change initiatives, pretty much all leaders declare to their leaders and managers that creating a new future for the company that takes the game to the next level is “mission critical.” Unfortunately, in most cases, it doesn’t take long before most leaders get spooked by the uncertainty of the transition from the old to the new and start paying lip service to their own declaration.

They set unrealistic expectations that challenge people’s ability to balance existing and new priorities, avoid making tough decisions about realigning cross-functional support for the new, and under-resource future work. These mixed messages make it clear to people that the new future is merely a “nice to have.”

The remedy is simple: Don’t get distracted by the temporary confusion, uncertainty, doubts and rollercoaster of emotions that people experience in the change journey. Stay the course; stay true to your declaration and commitment, do what you said, and keep creating ways to promote and enable the new work. The quicker the new work sets roots and becomes the new norm, the higher the chances for transformational success.

Barrier 3: Buying into people’s complaints that they are too busy:

When moving from vision to execution in a large-scale transformation, the first few months are always the toughest. People are expected to juggle both their existing day job and spend time driving the new initiatives and tasks that will propel the organization toward its new future.

You can hire additional people to support the new initiatives if you have the means. However, many companies simply cannot afford to do that. So, the same people have to do both, and for a period of time, people will feel stretched and overwhelmed. It’s inevitable.

The first phase of execution will test your leadership resolve. On one hand, you can’t ignore people’s hardships and complaints. In fact, you need to think outside the box, be innovative and look for ways to do things differently. You also need to motivate and incentivize people in this transition. This will send the right message to your team.

At the same time, though, you also can’t buy into people’s complaints. You can’t compromise on the key principles and expectations of the change. People will see that you don’t have the resolve and courage. The consequence will be detrimental to your success.

Barrier 4: Expecting results and progress rather than relentlessly driving them:

The operative word here is “expecting”. During change initiatives, I often hear leaders say things like “We should be further along,” “the initiatives are not achieving big enough results,” and “we don’t see a change in behavior yet.”

If you mapped out the trend of a change initiative, more often than not it would look like a horizontal hockey stick. That is the nature of the beast. At first, you invest a lot of effort and energy without seeing a lot of return and at some point, things begin to take off.

Expecting progress, change, and results is the wrong approach. You have to drive it! Just like you wouldn’t dig out a flower seed every week after you planted it to see if it’s making progress, you can’t second-guess yourself, your direction or your team.

In fact, if you want to succeed in your change initiative, you have to manage your expectations and have the mindset that your job is not to “see if it works” but rather to “ensure and prove that it works”. 

Barrier 5: Getting discouraged after the first wave of enthusiasm and excitement wears off:

A change initiative is like a marriage. After a while, the honeymoon will be over, and you will have to keep regenerating and refueling people’s energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to the cause. You have to keep enrolling your people in why the change is important, what the new future will look like and what possibilities and improvements it holds for the company and for them.

You also have to understand that at different phases of the initiative, people will be energized and engaged by different things.

In Phase One, the excitement comes from people envisioning, imagining, hoping, and believing in the new future state, which will benefit the company and them.

Phase Two is the toughest and most critical phase of a change initiative. In fact, this is the phase in which most companies fail. This is the stage when people work the hardest without easily seeing the progress and return of their efforts. In this phase, it is critical for leaders to keep focusing on, promoting, highlighting and recognizing any/all progress, wins and improvements, even small ones. That helps people to continue to be optimistic and hopeful about the change.

Phase Three is when the change has taken hold and noticeable improvements and wins are abundant. Motivating people in this phase is easier as they can easily see the changes and improvements and feel accomplished by being a part of the journey.

Understanding how a change initiative will unfold equips you to overcome this barrier.

Barrier 6: Blaming others and circumstances for what isn’t working, rather than taking ownership and responsibility:

Leaders who don’t stay the course tend to justify their failure with external circumstantial excuses and blame. I often hear them explain their failure with excuses such as: “There was too much going on“, “It wasn’t the right time“, “The market was too challenging” and “People were not on board“.

In contrast, leaders who stay the course seem not to care about blame or fault. They only care about how to make sure the promise of the new future will stay alive and be realized.

When things go well, they become nervous and shake people up in order to avoid complacency or arrogance. When things don’t go well, they rally and engage their teams in root cause analysis to figure out what they can change, correct and do better or differently.

You wouldn’t show up on the day of a marathon race without having prepared and trained, expecting to run. It is exactly the same with any significant change initiative!

The more you educate and prepare yourself, the more you can anticipate, expect and be ready for overcoming the inevitable barriers. If you don’t prepare, these obstacles will catch you by surprise and overwhelm you.

As the boxer Mike Tyson put it:

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth!”

Are you standing in your future or in your past?

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In 1899 Charles H. Duel, then Director of the U.S. Patent Office, said, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

In 1895, Lord Kelvin, who was President of the Royal Society, said, “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”

In 1905, Grover Cleveland, then President of the United States, said, “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.”

In 1943, Thomas Watson, then Chairman of IBM, said, “There is a world market for about five computers.”

We all say and think things every day that we sincerely believe to be true, even though they are not true at all.

When we think or say positive things, it could be motivating. Even though sometimes it could cause us to underestimate what it takes to turn these thoughts to reality. However, when we think or say negative things, it often limits our view of what is possible, and therefore, it disempowers us and kills endless great ideas and possibilities.

Our thoughts are not objective. We see things and form views based on our preconceived notions. We don’t believe or disbelieve what we see. We actually see and don’t see what we believe or disbelieve.

We seem to already know how good or bad the future is going to be, even though the future hasn’t happened yet.

For example, when people start a new project, I often hear them say things like “This is going to be hard” or “We can’t do it this way” or “It will never work here.”

These are all valid perspectives, but they are not facts or truths. And, if we get too attached to them, they often become self-fulfilling prophecies.

It’s as if we are driving toward our future, but without realizing it, we are looking into our rearview mirror. So, everything we see that seems to be in front of us is actually behind us. We think we are objectively working on our future, but we are actually stuck in our past. And, when the same type of issues that we incurred in the past keep reoccurring in similar ways, we blame others or the circumstances. We believe that “This is just the way it is” or “this is as good as it gets.”

If we were actually driving our car on the highway and we realized we were looking at our rearview mirror, rather than the road in front of us, we would immediately shift our view.

Could we do the same in real life?

If we stand in our future, without being distracted by our past, we could think, strategize, plan and navigate more freely and effectively toward our objectives and commitments. We would probably also avoid many of the hurdles and obstacles that impede our progress.

When giving advice to others who are dealing with a challenging situation, I often hear people say things like “Forget the past, discard it, pretend like it didn’t happen…“. I find that advice, both silly and unnecessary. First, it is impossible to forget our past, especially when we have memorable traumatic events in it. Second, it isn’t necessary to forget past events in order to move forward with freedom and confidence.

We all have the ability to proactively stand in our future while letting our past be, and leaving it alone. Unfortunately, most people tend to live in the opposite way – they stay fixated in their past and leave their future alone.

When people are stuck in their past, they tend to focus on the obstacles and reasons why things can’t be done or why something won’t work. When you try and enroll them in new ideas and possibilities, they often respond with “Yes, but… we can’t do this because…” And, they usually refer to the people who are initiating new possibilities as naïve and/or unrealistic.

But people who stand in the future tend to be more optimistic and confident. I was coaching a group of managers from two functions in a well-known technology company who were working on improving their role definition and collaboration.  The dialogue quickly became extremely lively and flowing with ideas. People built continuously on each others’ thoughts and ideas by saying, “Yes and…we could also do this and that.” This is a typical dynamic when people stand in the future.

We don’t have to forget or discard our past in order to become rooted in our future. In fact, we should always honor, respect, and learn from past lessons. But we shouldn’t cross the line and become too attached to our past, it will limit our ability to think, create, and fulfill great things in our future.

 

Are you failing often enough?

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Strange question, you may think, and you are probably right. I don’t mean it literally.

However, I am sure you would agree that people who make bolder decisions and choices; people who go for it ‘all out’ tend to have a higher risk of failing. In fact, the bigger you play in any area if you fail you will most likely fail bigger.

In contrast, people who play small and safe tend to avoid failures and if they do their failure is much smaller.

So, perhaps the right question is: “Are you playing big enough?”

What’s big enough? There is no objective definition or metric. Each one of us has to determine that for ourselves.

However, there are a few guiding principles that I would believe most of you would agree to.

  1. Do you have a vision for your life? It doesn’t have to be fancy. It could be any type or level of articulation of your desired future outcomes, commitments, ambitions, desires. Many people don’t have any of that. It takes courage to dream, desire and want. It takes greater courage to declare it in public. By doing so you are positioning yourself in the world as an optimistic, positive and committed person, rather than a resigned, cynical and negative person. As a result of you raising the bar on your brand, people will hold you to a higher standard, they will expect more from you and they will judge you more harshly if you don’t live up to your declarations/commitments.
  2. Are you taking action consistent with your life vision and commitments? My youngest daughter who is studying psychology at university reminded me this week that wanting something is much easier than actually going for it. In fact, she gave me examples of people we know who keep talking about what they want, but they don’t take any actions to pursue it. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy. You could start with small steps in the right direction. In fact, walking before you run is a good strategy. When it comes to action, the direction of your action – ensuring that they come from your commitment – is more important than the quantity or magnitude of your actions – at least in the beginning. It doesn’t take courage to want. It does take courage to take actions.
  3. Are you pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone? Once you have got the basic and psychological needs of the survival pyramid down you could start pushing yourself to perform at a higher level. Eleonora Roosevelt’s quote says it quite eloquently: “Do one thing every day that scares you!” If you are doing something, which takes you out of your comfort zone and your stomach is turning, that is probably a good indication that you are playing big enough.
  4. Are you celebrating your accomplishments and successes? From my experience, people who acknowledge, own and celebrate their accomplishments and successes tend to be more positive, happy, fulfilled, powerful and effective! It makes complete sense if you own your accomplishments and successes you are owning your greatness. You are self-empowering yourself. You are promoting a personal brand of someone that is bigger than their circumstances. As a result, you will strive for more, be more open to taking risks and have more confidence in dealing with obstacles and challenges. If you avoid owning your accomplishments and successes, you are fostering a scarce, circumstantial and small self-brand. Great people accomplish great things. Small people don’t accomplish much.
  5. Are you confronting, owning and learning from your failures? As I stated above, if you play big and go beyond your comfort zone you may fail more often and even bigger. However, if you have the courage to confront, own and learn from your failures falling isn’t that bad. In fact, every failure is the opportunity to learn from your shortfalls, put in the corrections and grow.

You can grow from successes and/or failures. So, perhaps my initial question “Are you failing often enough?” isn’t that farfetched after all.

It takes more than understanding change to achieve it

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I was invited to help a large global service company transform its bureaucratic, siloed and slow culture into an agile, cohesive and innovative one. In order to learn about this company, I interviewed around thirty managers and employees at all levels.

They all pretty much told me the same things and highlighted the same issues, challenges, and obstacles that were getting in the way of greater performance and change.

They all acknowledged that the organization was too siloed, that managers were too focused on their own area and not enough on the greater success. They all pointed at trust, alignment and communication issues between functions and businesses that were causing tensions, conflicts and hurting effectiveness and costing opportunities and results.

These issues, challenges, and obstacles had been around for many years and everyone knew it. In fact, people frequently expressed frustration about them in around-the-cooler conversations. Everyone sincerely wanted to change them. However, all this didn’t translate to new behavior and change.

Why?

Because understanding and knowing doesn’t produce doing and changing.

I didn’t make this up. Look at our normal day-to-day life. For example, we know we should exercise, eat healthily, balance our personal and work life, not stress out about unimportant things. By golly, we even want to do better in all these areas and more, yet we still continue to do what isn’t working for us.

If you want to change your culture and team dynamics you have to go through a transformative process that is emotional, not merely intellectual. You have to follow three steps: Clear, Create, Commit.

Clear the old dynamics. This means engaging in a brave and honest conversation about what is working and more importantly what isn’t working between teams and levels. It has to be a collective conversation. You have to enable a safe environment for it, and people have to be allowed to communicate and be heard without judgment, arguments, push back and consequence. Just speaking, listening and being heard. You can think about this as emptying the glass.  

Often, people have to communicate their frustrations and concerns and feel heard in order to get beyond them and move on to a new space.

Create and build new dynamics. When the glass is empty you can start filling it with new substance. In fact, you can only really create a new culture or team dynamic and sustain it, when you truly start from a clean slate. If you do the first step well it will enable that. In this step you have to engage in a collective team conversation focused on imagining and creating ideas and possibilities about how you could and want to operate as a team. Things like: (1) open, honest, authentic, courageous and effective conversations, (2) appearing everyone as one team with one voice, and (3) addressing all challenges in a win-win way. The possibilities you create should strike a healthy balance between being aspirational and realistic.

Commit to new behaviors, actions, and results. Committing stakes you to the new and better future state that you desire. When your team members promise each other to start behaving and interacting in a more transparent, candid and brave way it raises the collective bar and changes the expectations, interactions, and conversations within the team. It’s public, people can hold each other to account and no one can hide. If you stay the course and follow through on your commitments the new behavior and actions will start becoming the norm.

So, for a successful transformation of culture and team dynamics remember to clear, create & most importantly commit!

If you want your people to live the values, live them yourself!

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Every modern organization has cultural values that outline the type of culture and behaviors the CEO and his or her senior executives want to drive in their organization.

The CEO and senior team are typically the ones who stand on the stage and share the values. Most CEOs only mention the values a few times a year in the formal company-wide events. In many cases, this happens because their human resource leader or communications manager adds it in their presentation deck.

Some CEOs really care about the values. They see them as their personal endeavor; perhaps the legacy they want to leave behind them. These CEOs find any opportunity to mention, repeat and reference the values in day-to-day business conversations; when they criticize, coach or discipline their people, as well as when they recognize and praise them.

Everyone in the company knows where their CEO and his or her senior team stand regarding the values. They know if the values are merely another corporate slogan the senior team pays lip service to, or if the CEO and his/her team take them personally and they are sincerely passionate about them and committed to driving them. It’s easy to tell by watching actions, not words.

I was working with a CEO who was very passionate about the values of his company. Everywhere he went in the company, in all meetings and calls he would bring up the values in some relevant business context. When a product didn’t meet the deadline of being released to the market and he found out that the teams that were supposed to collaborate in order to get it done didn’t do a good job, he made a big stink about people not living the collaboration value. When his leaders would come to him to complain about other leaders he would coach them in the context of living the value of ownership. And, when the sales team overcame big challenges and achieved a great outcome at the end of the quarter he went out of his way to show everyone how it was because people were living the ‘we get it done‘ value.

Everyone knew that the values were the CEO personal pet peeve. People respected it, but more importantly, everyone felt compelled to get on board with the CEO and make the values the company’s norm. They were very successful at it.

Unfortunately, in so many companies the CEO and his or her team are the biggest offenders of living the values.

To state the obvious, if the values are Teamwork and Ownership and everyone can see that the senior leaders are highly political and siloed people will roll his or her eyes at the values. If the values are Candor and Transparency and people are afraid to give the senior leaders feedback and bad news because they won’t take it well, people will be cynical about the values.

Judging by their behavior, it seems that many executives think that they can drive the values by standing on a stage once or twice a year and saying all the fancy slogans with gusto and then going back to their day-to-day lives with minimal attention to the values until the next big fanfare. Nothing is further from the truth!

If the CEO wants to create a new culture based on values such as: Collaboration, Personal Responsibility, Excellence, Innovation and Care, he or she has to:

  1. Make these values a priority as high as achieving the revenues or profitability numbers of the company.
  2. Put in place the same robust programs, routines, incentives and practices to continuously promote, foster, reward, nurture and sustain the desired behaviors.
  3. Establish the same level of inspection touch-points to ensure clear changes and improvements are being made.

Making the values a part of the culture is an ongoing process and journey, not an event. It takes dedication and work. It definitely won’t be achieved by reciting slogans!

To the CEO and his or her senior leaders I would offer the following advice:

If you want your people to live the values, live them yourselves!

 

Move your orientation from Activities to Outcomes, then Breakthroughs

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I was participating in a performance review meeting with a successful division of a global technology company. In this meeting, the team members responsible for leading the key strategic initiatives were updating the entire management team on the status and progress of their initiatives.

With slight variations, pretty much every presenter jumped almost immediately into the details of the metrics they are tracking, the status of these metrics and the activities their initiative team is involved with.

None of the presenters provided any higher level context on the purpose and objectives of their initiative, or where they aim to take it. Based on these updates you could tell how efficient the team was at tracking the metrics and activities they chose, but not the impact and value of their initiatives, or the greater potential of their initiatives to reach a new level in the future.

Many leaders and managers have the same tendency to jump right into activities. I see it all the time. In fact, many leaders think that the higher purpose and objective stuff is “fluff” and “nice to have”.

These leaders are so mistaken! They are oblivious to a different level of powerful strategic approach.

When it comes to creating and achieving powerful strategies and extraordinary results, there are three levels of the game a team could be operating at: Activities, Outcomes, and Breakthroughs.

Activity-Orientated

Most leaders operate at the activities level. Managing and tracking activities is the easiest and safest strategic approach. You think about where you want to be and then you identify and commit to the activities that you assume and hope will get you there. In many cases leaders don’t even spend much time on where they want to get to, they just identify activities, because that is what they are most familiar and comfortable with.

In the activities approach, there isn’t typically a conversation about commitment, and if there is it is about promising to carry out the activities. People tend to take on comfortable, familiar and realistic activities in order to reduce the risk of challenging the status quo or thinking outside the box.

In the performance review meetings, the activity oriented leaders give a detailed account of what they have been doing and what they will do moving forward. In this approach, success is ‘ticking the box’ on on-scheduled activities.

What can happen is that you carry out all the activities and you still don’t achieve your results. Usually, when that happens activity-based leaders come up with excuses or they blame the circumstances and others; things like: “We did our part but they didn’t do theirs” and “We were on track but the circumstances changed”.

If you push on the activity-oriented leaders to promise the end results, not the activities to get there, they typically get nervous and defensive. They would tell you something like “How can we promise outcomes that we don’t have enough control over“.

Accountability for Activities is no accountability at all!

Outcome-Orientated

Leaders who focus on outcomes want to know “What are we out to achieve?”. For them, the activities are a derivative of the outcomes, not an end in themselves. As, the circumstances or the status of the outcome change, so do the activities.

I work with a powerful technical leader who has become outcome oriented. Every time one of his managers gives him a report on what they are planning to do he stops them and asks: “What is the outcome you are going to achieve with all these activities?“. As he has shifted his managers’ orientation from activities to outcomes, they have been able to elevate their results and impact.

Outcome-oriented leaders want their managers to promise outcomes, not activities. This shift is a big step up. Sometimes the outcomes are clear but many times they are not, and the team needs to engage in a deeper and more powerful strategic dialogue to align around what they want their future state to look like.

You can only reach the breakthrough level if you are oriented around outcomes.

Breakthrough-Orientated

If you move from “What will we do this quarter?” to “What outcome will we achieve this quarter?” you are making a big step forward, but it still doesn’t mean you have taken the game to a new level. In order to generate a breakthrough mindset and conversation, you need to promise an outcome that is beyond what is predictable; you need to put a stake in the ground for a bigger, bolder future that requires you and your team to think, behave and work differently together. You need to ask: “What breakthrough outcome are we going to cause this quarter?“.

You could call it a stretch goal. However, in most organizations stretch goals are driven down from above. If you want to create a breakthrough orientation in your team you need everyone to think bolder and believe that they can shape their destiny, set the bar and achieve more than what is predictable.

As Alan Kay called it:

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it!”

The most powerful leaders feel comfortable to promise a bold future state and trust themselves and their teams to get there without knowing how to do so in advance.

You can do it too!

Why is it so hard to integrate newly acquired organizations?

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I read a staggering statistic which stated that upwards of 80 percent of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) fail to fulfill the strategic goals that justified the merger and/or acquisition within the expected timeframe. What is even more shocking is that in many cases, the resulting organizations are less effective and less successful than the original two by themselves.

My personal experience and observation have led me to believe that this repeated failure is almost always due to the fact that most teams and organizations focus almost exclusively on the content and process but they don’t invest enough time and effort on the cultural, personal and human aspects of their integration. This almost always leads to a reality in which the acquiring executives end up with a well-articulated plan that doesn’t work because it is disconnected from the actual reality.

Even though I hear more and more executives acknowledge that the biggest challenge in integrating an organization they have acquired is “People” and “Culture”. That declaration is rarely reflected in their priorities, investments and actions.

I have supported many integration efforts and I have found that there are four areas that are closely related, that if addressed effectively – no matter how large or complex the M&A may be – could ensure a much more successful integration of the newly acquired organization:

  1. Establish an environment where people can communicate and dialogue about the M&A in a candid, authentic, courageous, and effective way. M&A efforts are often stalled or undermined because the executives try to quickly address the redundancies, overlaps and duplications. This includes the nuts and bolts of reorganizing, restructuring, scaling and letting people go inside an environment and atmosphere of mutual suspicion, guardedness, and defensiveness, as well as lack of trust, respect, candor, and authentic communication. Trying to do things fast often slows them down because people say all the politically correct things, but when they can’t really express how they feel, they walk away paying lip service to whatever has been agreed to.
  2. Elicit genuine ownership on both sides for the success of the M&A. In most M&As, one party feels ‘taken-over’ or victimized by the other. While this dynamic is understandable, it undermines the ability of both organizations to succeed in their integration. From the start, it is critical for the leaders to create an environment in which everyone on both sides of the aisle genuinely owns, feels committed to, and is accountable for the success of the integration process and its outcome.
  3. Enable both parties to complete their respective pasts in an honorable and empowering way. Each team or company has its own unique legacy of culture, brand name, competencies, ways of doing things, heritage and identity, which its people often feel proud of, and attached to. In order to move forward with a new shared identity, people need to ‘complete their respective pasts’ – or differently said ‘grieve for the end of an era.’ When both sides – especially the acquired – feel respected, heard, considered, included, recognized, and validated for their legacy, it creates space for all parties to enthusiastically partner in order to make the next chapter bigger than anything any of them have achieved in their past.
  4. Align the newly combined teams around a shared future and identity that embody the best of both cultures and operations. To create a reality where the new whole is greater than the sum of its historical parts, the two organizations or teams have to articulate and align on a new bold and compelling shared future. Both parties have to equally own, feel committed to, accountable for and energized about their new joined future. Unifying the teams around a shared future and identity will immediately create genuine excitement and urgency on both sides to clarify, align, streamline and scale roles, functions, structures, and responsibilities. When creating the future, it is important to consider and include the positive attributes and uniqueness of each organization in order to avoid the trap of one company feeling crushed by the other.

There’s no doubt that it is hard to integrate newly acquired organizations. However, there are some basic common-sense things that could be done to make the task more successful, that in most M&As are still not being done.

If executives stop paying lip service to the cultural, personal and human aspects of their integration and they start putting their money where their mouth is, I am confident that we will start seeing the grim M&A statistics change course.

Is your team evolving by default or are you shaping it by design?

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I was coaching the senior members of a new leadership team of a mid-size technology company on developing themselves a strong leadership team. We were in a collective discussion about “What is your role as a leadership team?” and people were expressing their views. At some point in the conversation, I shared some of my own thoughts and recommendations about what the role of a strong leadership team could be.

I included things like:

“Ensure that the strategic commitments and objectives of your organization are alive and meeting their results”

“Ensure that your people are in great shape from a professional, productivity, development and motivation standpoint” and

“Ensure that you, yourselves are operating and being viewed as a highly effective leadership team.”

One of the team members responded by saying: “But, aren’t all of these role definitions basic expectations of any leadership team, so these go without saying?”

He was right. There are some fundamental commitments and accountabilities that any leadership team should naturally be in charge of.

The problem, however, is that in so many cases – perhaps in most cases – there is a significant gap between expectations and ‘shoulds’, and the reality. Simply said, most leadership teams don’t adhere to these basic expectations.

For example:
In so many organizations when the strategic objectives are being paid lip service to, behind expectations or not met, the leadership members avoid calling it out or they simply engage in blame and excuse conversations as much as anyone else.

So many times when the organization goes through significant changes, like restructuring or downsizing and people are startled and traumatized by these events, the leadership team members are too busy looking out for themselves and the people that are close to them, rather than ensuring that all their people are in great shape.

And, in many organizations, the leadership team is not considered a ‘highly effective leadership team’, in fact in most places, people point to the leadership team as the team with most dysfunctionality.

So much for expectations!

Why is this the case?

Because most leadership teams evolve by default.

Most leaders approach evolving their team, consistent with what the management books say. They bring their team members together once or twice a year to engage in a ‘team building exercise’.  As many of these exercises are really good, the leaders leave them feeling energized.

However, the fierce reality and circumstances set in very quickly and in most cases the team building event at best remains as a remote memory in the rearview mirror.

Most leaders relate to building their team as an event rather than a process that requires as much ongoing focus, commitment, priority and investment of time, energy and funds, as any other mission-critical business process. Most leaders bring their people together frequently to react to tactical challenges. However, they relate to spending strategic and development time with their team as a ‘nice to have’ and ‘luxury’ to undertake if and when time, resources and circumstances are favorable. But, not as a necessity for maintaining and growing the entire competitive culture, performance and forward view of their organization.

If you want to build a powerful team you can’t bet your success on expectations and hope. You have to shape and build your team by design.

This means team members need to come together and agree on the exact type of team they want to be. There isn’t such a thing as “it goes without saying”. They have to articulate their role explicitly. Furthermore, their role must reflect the reality they are committing to deliver and cause. And, yes, they need to promise it.

Articulating your role as a leadership team through the language of “Ensuring” is very powerful. As a team, simply ask yourself “What future are we promising to ensure together?”, it orientates you around results not activities and it shapes a relationship of ownership with these results.

If you are promising to ensure a set of outcomes, that means:

  • You are accountable for these outcomes
  • You give up the right to have excuses, and
  • You are all in this together to bring about the outcomes you promised.

When it comes to powerful teams, you can’t beat that!

Promise results or don’t promise at all!

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I was coaching the marketing department of a global technology company in coming up with its strategic plan. They had identified their key strategic areas and were working on articulating the outcomes they wanted to achieve in each area. However, in several of the areas, instead of coming up with clear end results, they identified activities.

For example, instead of promising to grow the number of customers and potential customers who are signed up, and actively contributing to their user-group community to a specific number, they promised to increase the number of events in which they promoted the community. Instead of promising to increase the number of high-end industry events they are invited to speak at to a specific number, they promised to increase the number of training classes they would offer to train people to speak. And, instead of promising to be recognized by the key relevant CEOs as one of the top thought-leaders in their field, they promised to drive a vast list of PR and social media activities including the number of followers on Twitter and LinkedIn, the number of press and analyst briefings and more.

Whilst all these activities are important as part of the means to get to their desired end, they are just that – the means, not the end itself.

This mindset and approach of focusing on the activities that would achieve the results, rather than on the results themselves is very common in organizations. The explanation I often get to this is something to the effect of “We can’t control the results. We can only control our activities…”

The problem with the activity-based approach is that it creates a lot of busyness, but after a while, people tend to lose track of what all the busyness is for in the first place. In fact, after a while, people can’t tell the difference between activities and results.

In addition, the focus on the means (activities) versus the end (results) hinders the ability of the team to assess the effectiveness of the activities and if they are in fact achieving the results, and make any necessary changes. Most organizations are good at adding activities, but they are not good at stopping them.

Lastly, the activity-based approach undermines the team’s culture of accountability. Real accountability is always for clear results. It promotes a mindset of overcoming any obstacles. The activity-based approach tolerates and nurtures a culture of circumstance limitations, self-protection and excuses.

At first, I thought that the activities-based approach is more common when outlining a strategy for more subjective business areas like “brand awareness”, “team culture” and “customer satisfaction”. However, my experience has shown me that it is often the same when dealing with the most objective areas such as: “revenues”, “profitability” and “market share”.

In the world of strategy, there seem to be two schools of thought:

“Promise your desired results and then put the activities in place to fulfill them.”

“Promise the activities that you assume and hope will fulfill your desired results.”

Unfortunately, the second approach seems to be much more prevalent, most of the time in most organizations.

Why is this the case?

My favorite explanation is: It is much easier and safer to promise activities than results. Less risk and responsibility. Less need to challenge the status quo, think outside the box and come up with new ways to do things. And, you are off the hook for the most important piece – the actual outcome!

Another popular excuse that people give for focusing on activities and not results is: “You can’t measure areas such as “brand recognition”, “team culture” and “customer satisfaction”.

But, that is not true! You can measure anything that is important for you. You just need to understand that there are no right or wrong, perfect, and/or factual measures. When it comes to measures you need to choose something that is meaningful to you and then take ownership of it.

In my work with organizations, especially when creating bold future-based strategies teams often create new metrics for new areas they want to take on. It is actually quite refreshing to think differently about new areas, rather than trying to force old metrics on them.

To conclude, in today’s world where opportunities are abundant, resources are scarce, competition is fierce and everyone is looking for ways to scale and do more with less, you can’t afford to waste time and cycles on activities that may or may not deliver the results you want.

Your job as a leader is not to track and report on activities. It is to cause results.

So, if you are not going to promise to cause specific results, don’t promise anything at all!