What We Think
What We Think
Why Most Meetings Have Issues
You’ve been on the hunt for a way to actually make meetings work – not just a little better but DRAMATICALLY better! All the advice you have found and tried may have gotten you some improvement but didn’t deliver the “WOW” you’d hoped for. You think your organization’s “culture” or even certain people make it virtually impossible to really get a “WOW” level of improvement. Maybe you’ve even resigned yourself to regular, stressful levels of frustration in actually getting things done in your organization?
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We will tell you right up front that HelixPLAN® is extremely powerful if used in the right way! But we will also tell you that many have failed to realize its full power because they did not really understand what was going on in most “traditional” meetings…they did not realize the invisible problems underneath what they saw occurring. In this article we will take you deep into why most meetings have issues. You will indeed recognize the common issues, but you may be surprised as to why they happen!
What Steve Cantrell and Sharol Henry Can Teach Us About Change
What is “change management”? To be blunt, we think it’s the wrong question. It is the verb “manage” that we really don’t like. Here’s why. There are plenty of principles, practices, tools and methods in the world for managing organizational change in organizations…there are libraries and tool chests full of stuff to help manage change…there are many who have built careers and fortunes out of making it virtually a discipline unto itself…and THAT is where we have a problem – that it is a discipline unto itself.
We don’t think change is something to be managed, we think it is something to be achieved. It’s not a body of work unto itself, it is a goal. Let us explain the nuance: manage means to work on directly, to devote time, effort and attention to change itself…achieve is about an end goal. We think that trying to manage change separately from the real work of diagnosing issues, coming up with solutions and implementing those solutions…RATHER THAN doing this real work in a way that accelerates and achieves BOTH the change and results is precisely why so many struggle with “change management”. We don’t believe there are many practitioners who would take kindly to our emphasis on the “separateness” of contemporary approaches to managing change…they would probably use words more like “parallel”, and “complimentary”. But these words are euphemisms for “separate”. And our experience shows that when focus shifts away from real work -- whether in parallel or complimentary or separate -- the effort is quite likely to fail!
High Engagement Can Also Be Fast!
Leaders usually hold engagement and speed in an opposing paradigm of either/or: either they can actively engage workers or move fast. It can't be both. It's a trade-off. But this is not necessarily true.
Read More at HBR.org
Why don't leaders challenge this paradigm? Most leaders simply don't know how to effect change fast using a high engagement approach. Under stress, they resort to command-and-control, work in silos, and stick to turf they own. Most leaders can't embrace something new and different if they don't know how to do it.