Using Yourself as an Architect of Positive Change - With a Little Help from Your Friends
By Louis Carter

Most practitioners have roles in organizations in which they have to develop human capital by training, coaching, mentoring, and otherwise working to influence their own careers and the careers of their colleagues. As practitioners we are often faced with our own challenges in making sense of difficult situations, facing conflict, and confronting change. We are often so concerned with helping others with these issues that we may forget that, as champions of change for other leaders in our organizations, we must consider strategies that allow us to resolve these issues for ourselves and to model positive behaviors.

How many times have you found yourself feeling as though there were a hundred factors keeping you from achieving your life's goals? Have you found yourself saying "I'll get to it this week" and found yourself never doing it? When you read articles that provide advice and guidance, do you get a surge of inspiration, get that oh-so-familiar "ah-ha!" moment, relate to the idea, and the next day go back to all of those challenges and personal resistances to change? If you said yes to any of the above questions, first let me say, "Wow, me too!" and then let me share the time-worn psychoanalytical discovery that you, too, may be suffering from a 'lack-of-follow-throughitis.' What a surprise! And if you talked personally and frankly with the 'gurus'-personal coaches, psychoanalysts, and thought leaders-you would find that, they too, feel the same way that you do!

As a result of research that examined change champions, we found that the same factors that hold organizations back from achieving their goals are eerily similar to resistance factors of "change champions" or those in charge of change within the organizations and social systems-including consultants, coaches, and mentors!

Change Champion Resistance Factors to Change, in order of frequency of resistance factors:

1. Fear of the unknown, fear of change, loss of control
2. Time constraints (procrastination)
3. Negative reactions to "soft-skills" training
4. Negative reactions from prior unsuccessful change
5. Sense of mistrust

So, if you want to "build a business case for change," look no further than your and other's resistance factors to change. Yes it might help you, your board of directors or senior executive board to know that we have found that best practice organizations spend an average of $500,000 to $750,000 (with a high range of $2,500,000) per year on integrated, multi-mode systemic leadership development and organizational change programs. It is also notable that these programs maintain their "best practice" status by continually evaluating, re-inventing, providing follow-up support, consistently communicating the program, and integrating the program within other systems and divisions within the organization (e.g., sales, marketing, etc.).

Best Practice organizations that we have profiled and provided best practice status include such organizations as Agilent, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, First Consulting Group, Windber Medical Center, Barclays Global Investors, Delnor Hospital, St. Luke's Health and Hospital Network, StorageTek, and many more. Among the 90-plus best practice organizations we have studied throughout the past 6 years, we have also found that it is the "Click" and "Powerful Conversations" among and between key change champions that enable full support and ongoing "best practice" success. So, read on-being a mindful, best practice coaching/mentoring champion pays off!

Another key factor in "best practice" coaching is often overlooked: relating the problem to oneself and then letting go of the need to compete against your client, and instead allowing his/her greatest good to guide your actions and advice. My helpful friend Dan Bishop, the Director of the HeartMuseum Project in California once told me, "Lou, when you let go of what you think you know, the greatest good will come to you." Let me add to Dan's words-as a coach, mentor, husband, wife, or friend-always be willing to let go of your assumptions and attributions about the other person and his/her challenges and truly care for his/her greater good.

Coaches of today's leaders also face another variety of significant challenges in advising others based on the diversity of issues that different clients/employees within organizations face. Our research indicates that the top challenges of clients/employees in change and coaching efforts are, in order of frequency of the particular challenge:

1. Diverse learning styles
2. Diverse thinking styles
3. Diverse interests, positions, and needs
4. Different personality styles
5. Different levels of intellectual development
6. Different communication skill-levels and styles

Almost one hundred years of research in the field of organization change has sought to uncover how we can simplify the complexities of the human systems that make up our organizational systems. However, there is little new information discovered and a significant amount of reworking of pre-existing findings and/or statement of the obvious. You have likely been inundated with the often- and overused standard philosophies of the workplace: stay focused, continually innovate, understand the interrelationships between the variables that affect your behavior over time and your business, manage your employees differently according to context and situation, challenge your assumptions, stay emotionally centered, be "likeable," etc. However, coaches often have good advice to give that follows these same basic tenets and which may be seen as restating much of what the "coachee" or client already knows and those we advise rarely implement the advice effectively in their own lives.

Why not? They wonder: "Should we be listening and responding to all of this advice? Is it really going to make a difference in my overall success and performance as a manager?" Research, personal results, and real-life case studies around the world would reply with a resounding, "YES!" Taking action related to impartial advice that you find appropriate and fitting for your challenges from caring and appreciative coaches and colleagues positively fosters a sense of community and belonging. Creating a community and interpersonal relationships that are formed with deep care, appreciation for each other, and an absence of competition has been shown to increase t-cells, improve the immune system, and enable people to become more successful at work, at home, and beyond!v However, we must take into account the resistance to change that those we are coaching feel and be sensitive to the triggers of this resistance. A good coach will recognize the behaviors of a subject that will lead to inaction and recurrence of persisting difficulties.

Another helpful friend and mentor, Marshall Goldsmith, rated as one of the Top 10 Coaches by the Wall Street Journal, and a keynote speaker and featured presenter at Linkage's 2004 HR Leaders Summit and Linkage's 2004 Global Institute for Leadership Development, once told me, "Lou, take my advice and then thank me for it!" I laughed but then, boy did he give it to me. He said, "Stop being so damn detail-oriented and start thinking big!" The next day, I applied to a Masters Degree program, began writing two books, and started my own research on change championship and leadership development. I learned the power of synchronicity and the need to let go and trust while having a healthy awareness of my surroundings and my needs.

Another learning point I've had-understanding that there is opportunity in every situation-regardless of its conflict-orientation or danger. What does this all mean? First of all, let go of your untested assumptions-you will be far better off because, wherever you face challenges, or if you have been an expert in your industry for 45 years-you can always re-create yourself at any moment. You can rebuild and regenerate into something greater than the sum of your experience, knowledge, and other "parts." In other words, we are walking, talking, living, breathing regenerative animals who are capable, with the right help, of architecting synergy into our lives.

When we accept humility, innovation, destruction, and re-creation in our lives, we truly will become better than we already are.
Perhaps most importantly, I have learned that well-timed appropriate advice, when properly filtered through my own perceptions and assumptions and applied to my own context, is liberating. The permission to discover my strengths and act upon them enables my over-worked, tired, burnt-out human system to move beyond my own self-inflicted limitations.

The best contingency theorists, cultural change agents, organizational systems theorists, whole systems theorists, positive deviance experts, consensus-building thought leaders, coaches, and personal change practitioners alike have one thing in common-they all use themselves as an instrument and architect of their own and others' change. Use your experiences and resulting skills built on facing personal challenges as arrows in your coaching quiver: understand the challenges that lay before you as a coach, take advice, change your behaviors, continually follow up with your coaches, and thank others for it-because advice is a gift you'll be thankful for later (Marshall Goldsmith is right!). At the same time, as a coach, we need to be aware that advice is from one "rater" or helper-and it does not reflect the advice of everyone. Be appreciative of your client's right to choose to take your advice, but also be sure to push them to improve, despite resistance to change.

Reprinted from Link and Learn Newsletter, published by  Linkage, Inc.

Louis Carter is CEO of Best Practices Institute. He can be reached at: lcarter@bpinstitute.net

Louis Carter is the global leader in analyzing, developing, designing, and implementing best practices in the fields of organizational learning, knowledge management and leadership and human resources development. Carter is the founder and chair/president of the Best Practices Institute, the International Association for Human Resources Development The International Association for Developing Leaders and publisher of Best Practice Publications, LLC -  a research and development association of professionals worldwide that provides best practices coaching, analysis, and research in results-driven people practices to organizations and individuals. Besides working as a senior executive (Vice President) at numerous corporations, Louis has written/edited and directed over 8 books, 3 major research projects on leadership and change, and numerous large-scale learning events on best practices in organization development and change.

His most recent book, The Change Champion’s Fieldguide has been endorsed as a book that, “will become one of the most quoted, referenced, and used business books in the first decade of the 2000's,” by Vijay Govindarajan, Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business, Director, Center for Global Leadership, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. Lou is also an advisory board member of the Society for the Leadership of Change. Louis has been featured in Investors Business Daily, Business Watch Magazine, The Supervisor's Guide to Quality and Excellence, Symphony Orchestra Institute, The American Society for Training and Development, U.S. Army War College, The New England Human Resource Association, and business and government courses around the world.

He has lectured domestically and abroad including such universities as Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing, China, Texas A&M University, Seton Hall University, the American Society for Training & Development and for many executives in Fortune 500 organizations. His workshops on best practices in leadership development and change have received the highest reviews in the U.S. and abroad in such countries as Thailand, China, and Singapore.

His new book, Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organization Change (Jossey Bass/John Wiley and Sons) was just released in 2005. Click here for endorsements.