Staying On the Up Side of Change

Change, change, everywhere we turn. As a top executive, you can’t delude yourself into thinking that your entire management team and employees really like it. While there are those who thrive on change, most people experience it as a stressor.

To succeed, executives must become masters at transforming the fear associated with change into workplace creativity and enthusiasm. Therein lies a major challenge. If there’s fear anywhere in the executive boardroom, it often has little or no avenue for escape.

Realistic or not, executive fears can be crippling when it comes to driving a business through this abysmal state of the economy.

The Missing Sounding Board

Executives must transform their own fears into creative energy before they can hope to do so with their staff members. Time and again, though, we find that top executives are missing that no-risk sounding board they need so allay their own fears. The result is a hollow-speak about the importance of change – their communication about needed change is usually limited to survival of the company. It lacks the enthusiasm for new ideas that can make the company a better place to work.

Executive coaching can provide executives the sounding board they need to confront or  dismiss both real and imagined fears. That leaves them free to get on with the creative and insightful thinking that probably landed them in the boardroom in the first place. Add executive team coaching to the mix, and you might even change the boardroom culture so that executives feel comfortable putting their fears out on the table.

Celebrate Change

Once the executive team is charged up for action, it is important to involve employees in frank discussions. Allow them to ask questions and allay their own fears, just as the executives have. Solicit new ideas, and show enthusiasm in considering them.  Hold small but affordable celebrations of casting out old ways of doing things as you promote something new. What this builds is hope for a successful future. And before you know it, that hope could turn into the company’s self-fulfilling prophecy.