Of Mountains, Molehills and Change Management    

An excerpt from Chad’s book “Thinking Aloud: Reflections on Ethical Leadership”. We hope you enjoy the essay – and perhaps introduce the questions below as a way to start conversations with your teammates. – ELA Team

Get a free PDF version of Chad’s Book, “Thinking Aloud” now at https://ethinact.com/thinking-aloud/.

Of Mountains, Molehills and Change Management   

I recently enjoyed a vacation day skiing at a local Minnesota ski area (readers from beyond the Midwest may insert a smug chuckle here).  It was my birthday, and in recent years this local ski outing has become something of a habit.  It feels good to be outdoors.  The business was fine without me.

For whatever reason, I was irrationally nervous as I put on my skis.  I took first to the bunny hill, using its scant inertia to propel me to the nearest full-sized chair lift.  There was no line on a Monday morning, so I took a moment to ask the lift operator whether “there’s an easy way down from this lift.”

“Is this your first time on skis?” he asked, clearly surprised by the question.

“No.”

“You basically know how to ski?”

“Sure.”

He smiled, leaning toward me.  “I don’t know if you noticed, but we don’t actually have a mountain here,” he whispered.  “You can pretty much ski anywhere you want.”

So I did, all day.  What was I worried about?  I don’t really care.  I’m just grateful that I was able to relax and enjoy the day.

There’s a very personal story here, about my slight inclination toward physical cowardice, and a deep commitment not to let it rule my actions.  A more interesting observation, though, concerns the ease with which our fears, both conscious and unconscious, literally create mountains in our imagination.  At best, we waste energy preparing to scale mountains that do not exist.  At worst, this shadow terrain obscures and prevents us from pursuing our very real objectives.

Is it courageous to realize that our fears are unfounded?  Not especially, but it is probably a hallmark of adulthood.  It is certainly a leader’s task to sort out real and imaginary risks, beginning with our own imaginations.

There are mountains of literature about what is called “change management.”  That term has always struck me as peculiar, given the more or less constant state of change in most organizations.  Isn’t “static management” really the exception and “change” the norm?  Still, MBA students read Kotter and Schlesinger, Heifetz and Linsky, and a host of other authors, all offering guidance on how to lead others through the process of organizational change.  A common theme: overcoming the resistance to change, and addressing the conflicting interests that arise as the players imagine or predict what an upcoming change will mean for them.

Perhaps we can go a long way toward overcoming the overall burden of resistance to change, simply by reminding ourselves and one another – clearly and compassionately – that some mountains are imaginary.  We would do well to remember that others may perceive very real challenges that aren’t immediately apparent to us.  Good conversations can help everyone survey and understand the true landscape of any change.  We will be effective in delineating reality, to the extent that we have already earned the trust and respect of our teams.  Indeed, the condition of ongoing change offers ample opportunity to build credibility over time.

Conversation Starters:

Very often, we are held back by barriers that exist largely in our imagination.

• What are the imaginary mountains holding you back?
• What aspects of organizational changes have seemed like mountains? What brought them back to scale?
• What do you think about the opposite problem: minimizing or ignoring an important or urgent issue?

At Ethical Leaders in Action we believe that most, if not all people, can develop themselves to play leadership roles in many different spheres both large and small. The foundation of this development process is a short but powerful list of virtues which can be developed and improved through conscious effort. For more information feel free to take the Virtues of Ethical Leadership Self Inventory (VELSI) which breaks these virtues down into features that can be individually developed. The results of the VELSI come with a quick reference guide to help you understand how the virtues and their individual features fit together. https://ethinact.com/velsi/

See a list of other posts in this series at Blog Post Series

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