The prophet wanders in from the desert crying, “I have seen. I have seen. We must change.” And as the people listen with mounting interest, leadership plots to kill him. This is the way it has always been: Julius Caesar. William Wallace. Malcolm X. Robert Kennedy.
Visionaries often die of wounds to the back, their grand ideas smothered in the night by the very people they were hoping to help.
Change Management is the riskiest of enterprises.
It is the Visionary who cries, “Some men see things as they are and ask 'why?' I dream things that never were and ask 'why not?'” And it is the Guardian who responds, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.” Have you ever had a revolutionary idea stonewalled by the people that you were hoping would implement it?
Stonewalling occurs when you're trying to lead people faster than they're willing to change.
If you want things to be different in your company, if you want your revolution to take root and spread, you must start at the beginning… with the Guardians. While Visionaries see Guardians as “regimented and unimaginative sticks-in-the-mud,” Guardians see Visionaries as “flighty and unstable dreamers.”
On the surface the Guardian may seem like an uptight killjoy, a wet blanket, a little man with a badge. But the Guardian is also your strongest ally. He or she is, of all the people, the most practical, dependable, and serious. Guardians believe in authority and organization. They value structure and belonging. They consider work and service to be high virtues. They arrive early and stay late, their shoulders to the wheel and their hands ready to lift and carry. And Guardians are the most resistant to change. The secret to winning their support is to seek their counsel early: “This is the problem I believe we must correct. But in our attempt to correct it, what must we safeguard at all costs? What is working well for us? What must not be changed?”
If you have the patience to win the Guardians instead of trying to steamroll over them, you will have gained the power of implementation and guaranteed the success of your reorganization.
Do you have the patience?
Roy H. Williams
THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES – For more than a decade, advertising professionals had approached us in the hopes of starting an alliance. Then a year ago Pennie and I quietly began opening a few branch offices with carefully selected Wizard of Ads partners. Now that all the kinks have been worked out and things are running smoothly, we're ready to consider adding new partners to the team. If you'd like to know more, be at the orientation meeting for prospective partners in our Austin offices on August 6. For more information contact Corrine Taylor at (800) 425-4769.