Make Change Easy - Get Involved!

There are wild variances in how much involvement organisations are brave enough to offer their people in change. From those organisations where they just 'tell' (sometimes by text message even!), to the most enlightened extreme, where they enable wholesale contribution to the change process.

Such organisations actually create the time and space to involve as many people as possible, in the issues surrounding the need for change.

This organism of change, where the organisation fully respects (an important word in this context), the ability of individuals to contribute, not in a patronising way, but more in a synergistic and fully contributory way, enables two significant and positive steps.

Firstly, involvement in the creation of change solutions, empowers people in what can be a very disempowering situation. They begin to have a role in their own and their organisation's future.

This leads to a second significant point. The ownership of the solution shifts, so that individuals get really bought into the need for change and that they can contribute, sometimes much more than can be expected. Their empowerment values them as never before.

This can, with acute awareness on the part of senior managements, move the organisation from fire-fighting when things go wrong, to an ongoing search for quality, review and questioning of assumptions. This becomes as Ricardo Semler found in his wonderful book, 'Maverick', rewarding holistically, for the organisation, the employees and also the locality as a whole.

A marvellous example of embracing change, freeing a business owner and exemplar leader, and his team to realise their true potential.

An exercise to consider...

AP - New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a lead investigator into the mortgage collapse that wobbled the U.S. economy, hasn't taken the title "Sheriff of Wall Street" that one of his predecessors rode all the way to the governor's mansion.

AP - Ben Bernanke says declines in home prices have forced many Americans to cut back sharply on spending and warns that the trend could continue to weigh on the economy for years.

Reuters - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday issued a call to action to restore U.S. housing markets, saying depressed house prices and sales are a serious drag on the economic recovery.

AP - Monthly U.S. exports to Europe grew in December, a hopeful sign after a steep decline the previous month. But, some economists remain concerned that the region's debt crisis will still weigh on the U.S. economy this year.