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Changing Spots
Trying to change "What is" is impossible, but awareness,
acceptance and clarity make the impossible easy to
achieve
by Margot Cairnes
In his article, "Corporate Culture:
Use it Don't Lose it" Peter Drucker tells us that trying
to change a corporation's culture is a waste of time.
Cultures are simply too pervasive, too resistant to
change. However rapid and radical improvement in
performance can be produced through working with any
culture to help it yield of its best. During World War
II both Germany and Japan had their values, institutions
and cultures discredited, yet today these same countries
are industrial giants. Have their cultures changed? Not
much. "Today's Japan and today's Germany are
unmistakably Japanese and German in culture, no matter
how different this or that behaviour. In fact, changing
behaviour works only if it can be based on the existing
'culture'".
As a leadership expert I find this is
equally true for individuals. "Leopards" I am often
reminded "can't change their spots". However when we
really come to understand how leopards think and act,
when we fully understand what motivates them we can help
them learn new tricks.
People of course are more complicated
than leopards. Helping people understand their own
thinking, action and psychological drivers is no simple
task. However, the consistent demand for improved
leadership performance in our complex, rapidly changing
world means that anyone who seeks to get to and stay at
the top has to be constantly learning, growing and
getting better at what they do. This doesn't mean trying
to turn themselves into something they are not but
really understanding who and what they are and working
with that in order to get more effective at leading for
improved performance.
Ironically taken to its limit this
means that as leaders we only really change when we
learn to understand and accept ourselves the way we are.
Knowing what we want and increasing our effectiveness is
synonymous with accepting the reality of who we are and
facing the hard truth about the world in which we live.
In their rather unsettling book "We've
had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world's
getting worse" psychologist James Hillman and columnist
Michael Ventura tell us that as a society we are not
very good at doing this. The field of therapy has grown
so rapidly over the past 100 years precisely because
people don't know how to deal with death, divorce, job
loss, marriage, physical attack, relationship breakdown
and a multitude of other changes that constitute modern
life. In short we turn to therapy when life happens and
expect the therapist to help us change so that we can
avoid the pain and discomfort of life doing its thing.
In order to feel better we want to be different, when in
fact it would be vastly different if we just learned to
accept the reality of our feelings, clarified what we
wanted and got on with it.
This, you might think, is all very
self-evident; it is also, like common sense, extremely
rare. We are all so used to working with theories,
models, assumptions and expectations. We are very
unskilled at dealing with the reality of our own
emotions, relationships and the constantly shifting
sands of life. The very extent of this lack of skill
provides a great competitive opportunity - you don't
have to move very far to be way ahead of the game.
So let me be a little more explicit. The human brain
goes through several phases of development before it is
capable of complex, logical, adult thought, which is
achieved around the age of twelve. Prior to that we
receive and process information with the immature brain
of a child. This early programming which happens with
the immature mind, becomes the basis of our adult
behaviour. So if we decided as young children to respond
to adult males (Daddy) with love and trust we will
continue to automatically respond to adult males that
way. Now in some contexts this makes sense, but in many
others it doesn't. Some people are much more trustworthy
than others, discretion can very definitely be the name
of the game. Now I have chosen here a very coarse
example but the effect of our early patterning on our
adult behaviour while extremely pervasive is usually
very subtle and therefore very difficult for us to see
in ourselves. To do this we need skilled expert feedback
and support, not to become world class navel gazers but
so that we can learn to work with the patterns of our
own psyches.
The aim here isn't to change us, but
to understand ourselves so that we can work with our
ingrained response and consciously choose the most
appropriate behaviour in any situation. This is
different from what normally happens, which is that we
are unaware of our habitual response, think the
environment is causing us a problem and then learn
behaviourally based skills as a way of dealing with the
environment. While ever we remain unconscious of our
habits of relationship and response however we remain
remarkably bad at using the right skills at the
appropriate time. Moreover when skills are not congruent
with our true nature we usually reek of hypocrisy.
When leadership was easier, when
change was slower and life simpler there was less
motivation to undertake the hard work of understanding
what made us tick. When society was less complex we
simply didn't need to be so skilful. It was easy to know
when and what to do as integrity was less important than
conformity to accepted social rules.
According Hillman and Ventura, psychotherapy went wrong
because it became too individualistic, too apolitical,
too separated from collective social action. Drucker
tells us that programs aimed at the collective change of
the "ingrained habits" of corporate and national
cultures (he cites China and India as failures in this
instance) have resulted only in "frustration, friction,
confusion - and no changes in behaviour'.
My own experience in working with
leaders tells me that when leaders accept the reality of
their own programming, clarify what they want for
themselves and their corporations, choose consciously
behaviour that they can comfortably sustain because it
is compatible with their own leadership style), deep,
real and fruitful change happens.
This always appears through very
simple things, the asking of clear simple questions like
"What do we want? What is currently working best and
under what circumstances? What about this excites us
enough to have us commit to putting energy behind it?"
It isn't just the questions that work however but that
the person asking the questions is real, congruent and
therefore trustworthy. When we accept the reality of who
we are, we quit trying to pretend we are something we
are not, we stop making unreasonable demands and we no
longer appear as hypocrites preaching one thing and
doing another. I am constantly struck by the fact that
the most powerful and successful leaders appear
eminently ordinary. They radiate congruence, integrity
and self-acceptance. They know who they are and they
make no excuses for what they want. This frees them to
talk the truth, to ask the hard (usually the simplest)
questions and to stay constantly in touch with reality
as it changes. This level of being 'ordinary' is
extraordinary and leads to phenomenal results, quickly
and apparently effortlessly. Trying to change "what is",
is impossible but awareness, acceptance and clarity make
the impossible easy to achieve.
Copyright
ã Margot
Cairnes
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