LEARN TO PLAY WELL WITH CHANGE

By Guest Blogger Andy Webster, Energy Industry Leader 

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to meet with 16-year-old students graduating from the EDT Industrial Cadet program – receiving Gold Awards. Preparing for my talk I started to think about what’s really important for the next generation of engineering leaders to hear about. What – beyond their technical and social talent – might really matter? And three themes became really clear to me – finding their strengths, lifelong learning and accepting failure. I want to explore the lifelong learning one in this article, it’s connection to change, and get your own reaction and insights as you read this in the comments below.

At this point I should put a health warning in. For some reason I really enjoy and find change easy. For a long time, I thought this was a universal feeling. Apparently not. And the real world consequence of that is that for many people change is scary, stressful, tiring, confusing, or all and more of the above. As I thought about the 16 year olds I was meeting I thought back to when I was in their shoes. The world was very different back then. Mobile technology was almost non-existent. The internet was a dial up service that was like your encyclopedia but on your computer – and probably not your computer but your families’ computer. Electric cars existed – as milk floats (milk delivery vehicles for my non UK readers).

Not an exhaustive list of how the world was different but enough to make the point. Change since I was in their shoes was really quite increasable. It made me think – is our fear of change connected with our sense of worth? Are we valued for what we know and if what we know is no longer of value, are we of less value? I’m no expert of human psychology so I’d welcome in comment what the research shows. But this natural urge to conserve is a strong one. It’s also at a team and business level a dangerous one. With the pace of the change in the world, how do you make change for yourself, your team or your business less scary?

Invest in education. Any of you that read the LinkedIn articles from around the world will have seen the growing trend for educational investments by companies. The fear is that instead of skilling up, you skill out. That’s not what I’ve seen in practice. In the last team I lead, my proudest moments were seeing individuals graduate and achieve educational success. The gratitude to the company for the investment in them was immense. The value to the company was that they had more of the skills we needed. I’ve seen others advocate for ‘mandatory’ sabbaticals every certain number of years, and I think this could be a very powerful way that just like the post war generation saw universal education as a key to rebuilding of society, sabbaticals may ensure that the current generation remain relevant and employable in this fast changing world.

Develop leaders. Flying back from Amsterdam I read an article by John Kotter on leadership. His research had shown that there are still insufficient good leaders. But the message of his article was that leadership can be learnt (to an extent) and if you actually have a lot more people providing a little leadership it can bring major change to a business. I’ve seen this happen. Modern leadership is about skills such as creating a vision for your team’s purpose (why do we exist). Investing in understanding your team and coaching them to bring out their natural talent. Being good at providing real time feedback so that performance is understood – and being open to feedback yourself. These skills aren’t learnt from a course. They come from an intentional effort of a business to learn techniques, apply them and get better. It comes from seeing leaders across an organisation not just in the C suite. Modern companies don’t have time to run up and down their hierarchy real time decisions. There needs to be credible leadership at many layers.

Be human. I think the hardest thing in all that I see and read is that it ignores so often what we all know to be true – diversity. Every one of us has a life story that’s different from the others we work with. And in that sense to try and group people together is useful at a macro level but breaks down at the human level. We – at least I – want to be seen. Understood. Respected. We want people around us that can empathise with us, support us, and cheer us along. When processing stress, being human and meeting your colleagues, your team and your business where they’re at goes a long way to processing change. Their journey is not yours and yours is not theirs. What you can do is be authentic, caring and curious and be willing to be what they need from you to continue the journey together.

Definitely not an exhaustive list to living with change, but I hope a few ideas that might be of help to you where you are. Knowing that our world is changing like never before, I think we need to share ideas and strategies in this way to grow our collective skill and resilience so we can embrace change and use it to drive progress not fear. Now over to you – have you seen things that worked really well for you or your team?