making change now...

Change. We all struggle with how to deal with it. We know our organizations need it but we struggle with making it happen. I have never read a book that has helped me understand how to move people through change like this book from Chip and Dan Heath called Switch. Change must be intentional. Change is a process. Change takes time and persistence. Your impact as a leader will be evident as you lead your team through change. Check out some of my favorite quotes from the book that I captured on my Kindle (I love my Kindle!)

• For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.
• For individuals’ behavior to change, you’ve got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds.
• Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
• If you want people to change, you must provide crystal-clear direction.
• Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is precisely in the details.
• When you want someone to behave in a new way, explain the “new way” clearly. Don’t assume the new moves are obvious.
• Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.
• Starting an unpleasant task is always worse than continuing it.
• When you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort
• But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.
• Change isn’t an event; it’s a process.