Group Change

Ever had a group discussion about how things need to change? Perhaps the group talks about reasons they are unable to succeed or problems with process or procedure. Do you ever get the sense that there's an undercurrent of "everyone else but me needs to change"?

It's often been said that the only thing that's consistent in life are the forces of change. Well, I'll provide the corollary to that. The other thing that's consistent in life is a person or group's resistance to change. Don't get me wrong, some people are better at embracing change than others. But human beings are creatures of habit, so it's all too easy to slip into a pattern, often without knowing.

In order for us to become better employees, managers and people, we need to break out a mirror and regularly take a good hard look. Is what I am doing right now the best, most important thing that I should be doing right now? Is how I am doing my job the most efficient way possible?

Just the other day, we ran into an issue where we made a change to a customer account. There was some ensuing fallout related to that change. In post-mortem discussions, I found myself suggesting us using an email to notify everyone. That's NOT being an agent of change. That's falling back on old habits. For the past two years, we've been implementing an enterprise wide CRM system. So here we have this CRM system that is meant to unify customer information across the organization, and we'll go back to sending yet another email into the daily noise?!? Shame on me!

I was able to catch myself later that day and talked with the operations folks on documenting those changes within the CRM so that people in Customer Service, development and so on would be able to reference those changes and they'd be permanently documented rather than hiding in someone's in-box. Some days, the person who has to change is you and every day, you have an opportunity to make the right choice.