Leaders at Sears, Shell and the US Army transformed attitudes and behavior--and made the changes stick. Seven principles that help maintain change include:
Build an intricate understanding of the business. On the one hand, troops need to understand the principal aims of each engagement...and how it fits into the larger strategic context. On the other hand, soldiers need solid individual skills. Both requirements are essential.
Encourage uncompromising straight talk. ...predicated on the frank exchange among soldiers as they sort through the confusion of battle and figure our where things went wrong. [Frank] exchanges will not occur if people are showing deference to their superiors or holding back for fear of hurting someone's feelings.
Harness setbacks. NTC participants know from the outset that they are fighting an enemy far tougher than any they are likely to meet in the field. Observer/controllers remind them daily that their maneuvers are not about winning but about learning. Harnessing setbacks is a matter of recontextualizing failure, treating breakdowns as breakthroughs, seeing defeat as opportunity.
Promote inventive accountability. Close battles are won by exploiting the enemy's broken plays. Mastery of a combat assignment requires not just replicable skill b ut also the capacity to improvise. Observers/controllers single out and reward creative acts of initiative that are built on a solid platform of proficiency.
Manage from the future. Being all you can be is not a destination to be reached but a mindset to manage from...The most essential aspect of managing from the future is to alter the institution's point of view. We all tend to look toward the future as a distant goal. By contrast, this discipline means internalizing some future goal so the institution can plant its feet in that future and manage the present from there.
Create relentless discomfort with the status quo. The After Action REview is based on the notion that individuals can improve--in most cases improve dramatically--on everything they do...reinforce the notion that AAR disciplines can be applied everywhere to other activities, and a protocol like the AAR does tend to get under a person's skin. Soldiers carry the ideas back to their home bases. Once internalized, the discipline of relentless discomfort begins to reveal itself in repeated, gnawing questions: How can we do this still better (faster, cheaper)? Is there a radical new approach that we haven't thought of yet?
Understand the Quid Pro Quo. It takes more than compensation and employability to produce transformational participation. It also takes a sense of meaning of the work strong enough to generate intrinsic satisfaction. And finally, employees must understand where the enterprise is going and have some say in shaping its destiny.
From Changing the Way We Change by Richard Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja in Harvard Business Review, November-December, 1997.