Contemporary Lifestyle Consulting Offers Advice for Coping With Job Transitions Over the Holidays

With an Imminent Job Change, People May Feel a Fear of the Unknown and a Sense of Insecurity That Clashes With the Family Security and Togetherness That Make the Holiday Season Special; Tolu Adeleye of Contemporary Lifestyle Consulting Offers Some Advice for Those Undergoing a Major Job Transition During the Holiday Season

VICTORIA, BC–(Marketwire – December 6, 2007) – Facing a job transition isn’t necessarily a pleasant prospect even at the best of times. According to a study published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal), the self-reported health status of people facing a job change or job loss showed significant deterioration when compared to people with secure jobs.

“It’s already stressful to deal with career transitions normally,” said Tolu Adeleye, a partner of Contemporary Lifestyle Consulting, Inc. (http://www.staysanethroughchange.com). “When it’s the holiday season, it can be even harder to cope.”

Adeleye says that with an imminent job change, people may feel a fear of the unknown and a sense of insecurity that clashes with the family security and togetherness that make the holiday season special. The added stress of the holiday season also makes it harder to cope. She offers some advice for those undergoing a major job transition during the holiday season.

The first thing she suggests is to be in the moment, especially when attending holiday gatherings.

“If you’re present in the moment, then you’re not thinking about your impending job change or what tomorrow will bring,” Adeleye said. “You are only focusing on this time with your family and enjoying it. That alone will help coping with a job transition immensely.”

Adeleye also advises people to use the happy, euphoric feeling that comes from celebrating a joyous occasion to cast their career transition in a new and positive light.

“It’s so easy to get caught up in thinking about the stressful, negative part of a job change, and you let fear and worry take over,” Adeleye said. “You can use the positive emotion you experience from being with your family to give you momentum into the change. Instead of viewing it with fear, you can view it as a new adventure in your life.”

People with a job change in the near future should also be careful making New Year’s resolutions, Adeleye says. Throwing in more change where there’s already insecurity about a job transition could add more stress to the situation.

“Try to make realistic resolutions,” Adeleye said. “You’ve already got one major change happening in your life. Handling too many life changes at once may bring unbearable pressure on you.”

For more information about how to cope with a job change during the holiday season, visit Contemporary Lifestyle Consulting online at http://www.staysanethroughchange.com and get 10 percent off their e-book, “Stay Sane Through Change.”

About CLCI

F. David Webster, M.A. and Tolulope A. Adeleye, Ph.D. founded Contemporary Lifestyle Consulting in September 2005. CLCI seeks to empower people with time-tested tools for turning times of change into stepping stones to greater fulfillment.

Tolu Adeleye, Ph.D.
Phone: 250-744-2159
Email Contact
http://www.staysanethroughchange.com

Dave Webster, M.A.
Phone: 250-744-2411
Email Contact
http://www.staysanethroughchange.com

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Breakthrough Cultural Change

Once initiatives are off and running companies need to make sure that they are going to stick, and that they are going to become a permanent part of the day-to-day activities of the organization. This means changing the way that the company does business, and it is one of the key areas where reliability initiatives continue to fall over! This means changing the workforce culture! Great! Got it! The last five consultants I spoke to told me the same thing.

So… what’s culture?

Culture can be identified as the way that a company, as an entity, thinks thus driving how it acts. Lets look at that in some more detail. When one person thinks a certain way this is referred to as a mindset, his or her way of looking at things and of interpreting the world. When a group of people think in the same way then it becomes a paradigm, and the culture of any organization is made up of the paradigms of its people.

One of John Moubrays’ more regular quotes was “if you want to change the way that people act, you have to change the way that they think.” If we tie this in with the paragraph above then it becomes a powerful tool for changing workplace culture. So, to put this into practice we need to change the mindsets that make up the paradigms of an organization. You are probably thinking, that’s easy for you to say, harder for us to implement! And I would agree with you 100% on that!

How then can you go about implementing some advanced technique, method or tool, and ensure that it is both effective and permanent? The rest of this short article focuses on some of the techniques that I have used a lot in my working life every day.

As a consultant, managing through change is what I have been doing for the last 12 – 15 years and I would like to share with you some of the lessons that I have learned in a way that makes them a lot more painless for you to learn, than they were for me to discover. This is not what I think this is what I do! So these are road tested to the extreme!

Breakthrough cultural change tip #1: Create a new belief system

As we have looked at earlier, changing culture requires a change in thinking. So we need to begin at the beginning. What are the new paradigms that your organization needs to have? How do they differ from what “we” think today? And most importantly, how can we introduce these to the workforce in a way that will get them to understand and buy into them?

These are the first questions you need to ask yourself. Define what it is you ultimately want to achieve then look at the thinking that will be needed to support that. Adult learning is different from learning in infancy. Adults are smarter, (mostly), more experienced, more cynical, and generally less willing to believe things that they are told.

So you don’t tell them, you show them! Adult learning needs to be delivered in such a way so as to ensure that the people on the course, seminar, or training event, build their own conclusions supported by logic, fact and their inherent ability to reason. In all my time consulting I have yet to come across a single person who did not respond positively to something that agreed with their internal logic!

Sub-tip: Elements of adult learning

To be effective, any adult learning program, whether it be developed in house or delivered by an external provider, needs to contain the following elements in order to be effective in challenging long held belief systems:

Socratic teaching. This is often referred to as teaching through questioning. As the title suggests it comes from methods Socrates used to teach his students. (As opposed to didactic teaching) So it has stood the test of time I would say! Socratic teaching is about being inclusive, continually getting the course participants to respond to questions and to drive the lesson forward.

The trick, and it is a practiced technique, is to get them to arrive at a point where the limits of what they know, or the errors of how they think, becomes immediately obvious to them.

This sounds difficult and the first couple of times that you deliver this sort of a lesson it will need to be very carefully structured and focussed. After a while it becomes an almost instinctive method of teaching key learning points.

Why is this so powerful a technique? Because they participants arrive at the conclusions themselves, through their own reasoning abilities. You didn’t tell them anything just pointed them at something! And if they thought of it, rather than you telling them, then they are more likely to believe it and remember it. (Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why. I just know it works)

Participative learning. If you do something you are far more likely to remember it than if you are told it. Think about it in your own life, if you learned a craft, the theory side of things was only interesting once you got into the field and did it for real. If you learned an engineering discipline, then it was only once you got into the real world and put it into practice that the reality of it became obvious.

Most modern training courses have an element of interactive exercises and practice sessions. However, sometimes these are unrelated to what’s actually being taught and can often just be something to fill the time. In worst case scenarios exercises are the unimaginative kind that say “Now make a list of the high priority items in your plant”. Wow! What’s to learn here?

If exercises are going to be effective they need to challenge those doing them. Argument, in these situations, is not a bad thing at all. In fact it is a good thing and shows that people are thinking, being challenged, and are going through the pain of changing the way that they think.
Participative learning can be group driven, or individual. It can be focussed on an adult learning game, a set exercise, a group discussion, or any other range of variables. In designing your exercises, don’t make the mistake of revealing everything at the beginning. Structure it so that they reveal things to themselves, or with your guidance, during the process.

Apply the techniques to their day-to-day activities. This is a key element that is often overlooked. It is overlooked because it can often throw up things that are weird, out of the ordinary, extremely difficult to deal with and sometimes controversial. Why? Because no matter who you are, it is likely that they know their plant a lot better than you will ever be able to!
So, if you are going to include a session where they apply the techniques to their own equipment then you need to be 100% sure that you understand your subject matter thoroughly. If so then you can deal with the curve balls that will come at you once people start to apply it to their own situation. Thinking on your feet is not a nice-to-have ability for asset management trainers it is a must-have!

Why is this so powerful? Because it combines the elements of the other two steps. Socratic learning through questioning current practices and using their new found logic and understanding to solve them, and doing rather than hearing about, so they can learn from the results.

As a quick warning, unless you are looking at something very simple, don’t think that you are going to get a fantastic result that you can use in the plant immediately. Take the pressure off everybody and let him or her learn through making mistakes.

So this is the basis of changing culture. Why do we need to do anything else? We have changed the way they think. Right? Wrong! We have only just begun. After the workshop or training session they are going to go out into the workforce with a range of people who think nothing like the way that they now do. And these people are not going to “get it” just from a passing conversation.

If you don’t follow up immediately then the results will be, changes to thinking 0% – 20%, changes to the way they do work 0%-15%, changes to the way the company works 0%!

Breakthrough tip #2: Prove it!

This is key to success. As a consultant it is my job to continually be backed up by a successful track record. In my business, having a scorched earth policy will only lead to reducing levels of business and ultimately a forced career change! If you are going to put in place a successful change program you need to think like a consultant. Think end of life, not end of project. How will this go on to be a fantastic reference for you within your company and beyond? Through its success!

So, to prove it you need to get the course participants to apply it to their areas of activity almost immediately after the training! Get them to apply the principles of what they have learned, under your expert guidance, to an area of their daily work.

Using their logic and new understanding of a particular area, get them to reason through a problem or issue Arrive at a result, and then go about putting the result into practice. Through it all, make sure you remind them, and yourself, of what you have achieved. This means tracking the benefits. Make sure that they are aware of how their efforts translate into an impact on the corporation. Either through increased productivity, profitability, reduced risk or any of the other key areas that your company is focussing on.

Why is this a powerful cultural change tool? Because they see that what you have taught them actually works! It is not just theory, whiteboard magic or “slide-ware”. It is a real, practical method that they can apply to change their situation.

At this point we start to get into some of the myths surrounding cultural change. Most people are afraid of changing their current situation. This much is true. But, people do want to contribute, they do want to make things better, and they do want to improve the way that their company works. (And often want to better themselves personally in the process. Nothing wrong with that!) Despite what you may hear, it has been my experience that this is the “what’s in it for me” factor.

Breakthrough tip #3: Check it!

Put in place a monitoring regime to ensure that what we said we would do, we actually did. Place some form of scorecard or performance monitoring regime around the asset, department or whatever it was that you applied the techniques to.

Learning about new ways of doing things will challenge their belief system and allow them to look at accept that there are better ways of doing things. Putting it into practice will enable them to see that it really does work and is not just some theoretical program of the month! But, seeing for real that it did work, monitoring the metrics in place to watch the benefits they said would appear become reality. That’s a sealer! And it drives home all of the things that they have learned, in a number of different ways, up to this point.

Breakthrough tip #4: Re-apply it!

As things go on, changes to the way that the company operates, changes to the quality of data available, changes to the way that the workforce is structured and any number of other variables could mean that what you wanted to achieve didn’t come about. Or what you wanted to achieve has been affected by changes in the environment. At this point there is a need to revisit the exercise, re-apply the techniques with the benefit of new knowledge and hindsight, and begin the process of monitoring it all over again.

This is the essence of continual improvement. A workforce, now thinking along the lines that we set out to achieve at the beginning, monitoring and adjusting processes and other tools to ensure maximum performance to what the company requires at all times. Steps three and four become the core of the day-to-day application of the new culture, and the company has successfully changed an element of the workforce culture in a way that will drive it further along the road to breakthrough performance.

8 "lies" companies tell before starting a consulting engagement

(Format shamelessly stolen from Guy Kawasaki’s Blog “How to Change the World”, check it out!)

Okay, so they’re not dirty big “lies”, more like the white untruths, miscalculations, obfuscations and poor judgments that companies (we’ll call them “clients”) generally say just before starting on a large scale initiative.

If you have ever been involved in an ERP system implementation or any other sort of project with a big organizational impact (As a consultant or a client) then it is likely that you have either heard or used these at one time or another.

1. Yes, we will make sure that all of the documents are ready for when you arrive

Like most of these “lies” this one is very well intentioned; just wrong. The people making these statements have often never seen the technical documents, nor do they have any idea if they even exist, neither would they know where to find them if they needed to.

The people who do know where they are often would not make these claims because they were lost years ago, or they are spread out in several peoples desks and offices or they have never been seen since Noah was a boy!

Sometimes companies do have good technical libraries, but this is beside the point. Don’t take any assumptions about this one. If the project is planning to have these and doesn’t, it can upset the entire time line!

2. Providing office space and administrative resources for the team will be no problem at all.

Correction, this will probably be the hardest thing you will have to do!

There is almost never any free space, or if there is it is in an isolated part of the company’s estates that nobody has seen since the entire division was downsized. (And even then it will be a fight!)

This is a good example of how project sponsors or managers tend to over estimate the importance of their project. (The operations, plant and maintenance managers)
And when admin assistance is needed it is often some poor overworked clerical assistant or secretary who cannot possibly meet all the demands of the project and her day job!

Get commitment first, and then work out how to deal with this one! It is easier to deal with this problem before you get a room filled with egotistical consultants and megalomaniacal project managers.

3. We will take care of the communications issues.

Well intentioned and probably something that you thought you could do. My experience has been that when this is run wholly internally, meaning by the client alone without assistance from the consultancy, it often ends in tears.

Why? Because of one small miscalculation, the people carrying out the communications and trying to change the culture of the company’s employees are often the same people that they have been working alongside for many years.

So they have the same workplace culture anyway, they are familiar with each other and know each others faults and histories (not always great).

Also there is a need to get very serious about this. The project is often in the millions, sometimes even in the tens of millions, and you want to entrust the change of workplace culture (and communications of these changes) to an ex-division manager who worked through a couple of big projects like this before.

Okay, sometimes it works but we should be realistic. This can’t be amateur week if you are spending that kind of money. Cultural change is the bedrock that will ensure the success or failure of the initiative over the long term.

Understand what the challenges are (really understand it) check out your options and if necessary spend the money to get it right the first time!

4. Don’t worry, if we tell them to be there for training they will be there!

Um…no, they probably won’t.

This is a standard sort of line that project sponsors and managers give. Why? Several reasons, they overestimate their ability to get things done (this is after all probably a big step both for the company and for this person specifically) or they have underestimated the workload that the sites and departments that have to implement this are already facing.

Organizing training is a pretty intensive and difficult thing to do! What about:

• Turnaround schedules and when people are likely to be busy doing other things?
• Heavy vacation periods? (August and December for example?)
• Other initiatives that are on the go at present?
• Work rosters?
• Current workloads and the ability or otherwise of the department to spare that person for one to three days of training?
• Resources for training and their availability? (Rooms, projectors, flip charts etc)
• Are they even interested? (The people or the plants / departments?)

Face it, they probably won’t be there unless you organize for them to be there beforehand. (Project pre-planning) Doing it after making the commitment (as in 99.9% of projects) means some of the best resources or a large number of ordinary ones, will not get to be involved.

5. This is important to us; we will make sure you have a dedicated team of top level resources to implement this.

The guy making this statement often doesn’t “know” this, but he does believe it! Again, do we really believe this project is so important that the key resources that should be “at the coal face” are going to be taken off line to do it for an extended period?

The reality is often somewhere between a range of possible outcomes.

One, this has happened to me sadly, the guys you get are the people that the company is intending to elbow out once the project is over. Great motivational symbol that one!

Two, you do get a small core of disciplined and seasoned professionals who are overwhelmed by the workload they have to do to get this done for the entire corporation, often leading to frustration and resignations.

Three, you get the people who can be spared. More likely than not this will be the guy who is often quoted as a “hard worker” but everyone realizes they are not really very sharp. But, “he deserves a break!”, so they give him to you to ruin your project.

Four, they give you good core resources, supported by a good network of satellite resources, and once the project ends they go back to what they were originally doing. Conclusion, some small gains followed by business as usual.

Five, you get nobody, but have to get the work done anyway.

This last alternative is sadly the way that many projects are done today in our field believe it or not. Meaning that there is absolutely no chance of realistic knowledge transfer or of the entire thing becoming permanent in any way at all.

6. We want this to be a knowledge transfer process so that we take over the implementation during the handover period.

He is right, he does want this, his company wants this, and sometimes they actually get it. But most times the time allowed for transferring a lifetimes worth of knowledge to somebody who has been running operationally for their entire career is nowhere near enough.

More to the point often the program for realistic knowledge transfer, including post training mentoring, skill audits, reviews and updates of training as well as the role support mechanisms are often not even considered.

Sometimes there will be one or two “knock-em-down-drag-em-out” types who will get the bit between their teeth and take this on as a personal mission, regardless of the support they do or don’t have. But these people are the exceptions, those who will get the most out of the training and then embark on their own personal self improvement to get the rest of the information they believe they need.

But most times it all ends in tears with the client being left with a half implemented initiative, moderate to useless resources to continue the implementation, and a rapid downward spiral of interest once the baton has been handed to their own people.

7. We will make sure you get full access to our existing system for any data you need.

Unless the guy telling you this is the head of IT and can change their policies regarding information, data and its manipulation then this step will be like pulling teeth!

Data, its management, storage and use is the realm of the all seeing, all powerful IT department. And they see themselves as the guardians of the company’s future in many cases. If you want to get access to something as privileged as asset data in an asset-intensive company; then prepare to be met with restrictions, difficulties and outright refusal.

While this can be done through diplomacy, horse-trading and other not-so-enjoyable activities; it is far easier to include them in the project planning and execution from the very initial stages.

8. We have full management support for this

Wrong, wrong, wrong! You don’t have management support; you have their authorization to spend money!

Management support is a whole different thing. Thinking that you can crowbar this into the organization just because you have “the big guy” standing behind you giving out threatening looks is never going to work in the long run.

What it will do is get you compliance, but not acceptance. Think about what you are doing here. Taking something from the center of the company and pushing it out into all of the departments, sites, plants or companies that are associated with it.

What do you think they were doing before you and your project turned up? Waiting for you?

No! They were making do, building their own systems, finding their own solutions and applying hard-earned experience to take care of the headaches of their day to day operations. Sometimes they have done a great job at this, oftentimes it could be better. But it’s theirs! It wasn’t imposed on them by somebody they have never even seen (but have read their names on fliers).

So they are going to view the project with suspicion. Worse, if you haven’t got the communications right at the beginning they will be hearing rumbles in the distance, feel threatened, and raise the defenses.

If management really supports what you are planning then “the big guy” will be out there selling (not pushing) the project to the department heads, plant managers or company presidents. There will be financial linkages for them to the success or failure of the project, and once they are convinced they will also start to evangelize their senior management and decision makers.

If you are going to spend several millions of dollars changing the way that the company works, then platitudes, strongarm tactics and sheer bloody-mindedness is not going to cut it. There needs to be a sense of mission and everybody needs be on it!