CEOs who succeed in the Innovator-in-Chief role are what I think of as change-savvy. The change-savvy CEOs that I’ve worked with and observed:

• Are technically very knowledgeable about best practices in the rapidly changing area of change planning and management, which means she isn’t wedded to conventional planning wisdom and out-of-date approaches. You’ll never hear a change-savvy CEO extolling the virtues of traditional long-range (or strategic) planning as a change tool, much less catch her fondling a ten-pound five-year plan.
• Realize that successfully bringing off out-of-the-box change against all odds requires that she make leading the change planning and implementation process a top-tier priority. In practice, this means that the change-savvy CEO makes a firm commitment of time to leading change from the top and never tries to delegate one piece or another of this leadership role to lieutenants.
• Recognize that leading out-of-the-box change as Innovator-in-Chief of the organization is more psychological and political in nature than technical. Not only does the change-savvy CEO understand that fear is more often than not at the heart of staff resistance to change, she also takes strong, visible steps to allay that fear through the clear articulation of vision and other motivational steps that are intended to inspire and energize participants in the change process. The change-savvy CEO also pays close attention to the transformation of key stakeholders into ardent change champions.

• And command the respect of staff members and key stakeholders, primarily by playing a very aggressive and visible change-leadership role and practicing what she’s preaching in the change arena. A change-savvy CEO knows that her leadership credibility depends on walking the talk, never contradicting in practice what she’s saying publicly.

            In addition to the characteristics I’ve just described, the CEOs I’ve observed who have been most successful at accomplishing out-of-the box change have possessed three powerful character traits: courage; deep emotional self-awareness; and fundamental self-confidence. Being courageous and steadfast in leading change planning and management is a critical CEO trait. It never fails: The farther change planning moves outside the box in your organization, the more fear, anxiety, tension, and often anger you’re likely to see. As you’ve probably observed, fear (which feels quite weak) is often quickly transformed into indignation (which feels far stronger), and who’s a more convenient culprit and target of anger than the highly visible Innovator-in-Chief who’s leading the change charge?  The CEOs I’ve seen do a great job of leading out-of-the-box change are loaded with calcium. That doesn’t mean they’re insensitive Genghis Khans bludgeoning staff into change — quite the contrary. But it does mean they don’t cave under pressure. They expect the resistance and frequent anger, and they withstand it.

            The absence of deep emotional self-awareness can seriously limit the impact of a CEO in leading out-of-the-box change. I’ve seen CEOs who couldn’t capitalize on the talents and commitment of strong women on their executive teams because they found such strengths threatening. I’ve observed CEOs who were unsuccessful in building critical partnerships and joint ventures with other organizations because they saw the world as a dark and dangerous place filled with competitors waiting to do them in. And I’ve come across CEOs whose need for security and control made them intolerant of the give-and-take of wide-open discussion and led them to impose on their organizations mechanistic long-range planning processes that substituted neatness and order for creative questioning and exploration. In these and other cases, what has struck me over the years is how hidden, unrecognized emotions can sabotage CEOs, causing them to see the world through an internal lens that distorts objective reality, and, hence, leads to inappropriate behavior.

            I know that this might sound like psychobabble to some readers, but long experience has convinced me that the most effective change leaders are emotionally so self-knowledgeable that they aren’t easily sabotaged by deep-seated emotions they aren’t aware of. A few years ago, I worked with just such a CEO, who headed a large and highly successful senior services nonprofit. We were chatting one evening after getting through the first day of an intensive 1 ½-day work session kicking off the organization’s change planning process, when she confided that at one point in what’d been a great day she’d felt like lashing out at two of her board members. She said that when they’d raised some pretty pointed questions about her decision to pursue a merger with a sister agency a couple of months earlier, she out of the blue felt like a little girl again, being harshly judged by her parents, and the sudden surge of anger caught her off guard. Fortunately, she didn’t lash out, knowing that the anger — while a real emotion that she’d truly felt  — was totally misplaced, having to do with a vulnerable little girl inside, not with the strong CEO she’d become. That’s what I mean by self-awareness.

            The fundamentally self-confident CEOs I’ve worked with and observed have embodied a character trait that I think of as true humility. They are so secure, psychologically speaking, that they are able to celebrate — and capitalize on — the strengths of the people around them, both board and staff members. They’re blessed with robust, healthy egos that aren’t easily wounded and don’t require constant protection. They are able to keep things in perspective, seldom seeing a personal challenge, slight or even insult as a cause celebre. Rather, they are able to take the long view, resisting the impulse to lash out now in the interest of achieving an important objective down the pike. They’re keenly aware that the person who’s treated them with apparent disrespect today might very well turn out to be a valuable ally some day if they bide their time.

Virginia Jacko, my colleague and coauthor of our book, The Blind Visionary, is a great example of a fundamentally self-confident CEO who’s wasted absolutely zero time defending a fragile ego. President & CEO of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Virginia, who is blind, recounts a story in our book that vividly demonstrates the value of a healthy ego. Not long after her appointment as the first blind CEO of the Miami Lighthouse, Virginia learned that a prominent Lighthouse volunteer had commented to a current Lighthouse board member, referring to her appointment, “Can you believe the inmates are now running the asylum?”  Were Virginia’s feelings hurt?  Of course. Did she lash out in anger?  Of course not. She didn’t take any action, and when she eventually sat down in a meeting with her detractor, she made clear her desire to work together, letting bygones be bygones. The upshot?  The person who’d made the derogatory comment became a close ally, even nominating Virginia for a major community award. That’s the kind of emotional maturity that makes Virginia a highly successful out-of-the-box leader.

  Excerpt from Leading Out-of-the-Box Change (Doug Eadie, Governance Edge Publishing, 2012) www.leadingoutoftheboxchange.com

The absence of deep emotional self-awareness can seriously limit the impact of a CEO in leading out-of-the-box change. I’ve seen CEOs who couldn’t capitalize on the talents and commitment of strong women on their executive teams because they found such strengths threatening. I’ve observed CEOs who were unsuccessful in building critical partnerships and joint ventures with other organizations because they saw the world as a dark and dangerous place filled with competitors waiting to do them in. And I’ve come across CEOs whose need for security and control made them intolerant of the give-and-take of wide-open discussion and led them to impose on their organizations mechanistic long-range planning processes that substituted neatness and order for creative questioning and exploration. In these and other cases, what has struck me over the years is how hidden, unrecognized emotions can sabotage CEOs, causing them to see the world through an internal lens that distorts objective reality, and, hence, leads to inappropriate behavior.

I know that this might sound like psychobabble to some readers, but long experience has convinced me that the most effective change leaders are emotionally so self-knowledgeable that they aren’t easily sabotaged by deep-seated emotions they aren’t aware of. A few years ago, I worked with just such a CEO, who headed a large and highly successful senior services nonprofit. We were chatting one evening after getting through the first day of an intensive 1 ½-day work session kicking off the organization’s change planning process, when she confided that at one point in what’d been a great day she’d felt like lashing out at two of her board members. She said that when they’d raised some pretty pointed questions about her decision to pursue a merger with a sister agency a couple of months earlier, she out of the blue felt like a little girl again, being harshly judged by her parents, and the sudden surge of anger caught her off guard. Fortunately, she didn’t lash out, knowing that the anger — while a real emotion that she’d truly felt  — was totally misplaced, having to do with a vulnerable little girl inside, not with the strong CEO she’d become. That’s what I mean by self-awareness.

 This blog is adapted from Doug Eadie’s new book, Leading Out-of-the-Box Change (Governance Edge, 2012)

Visioning – painting a picture of the life you aspire to lead over the long run – is one of the most powerful tools for growing and enriching your life professionally and personally.  However, experience has taught me that you shouldn’t think of visioning as a straightforward planning exercise.  I’ve never come across a person who regularly updated a formal, personal vision statement, and I can’t imagine formally updating my own vision on a regular basis as part of some sort of personal strategic planning process. Instead, in real life, so far as I can tell, a person’s vision, rather than being formally planned according to some kind of schedule, unfolds over the course of a person’s life, through a largely informal process of learning from — being educated by — experience. Sometimes the experiences are dramatic and abrupt, easily commanding our attention and eliciting a strong emotional response: for example, you lose your job or your spouse initiates divorce proceedings.

To take some real-life examples, at the more dramatic end of the spectrum is the experience of a close friend and former teacher of mine, then in his mid-seventies — a distinguished professor of management, a Jew who had for years adamantly resisted any involvement in the religious aspect of Judaism. One afternoon he was walking by a storefront Orthodox synagogue, when he heard loud singing. As he told me later, he felt a powerful emotional jolt out of the blue. Not understanding what was going on, he stopped and looked in the open door to see dark suited and hatted men in a circle singing and dancing. Tears streaming down his face, he stood there for a few minutes, until the circle opened up and he was motioned in. He danced for a few minutes, feeling, as he told me, that he’d in some deep sense come home. For the rest of his life, “Grundy,” as I knew him, was an observant Orthodox Jew, attending synagogue faithfully and observing dietary restrictions for the first time in his adult life.

Another example of being dramatically educated by experience involves a woman I know well — a highly creative graphic artist — who’d taken a job heading the graphics department of a consulting firm, lured by the salary and other perks. You might say this was an example of poor visioning, in contrast to Grundy’s discovery of a part of himself he’d kept at bay for years. Fired after less than a year on the job, Karen — humiliated and devastated (she’d never failed in any major way professionally before this) — curled up in a ball to lick her wounds, bitter at what she saw as brutal mistreatment. But as she reflected on her experience, she eventually realized that her true professional vision — her fundamental source of satisfaction and fulfillment — was to create directly, as a graphic artist, not to manage a shop of artists. She actually came to believe that she’d sabotaged herself in her corporate job, unconsciously asking to be fired, as a result of straying from her true vision, even though she wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.

At the less dramatic end of the change spectrum is a vision that unfolds over quite some time and feels like discovering some true side of yourself — of what you are meant to be and do. I have always loved the true story of a teenager who the summer he turned fourteen worked in his dad’s bakery in the small Illinois town where he’d grown up. With the money he saved that summer from his $36-a-week paycheck, he bought a cheap record player and, without thinking much about it, joined the classical division of the Columbia record club. Every month a new record showed up in the mail, and over a couple of years he was introduced to the mainstream classical repertory: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mozart — the whole crew. As he observed years later, “Listening to those records taught me that the good life I aspired to live had to include easy access to classical music, not just on record but even more important, in live performance.” 

Can you get better at visioning?  In my opinion, you definitely can, but it won’t be by sharpening your technical planning skills. Rather, the preeminent key to visioning is paying close attention to the emotional signals that are elicited by events you experience in your life journey, whether positive or negative, and asking yourself what the feelings mean, whether they might call for moving in new directions in your life. And you’ve always got to be on guard against blocking out uncomfortable feelings, such as fear and anxiety, or, worse, using alcohol or some other anesthetic to blunt the pain.      

This article is drawn from Doug Eadie’s forthcoming book, Leading Out-of-the-Box Change:  The Chief Executive’s Essential Guide To Nonprofit Innovation and Growth (Governance Edge, 2012).

After six weeks, I earned the privilege of being relocated from the ICU to a standard hospital room. It was pleasing to know that the medical experts no longer considered me on the verge of death. I was now on the miraculous road to recovery.

My first reward was a visit from my teammates. Before they entered the room, my mom thoroughly briefed them about what to expect in the hallway. She tried to explain what their friend, her son, had been through for the last six weeks, but words would not do it justice. As they all clambered into the 8x8 room, I mustered up as much enthusiasm as possible to demonstrate my latest achievement. Because I had limited mobility in my upper body, I mastered a clumsy and awkward flinging motion of my right forearm to my face. This was a shocking and grotesque action observed by my friends. They didn’t know how to respond to their teammate who once bull-dozed through the defensive line. Attempting to break the tension in the room, I jokingly, but very seriously, called out for help. “I haven’t learned how to get my hand back down.” It was warming yet painful to see my friends again. I knew for the first time how hard it was going to be to complete my mission. The way they looked at me is indescribable. It’s more than shock and empathy. It was the same “unknown” expression I had seen earlier on my father’s face. Their distance surrounded me, and the barrier between us was already built; little did I know that I would see the “unknown” look for the rest of my life.

This excerpt from JR Harding’s powerful new book, Now What? (SokheChapke Publishing), describes an incident early in JR’s inspiring true story, which is about mustering the courage and discipline to overcome quadriplegia and become a successful executive, policy leader and consultant.  JR’s courageous odyssey certainly illustrates every one of the four lessons of The Blind Visionary:  Reach out aggressively; Act on opportunities; Don’t let fear win; and Keep things in perspective.  It has been a privilege to get to know JR as a friend and colleague.

Check out JR’sFacebook page - http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100002428955547 and website - www.Jrharding.com.

 
JR Harding, Author of Now What?

The surest sign of likely success in the out-of-the-box change game, in my experience, is a chief executive officer (CEO) who is passionately committed to playing - and well prepared to play - what I call the Innovator-in-Chief role.  CEOs who excel at the Innovator-in-Chief role first and foremost make accomplishing out-of-the-box change a top-tier chief executive leadership priority.  They also bring to the out-of-the-box change game  substantial technical planning know-how, strong psychological and political skills, a large dollop of discipline and courage, and the internal stature to lead the change charge.  . . .

The CEO is the only person in your organization who can wear the Innovator-in-Chief hat for the simple reason that no one else brings to the change game the formal authority, influence, access to resources, and time required to spearhead an out-of-the-box change effort and to overcome the inevitable inertia and resistance that can sink a change ship early in its voyage.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that out-of-the-box change is just a top-down process or that your CEO could get the change job done on his own.  Of course not!  Without the backing of his board your CEO couldn't possibly succeed in the Innovator-in-Chief role.  And it's obvious that the bulk of the nuts and bolts work of planning and developing out-of-the-box change initiatives must be done by staff and volunteers.  But the fact remains:  Without a committed, capable Innovator-in-Chief ensconced in the chief executive suite, out-of-the-box change will almost certainly be the impossible dream.

(An Excerpt From Doug Eadie’s New Book, Leading Out-Of-The-Box Change, Governance Edge Publishing, 2012)

Long experience as an executive and consultant have taught me that many if not most people not only don’t welcome change in their lives and organizations, they can be really ingenuous at keeping it from happening.  Why the emotional resistance to changing?  It seems to me that fear is the culprit, more often than not.  Many if not most people, so far as I can tell, won’t readily jump on the change bandwagon because they’re afraid to. This might not be true of you if you’re a board member, CEO or senior executive, but the further you move away from the top tier of leadership in an organization, the more fear you are likely to encounter.  What are staff and volunteers afraid of?  For one thing, anxiety, which is anything but a comfortable feeling.  Tried and true routines feel familiar, comfortable, and safe, whereas the possibility of venturing into the unknown to do something really new can feel quite dangerous and cause lots of anxiety.  Perhaps the most fearsome prospect is the possibility of failing at doing something new and suffering the consequent embarrassment or even humiliation.  The fact is, people are sensible to expect emotional pain when changing in important ways, which is why the old saw, “no pain, no gain,” makes sense. 

In addition to the very normal human resistance to change that is largely fear-based,

in the real world where you and I live and work, staff members and volunteers in nonprofit and public organizations are so busy and under so much pressure – not to speak of feeling pretty anxious and fearful about being jerked out of their comfort zones – that getting them to participate whole-heartedly and creatively in a new planning process is no small challenge.  Of course, people can be bludgeoned into going through the motions, but grudging acquiescence isn’t a recipe for the kind of creative involvement that will generate high-stakes out-of-the-box change initiatives.  So the primary goal of your CEO, wearing the Chief Motivator hat, is to get your staff and volunteers to WANT to participate fully in your out-of-the-box change planning process.  

This past weekend, I found myself in one of those “woe is me” moods, which, fortunately, don’t hit me too often.  The amount of consulting work t h at needed to be done by Monday seemed overwhelming, I’d fallen pretty badly behind on writing my new book on lead ing “out-of-the- box” change, and on top of that I was struggling with a cold that wouldn’t go away.  Some TLC would’ve pepped me up, but, alas, my wife Barbara was in North Carolina on a buying trip for her interior design business, so I was stuck with my mor ose s elf.

Fortunately, I lucked into the perfect antidote to s elf-pity:  a dose of Virginia Jacko, the blind CEO of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind an d co-author of our book The Blind Visionary.  Sitting at my desk, I noticed a copy of the wonderful interview with Virginia in the October/November issue of “Ability” magazine.  Thumbing through it certainly helped to put things in perspective.  Here’s Virginia talking about one of the benefits of being blind:  “I know this sounds corny, but as a result of my blindness I now have more vision, in some ways.  S ight can be a distraction.   For example, if you’re at a restaurant, you start to look around, check out what people are wearing, see who’s sitting with whom, or see if you know anybody there.  But if you can’t do that, your other senses are height ened:  your sense of taste, your sense of hearing.”  This isn’t a woman who wastes time bemoaning he r fate!  Her words did the trick, and I headed for my study feeling like a cloud had lifted – after, that is, counting a few of my many blessings.

I got back to Tampa Bay last night after a memorable three-day weekend in Washington, DC.  I’ve always been an ever onward and upward kind of guy with little inclination to celebrate or commemorate things in my past.  So I wasn’t really sure I wanted to head to Washington for the Peace Corps’ 50^th birthday party, but I’m sure glad I overcame my reluctance.  It was a wonderful, emotionally powerful weekend.  Some impressions:

•   It seemed kind of surreal examining faces at the reception at the Ethiopian Embassy Friday night and at lunch on Saturday, trying to place guys and gals I’d trained with in my Ethiopia III Peace Corps group a little over 47 years ago at UCLA.  Except for five or six friends from my “Ethi III” group whom I’d stayed in touch with since returning to the States in 1967, the pictures in my mind were of the 21-22 year olds I’d trained with.  What a relief to be able to place everyone without much scrutiny and to find that the years hadn’t taken such a drastic toll.  As my former Peace Corps house-mate in Ethiopia, Randy Sword, observed in a recent email, “Today’s 69 is what 49 was not too many years ago.”  I like the way that sounds!

•   Sitting with a couple of thousand Returned Peace Corps Volunteers in the amphitheater at Arlington Cemetery Sunday morning for a commemorative program, I could feel the strong ties that continue to bind us together, even – in the case of us Ethi IIIs – nearly 50 years after training at UCLA.  This was no cynical government bashing group sitting together last Sunday at the amphitheater at Arlington.  President Kennedy’s clarion call to serve America by devoting time and talent to helping the less fortunate around the globe seemed as fresh and compelling on Sunday as it did back in 1961 when he created the Peace Corps.  But it wasn’t just the idea of service that bound – and binds – us; it’s also the exhilarating spirit of adventure.  Many PCVs in my Ethi III group, including me, flew in an airplane for the first time when we set out for UCLA  that summer of 1964, and the great majority of us hadn’t traveled beyond the borders of North America.  Imagine: just three months after arriving at UCLA, there we were, living and teaching in the exotic and ancient kingdom of Ethiopia some 8,000 miles away.  What an adventure for someone just out of college! 

• After the program at Arlington, we brought the memorable weekend to a dramatic close by marching en masse across the Memorial Bridge to the Lincoln Memorial, following our respective countries’ flags.  Walking over the bridge with my Ethi III friends, I thought back to November 1963, when I was standing with friends not far from the bridge watching President Kennedy’s funeral cortege moving slowly to Arlington Cemetery.  We’d driven all night from the University of Illinois to be there.  One of my vivid memories of that day was seeing Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, the Lion of Judah – probably not much taller than 5’5” – walking beside France’s President de Gaulle, who must have been at least 6’4.”  Little did I know that less than a year later I’d be standing by the gates of Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa, watching the Emperor leave the palace in his Rolls.

“The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred.”  This is Drew Westen a psychology professor at Emory University, writing in the Sunday, August 7, 2011 issue of The New York Times:  “What Happened to Obama?”   Westen strongly believes that one reason President Obama has apparently lost the initiative in the current political debate over the economy is his failure to tell a compelling story to the American people:  making sense of the events that brought our economy down, clearly assigning blame for the events, expressing his understanding of our fear and anxiety, and pledging to restore order and security. 

      Now, you don’t have to agree with Westen that the President has lost the initiative in the current debate to recognize that story telling is one of the most important tools that a US President  can use to educate, inspire, and foster support and commitment among followers.  We have some stunning examples of effective story telling at the national level.  There’s Abraham Lincoln re-interpreting the meaning of the Civil War at Gettysburg in 1863, directly tying that terrible war to the Declaration of Independence’s promise of human equality rather than relying solely on the imperative of preserving the national Union.  In his eloquent words, the fundamental purpose of the war was  “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  And millions of Americans in the Great Depression were inspired and heartened by Franklin Roosevelt’s call to resist the power of fear, telling his audience in Washington and all over the country on March 4, 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”   

      What you should keep in mind is that story telling can be a powerful leadership tool in any setting, not just on the grand scale of our nation as a whole, but also in public and nonprofit organizations such as social service agencies, public transportation authorities, and school districts.   Over the years, I’ve seen nonprofit and public CEOs inspire and rally support by telling stories about the importance of high-quality, friendly customer service, the right and ability of all students to learn, and the obligation to make prudent use of  scarce financial resources.  What stories do you need to tell as a leader in your organization?  What stories have you heard that have infused your work with greater meaning?