Haunting Your Way To Organisational Change

If you follow Australian politics at all, you notice something strange.
Or, rather, it’s what you don’t notice.
Like every democracy, our election cycles end with a feeding frenzy of attacks, soundbites and vague appeals to emotion.
In between, though?
The government gets on with the job of governing – if you can call it that.
The opposition, though?
Unless they’re involved in a scandal, you barely hear from them.
The Labor Party is especially bad at this. They seem to hibernate for years at a time, then explode into a mad rush of photo opportunities right before an election.
It doesn’t make sense to me. If you want folk to vote for you, then surely you want them to recognise you…
Oh, well.
Maybe one day they’ll cotton on to the notion that familiarity breeds trust, and trust breeds victory.
Speaking of…
Politicians aren’t the only ones guilty of this. Many senior leaders get caught up with the minutiae of each day that they forget to see and be seen.
One of my more interesting jobs was writing for a mid-sized government department. For six months, I wrote a three blog posts a fortnight on behalf of the department head and his deputy.
It was educational.
For one thing, senior leaders tend to think they’re more visible than they are. They spend all day in meetings – how could they be invisible?
But those meetings aren’t with everyone.
They tend to be with other senior leaders. Sure, sometimes frontline employees score an audience. But it’s too few people, too infrequently. Anyone you aren’t meeting with fortnightly – at least – doesn’t understand you, and you don’t understand them.
Things change too rapidly in a couple of weeks.
So while it feels to the leaders while they’re constantly meeting everyone, they’re not – not from the organisation’s perspective, at least.
Thankfully, this department’s leaders were smart enough to see the danger. You might think a blog post each week won’t do much, but it does.
It really makes a difference.
Everyone has the chance to read it.
To hear what’s going on across the organisation.
To see what the leaders are thinking about – what’s important to them.
Sure, it’s no substitute for face-to-face engagement.
But it supplements it beautifully.
Because you can’t haunt your way to anything meaningful. If you’re nothing more than a shimmer they see out of the corner of their eye, no one will follow your leadership.
(Mostly because they won’t know what it is.)
“Nonsense, William,” you say. “I circulated a memo with my top eight priorities a year ago. Everyone knows what I stand for!”
That’s not communication – that’s a haunting.
If my friend says he wants to become an Olympic athlete, then doesn’t mention it again for a year, I assume they were full of it.
Your employees think the same way. Every organisation says it values “excellence” and “professionalism” and whatever.
But an organisation truly values whatever it talks about every day.
So I hope you’re shaping the dialogue. If you don’t drive the conversation, you’re not driving the values.

The best way to enhance your organisation is with the ultimate advantage: trust.
But how do you measure something like that, let alone improve it?
Especially if your workforce is stretched thin, cynical and burned out on change?
There are simple, effective and proven strategies you can begin implementing today. I know you can unlock the creativity, productivity and joy of your employees.
Learn how today with my free white paper and all the resources you need to launch your own trust-based change initiative:
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