Why Change Anything Now?
This year has marked in sharp contrast the two extreme viewpoints of a recovering economy –
1) our business is good, so why would we want to change anything now,
2) our business isn’t going as well as we’d hoped and we don’t have it in the budget to invest in change.
Both answers are real and both answers provide the same reason behind, ‘why not?’:
“…I’m ‘afraid’ (or any characterization of that word) to change anything now…because ‘I don’t know’ if the results can be attained.”
What’s incredibly nearsighted by highly-intelligent business professionals and executives is the desire to only gamble on a ‘sure thing.’ Nothing is guaranteed, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
If you don’t change anything, what do you think will happen?
There are certain situations everyday we gloss over because the embers of your situational-fire are only smoldering. One executive told me last week, ‘…I’ll wait until it catches fire and then we’ll react…’ sounds like great advice for an ostrich, but not a professional operator. Sometimes, I scratch my head and wonder how [these people] were hired in roles of leadership.
Some leaders prefer to tolerate medicority or less than excellent performance from their business units, because it’s easier to stay the same and not rock-the-boat. Some would rather be popular, or always right than be successful. Hey, you can’t push a string…yet some of you do daily! Until the pain to change is less than the pain of staying the same, executives and business professionals alike will sit stagnant and do nothing. It’s job preservation in their eyes, but in actuality it’s role suicide.
Until the pain to change is less than the pain of staying the same, nothing will change.