Why Change-friendly Leadership?

During the years I contemplated writing this book I struggled with many titles. Early possibilities were ChangeSmarts or ChangeWise. Neither quite seemed to fit the idea I was trying to convey.

CFL Books Then it dawned on me. Many of the failed change efforts I’ve seen over the past 40 years certainly had the best of smarts and wisdom. Some of them, with their endless charts and graphs and to-do lists, were monuments to planning procedures. What they lacked was ease of use. They lacked humanness. They lacked approachability. They lacked … well, they lacked friendliness.

Change-friendly Leadership: How to Transform Good Intentions into Great Performance is a simple affirmation that successful organizational change involves—requires in fact—the active, willful participation of the people affected by the change. Look Inside the Book

Change-by-announcement, change-by-slogan, and certainly change-by-executive-decree are doomed to failure.

Effective change requires genuinely engaging the brains of the people expected to embrace and even champion the new state of affairs.

Effective change requires engaging people’s feelings—not merely making a business case for action, but making a compelling psychological case for action.

Effective change requires engaging people’s earnest hopes.

In this context, hope is not used as the verbal equivalent of crossing your fingers—“I hope my team wins the game.” In this book, hope is used to denote people’s heartfelt aspirations, their dreams, even their sense of self. Any change effort that ignores or pays mere lip service to that kind of engagement is destined for disappointment.

In the change approach prescribed here, the Friendly Factor is not just a play on words. It is the very foundation for effectively engaging people’s heads, hearts, and hopes. Think-friendly®, Talk-friendly®, Trust-friendly®, and Team-friendly® form a relationship framework or operating system that brings out the best in people. RDD Signature