Shifting Your Business to a New Way of Operating
When a CEO wants to do something different in the business — whether it be implement a new policy, shift the culture or create a stronger team — the common way they do it is to just begin, without a lot of intentionality. CEO’s operate at an incredibly fast pace, and their teams are expected to keep pace. The CEO often goes into a meeting and states a request that things be different, without getting people’s agreement. But when you make a request or initiate a change without getting agreement from your team, it only leads to frustration for everyone. The team gets frustrated because you didn’t ask them and you get frustrated because nothing changes. This is how most people think culture changes, but it doesn’t work that way. When it comes to establishing or shifting culture, forming a team or implementing something new, the most crucial thing every CEO must do is to create absolute clarity through creating the container and the agreements that will hold and guide everything to be done.
What is a container?
A container is a metaphor for the invisible thing that holds your initiative, business or team. It holds and creates the boundaries for everything that happens inside of it. The container might include:
- How those involved will behave with one another
- What success looks like
- How progress and success will be measured
- Who will do what by when
- How conflict and/or disagreement will be handled
If you consider each of these possible parts of the container, a container of your initiative already exists but most often the container is quite leaky. It’s leaky because typically each person involved has their own assumptions, definitions and answers to these questions and there isn’t clarity and agreement. When there isn’t an explicit definition for the container and the group operates based on assumptions and unclear or unspoken expectations. This leads to…
- Frustration and disappointment – One of the main things that results from operating based on assumptions and expectations is disappointment (or even betrayal).
- Interpersonal conflict – Related to the disappointment when people aren’t in agreement on how they will behave with one another or what each will do, this invariably leads to conflict.
- Lack of buy-in/commitment – The uncertainty about the whats, whens, whys and who of a container diminishes commitment
- Drain on your time and energy – All the above takes energy away from what’s most important – the success of the initiative
- Lossed time/money
How to set a new container.
Your job as leader is to create an air tight, non-leaky container for your new initiative. Creating a new container is a huge job and it doesn’t need to be perfect on day one. In fact, the nature of containers is that they are flexible and changing; they’re a living, breathing, constantly evolving thing that’s co-created with your team. So don’t expect this process to ever be fully complete. As the initiative and people change, the container will need to change too. The goal is clarity and agreement.
How to create a new set of agreements.
- Step 1: Personally reflect on what the things you want to get agreement with your team on using the list above as a guide.
- Step 2: If you could only initially establish agreement on only two of those things, what would they be?
- Step 2: Get clear on them for yourself. Define the exact terms.
- Step 3: Get into conversation with your people and explain the idea of the dynamic container made of agreements and why having a container with no leaks is critical to the initiative.
- Step 4: Share the two agreements you have in mind to start with. Ask them:
- What do you think about these?
- How can we implement them?
- What do you need to be able to agree with them?
- What do you need from me?
- What other agreements do we need to make that are of equal or greater importance?
- Step 5: Ask everyone (including you) for their agreement to the container you’ve created together. If anyone is not able to agree, the container has a leak! Go back into the conversation and ask, “What do you need to agree to this container?”
- Step 4: Discuss how you will collectively ensure you hold to these agreements and agree on how accountability will work and how you will get things back on track when leaks form in the container
Remember, this process is a conversation, not a monologue. While you are initiating this as the leader and even asserting a set of agreements as a starting point, you are co-creating these with your people in a conversation. This process might feel tedious and unnecessary at times, a typical agreement I have with groups I lead is that everyone will listen fully to others. When that agreement is put on the table, I get looks that say, “Really?!? We need an agreement to listen.” It might be easy to gloss over the agreement because of that, but in every case, the group is glad we didn’t.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to implement this with your team or organization, reach out to me and let’s see if I can help.