Complacency: The biggest barrier to future greatness is our current success
There are a lot of approaches and models to getting meaningful change accomplished in the workplace. There are equally as many reasons why people get off track and why change initiatives fail. To be successful in creating positive and constructive change you need to avoid the Seven Deadly Sins of Change.
The first Deadly Sin is Complacency. John Kotter in his 1996 book, Leading Change, said the biggest enemy to change is complacency – becoming satisfied with our current results and unaware of how the known and predictable erode performance. Complacency has a way of lulling us as individuals and organizations into accepting the status quo and limits our ability to investigate unfamiliar and uncharted territory. Without urgency we have nothing that propels us in the direction of something new, and in turn, change doesn’t happen.
The implications for organizations are important. When our organizations become complacent we will have a difficult time evolving to the demands and changes in our marketplace; we will be reluctant to adopt new business strategies; and we’ll remain enamored with how we’ve always done things in the past.
Complacency happens for a lot of reasons. Oftentimes within organizations people don’t want to make waves. They see making waves as a risky proposition and not something that is helpful to their career. Whatever the reason, leadership plays a role in creating or eliminating complacency. Leaders need to not only support, but role model what the development and adoption of new ideas looks like behaviorally. In order for organizations to change, leaders need to foster a culture where people can feel safe in taking risks and experimenting with new ways of doing things. Within the change management process, a leaders primary role is to create a culture where people feel safe to have urgency around experimentation. There are three ways of doing that:
A leader can create urgency for addressing a crisis that’s taking place either within the organization or within the industry at large. In this way a leader is moving away from something, and is creating a burning platform that communicates “we have to leave here in order to survive”.
The inverse of option one is to create a desired future that is positive, inspiring and compelling enough to draw people into a more rewarding future. The language used here is “being there will provide us with more options, greater flexibility and will allow us to thrive”.
Develop high levels of personal accountability for change. Within our consulting practice we oftentimes find that people are not accountable for change within the organization. The reality is that you always get the results you reward. If you’re not rewarding people for new behavior you will continue to get the old behavior.
Let’s face it; we all like to feel successful. We want to know we are making a meaningful contribution to our organization and that we are bringing value to our organization. But consider this…if you are relying on what has made you successful in the past and are not actively investigating what you will do differently tomorrow, you are at risk of becoming complacent…and that is the death knell to professional success and security.
