“We have spent three years and three million dollars rolling out one of the most popular leadership development programs in the country. We have not moved the needle on any performance measure in the building. We have invited you here to figure out what to do next.”
At the time, I was working in a different manufacturing plant on similar issues. Unfortunately, we had similar results. I struggled with getting leaders to model the behaviors they were asking their employees to adopt.
I was getting more and more discouraged about my career. One of the executives stopped me in the hall and said, “You should just give up. It’s been this way for years, and you’re not going to change things.”
As you can imagine, I thought long and hard about continuing down my career path, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my dream of helping the organization reach its goals. The leaders were great people but had a history holding them back.
Then I was reminded, organizations don’t change; people do. I reevaluated everything and asked how can we leaders change one at a time?
