Lockdown 2020 series: Evolving change in your team
Into our fourth week of lockdown, my focus is turning to the Cultivators we have in our teams and organisations. In relation to our two main questions, Cultivators are:
Very ready are for this new way of working we are experiencing; and
Less expressive with regard to how visibly they make it happen.
Cultivators strengthen, embed and evolve change
Cultivators are fully enrolled in this new change and are exploring ways to make it even better. It’s quite possible they’ve been thinking about it longer than you have, and possibly more deeply than you. They’ll have some great ideas about how to:
make this change more sustainable
make this change more impactful
bring more people on the journey
Cultivators are typically well connected to others. They build relationships on a foundation of connection, care and clarity, and through that quality of relationship have a lasting impact and influence on others. Where the Driver’s influence dissipates quickly when they are not present, a Cultivator’s influence is sustained. Because of this, they have the ability to exponentially accelerate change. And while that acceleration might be widely observed, Cultivators’ actions are typically low volume. They use their strong internal networks, engage in an understated way, and their attention is towards helping the other person participate in change, rather than being the flagbearer themselves.
My friend Ami is a great example of a Cultivator in action. Ami is a teacher, and on day one of lockdown those of us who were mere mortal parents had the very real realisation that we were not ready to be home schoolers. Before we dipped our toes in the water of year 7 algebra (should’ve paid more attention, Leslie!), we wanted to very much spend a bit of time exploring how the heck we were going to get this right for our kids.
Along comes Ami. A simple Facebook post went from a handful of people joining a group she called Ideas for Isolation to what is now a mini movement of content and interaction that could outlast our future migration to Mars. How did Ami do it? Well, she quietly put a few ideas out there and invited others to build on them, make them better, contribute more…evolve them. And with that simple approach, she turned a few people who were Observers into a group of close to 100 Participants, Drivers and Cultivators. And at no point has Ami said an idea doesn’t fit, needs some key messaging, or requires a board paper to be written. Some ideas get a heap of enrolment, others idle for a while. It’s all experimental, and a bunch of kids and their parents have engaged in ways they’ll remember for ever.
Cultivators need autonomy and space to evolve the change
“How can I get others more comfortable with this? What am I seeing work really well? How could we make this even better?” Those are the kinds of questions your Cultivators are asking. They’ve been observing closely and thinking deeply about how they can make this change more impactful and abiding. Now they need the autonomy to turn some ideas into experiments.
Your Cultivators need high trust from you – it can be really challenging as a leader as you’ll pass on some control of the change. They need you to:
Treat the relationship as a partnership
Help them broaden their relationships across the organisation so they can have wider impact
Create space for them to challenge the current state
Be a thinking partner with them – ask questions that expand thinking and help create a better outcome, rather than just focus on the end game
Empathy, connection, stillness on the road to change
Cultivators bring stillness and calm the change environment. That calm enables them to connect with others, take time to genuinely listen and demonstrate empathy for what others are experiencing. In that connection, Cultivators acquire the knowledge they need to walk at the pace of the other person, then start nudging them to stretch and make progress towards the new way of working.
If you are thinking some of this sounds like creating that sense of belonging I wrote about in the Observer posts, you’d be right. Cultivators are great at this, and in creating that belonging environment, the people Cultivators connect with start to stretch themselves out to meet Cultivator expectations.
Cultivators risk losing momentum for the sake of making the journey right for everyone
It might sound like Cultivators are the ultimate answer to progressing your change. Each of these roles has its shadow side if it gets overplayed though. For Cultivators, that comes out as a need to slow right down to let others catch up. This definitely has value – we want our people to know they have time to explore and then try out the things that bring our change to life. For Cultivators though, they may slow down too much and too often to ensure people aren’t being made too uncomfortable with the change. Further, by looking to ensure everyone’s needs are met, Cultivators risk spreading themselves too thin in an effort to reach everyone. Unremedied, they’ll run out of energy and won’t be as effective.
To keep your Cultivators going:
Connect them with other Cultivators. This is how movements gain traction. Just like yeast needs to grow and multiply to change a barley tea into beer, so do Cultivators need others with them to accelerate your team or organisational change.
Help them identify how to put the onus for decision and action on the other person. At some point, they need to get the Observer, Participant or Driver they are working with to commit to an action and take accountability for it. (“How will you…” or “What will you do next” questions are great for achieving this)
Get your Cultivators to take Ami’s lead: put some ideas out there and ask others to contribute, improve on them, try them out.
Remember – Cultivators have been observing closely and are well connected, so they’ll have some great ideas about how to further improve and evolve the change. Your challenge, leader, is to step back and let them go for it. Be their thinking partner, give them support when they need it, but mostly – let them step into their own challenge and bring their best selves to evolving the change.
This post is part of my 2020 Lockdown series. If you’ve found yourself thrust into new ways of working and you want some tips on helping your people navigate this unforeseen change, I’ll be providing ideas for leadership all the way through New Zealand’s lockdown. Check out the rest of the posts here.