How to Help Experienced Managers Adopt New Ways of Working

I attended the Jumpshift NZ Leadership Action Network event last week, focused on Liberating Structures. If your team has been running the same plays for years and the results have started to plateau, what I found there is worth a few minutes of your time.

The name meant nothing to me going in. I half expected a session on restructuring or mental models.

It turned out to be a walk through a selection from over 35 tools which leaders, facilitators and, frankly, anyone can use to get more out of the people around them and generate fresh thinking. Worth checking out here.

“Liberating Structures make it easy for leaders of all levels to create conditions for people to work at the top of their intelligence and creativity. In this environment, people thrive and enjoy their work. It is also the path to top performance”.

It got me thinking about how we all lean on the approaches we know work. We maintain patterns and routines because they produce expected results. That reliance is also limiting, though, and it can prevent the kind of fresh thinking that a new approach might produce, including better results than the old method ever delivered.

Off the back of that session, I committed to trying some of these models in my coaching work. The first attempt came the following day, where I adapted the TRIZ structure into my own version: TRIO, Total Reverse Ideal Outcome. The idea is to imagine the absolute opposite of the outcome you want, a thoroughly terrible version, in as much raw detail as possible. What would the type of organisation you least want to lead actually look like?

It sounds absurd until you try it. The client I was working with said it helped him surface things he had not realised were there. There is room for humour as the ideas come out, which helps.

I then asked which of those "ridiculous" items were present in his organisation. He went quiet for a moment before saying, "too many." The exercise has a way of making people more honest with themselves than they would otherwise be.

Whether the TRIO exercise lands for you, or something from Liberating Structures catches your eye, or you come up with something else entirely, the question worth sitting with is how many of us will try something new today. A willingness to experiment builds the capacity for it, and each subsequent change becomes less daunting to face.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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