Reinvent or Die
This was going to be about a few posts that I have followed with interest in my bloglines account, but something far more personal is calling for my attention today.
It’s happening to me as we speak: The death of a program. What do you do when a program you worked to create seems be on the death bed, about to die?
What do you do when your system looks like it’s about to fall apart in your arms? Do you frantically try CPR? Do you scramble to inject fresh blood by increasing your involvement with it? Do you take the blame and say: This isn’t working because I’ve not been hyping it enough? It’s falling apart because I’m not advertising and selling it to our staff enough?
Do I need to slam medication down the program’s throat? Do I need to jam more tubes and devices into it to get its lungs to function again?
Today I’m being faced with the likely death of one of our company’s programs. It’s not just any program though: it’s one I developed and launched. It’s one that I followed and took care of during 2005. The program: an employee incentive and motivation scheme.
2005 saw the program’s birth. It rapidly grew, and our employees seemed to embrace it well. We worked it. Our teachers worked it, and all were happy.
2006 saw something different. A disconnect between program and staff. A disconnect that I didn’t notice until a month or two ago. Interest and staff "buy-in" seem to have parted company, but the program marched onward.
I just had a meeting with my bosses about it, and they are feeling the same: the program seems to have lost it’s usefullness. I sort of felt the same way, but didn’t know if I wanted to come to terms with that.
And now I wrestle with myself; I wrestle with what I think about myself, and I ask if I am a capable leader. I find my mind rushing back to my childhood, and I remember a string of failed building projects - cabins and forts in the woods, all imagined greatness that I could not seem to bring into reality. Today I remembered that frustration, that idea of "I’ll never be able to build anything good…"
This present project feels like yet another failed cabin in the woods. It looked great in my mind, but somehow just couldn’t survive for long in the real world.
I wrote an email to my wife after the conversation with my bosses.
I told her what had happened, and how I was feeling. I wasn’t expecting her response, but it totally made sense.
Programs shouldn’t live forever. Systems that don’t evolve stagnate. She rightly suggested that I not see this as failure, but as a big request to innovate, and roll with the changes. Our company has changed dramatically over the last year, in fact, so have our staff members. (One of the banes of being an English teaching company is dealing with high staff turnover. We’ve lost a lot of excellent people over the last year…)
That struck something in me. This isn’t about program preservation. It’s about being relevant, both to a company and to our staff. If 50% of our teaching team had changed over the last year, wouldn’t it make sense that employee satisfaction and motivation programs need change as well?
I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think I need to just face myself and realize that great leadership isn’t about having programs that last for centuries. Great leadership is being relevant. It’s about meaningful influence in the lives of those around you.
If you notice that the way you express that influence is no longer touching the people you’re trying to touch, it’s time to reinvent. It’s time to evolve.
Perhaps this story was not what you were expecting. I know I wasn’t expecting to write it…but it just seemed to be really important for me to say. This is meaningful to me…and if you want an edu-spin, well…I think there’s clear crossover there too. What do you think?
Reinvent yourself, your programs, your lesson plans, your class content, or find yourself in the place of being irrelevant.
