I went to the symphony a few weeks ago with my sister- something we have been doing about five times a year for about twenty years now.  Lang Lang was playing, and everybody in the crowd was blown away.  It struck me how many people and how much imagination went into creating that experience.  The obvious creators are of course Beethoven, Lang Lang, the orchestra and conductor, but I thought too about the people who designed and built Roy Thomson Hall, the music teachers, the craftsmen who made the instruments and all of us in the audience that night.
 
It goes that way in business too.  None of us is an island- our clients and suppliers are the obvious co-creators of our business experience, but we rely on a much broader network too.  Our colleagues, partners and mentors inspire us with great ideas and serve as role models. The larger community supports us in a million ways every day.  It works mostly because all of us are working in some way for everybody else. The more we acknowledge and celebrate how interconnected we are, the better connections we’ll have.

Sally Fazal

Change management can be described as bringing a lot of people from different starting points to a single destination.  So often companies and not-for-profit agencies use a one-size fits all approach to communicating change or transformation to employees and stakeholders.  Of course, everybody is not starting in the same place, either in terms of capacity to adapt or in understanding the goals.  Realizing that we have to meet people where they are (and hear where they are), rather than where we would like them to be can be a real epiphany in change initiatives.  We’re leading real people and not their job descriptions.  A sensitively managed change project will reach out to people through multiple channels, multiple times.  Most importantly, though, successful change initiatives are based on effective and active listening to people.  

Sally Fazal