The Stress of Change: Preparing for change requires great mental power and thrill of uncertainities, Some these uncertain times could be maddening and stressful.

Once again my feeling is that once the central pivot (as mentioned in first blog post) becomes clear the rest of the "process to Change" becomes clearer.

Every change comes with an uncertainity of where you will go next and what will you do next, where is the next "cash in pocket" coming from and who will be your new compatriots. The period between the time when change kicks in and these question arise to the time when these are settled is the test of the human character.

Mainly tests you on your stress factor, your handling of human relationship (near ones), your clear thinking ability, and you ability to read others mind.

I am quite sure all of you would agree that the most challenging part of change management is managing people in a change process. However there are various kind of people and one of the most influential in motivating you as change manager are people who are compliant to change.

Possibly these people are least effected by change hence they really dont care, but convincing people who are effected by change will be the most difficult task - you included (i.e if you are effected by it). Actually you will be in the best position to effect a change if you or your job will be part of change. Believe me you will succeed more when you are part of the group of people who are effected by change.

My experience suggests that only key skill you require to effect a succeefull change (and accoladed for it) is to communicate! communicate! and communicate! I can tell you also that more you do that the more the need for it.

Empathise is another keyword to convince people to make that change. Again I would say that 40% of change management is the process and 60% is people.

As you effect that change, remember to have a strong reason for the change as most of reasons for change are baseless - atleast to people who are effected by change.

Remeber there are two tools you can use to manage a change - the Whip or you yourself, In majority cases the choice is simple and trust me both are effective in different circumstances.

I had a very interesting experience on change, I was appraoched by a very senior member of the Management group to give an opinion of the way my department works and whther I was happy with the way things were going and if I was happy with line management etc.

In my urge to be sincere and honest I ended up telling a lot of truth about the job and what can be changed to make it better, and my disatisfaction with line manaagement approach, about the structure of the team.

These were mainly constructive criticism and I had a positive approach throughout my conversation with him. at the end of it all he thanked me for being sincere honest about my feedback. He also said that he would like to take my comments to his senior and make changes as necessarry.

I met him a week later and he said that he plans to change the location of the department to another country and intends to recruit a new team. and he was not feeling guilty as I anyway did not approve of the way things were going at present!!!!

A lesson learnt here, eventhough unknowingly you could be a tool to a change which can directly effect you.

In my earlier post, I had raised a question on change - are we afraid of change? Let me explain this a bit further and we can explore whether we are.....

Eventhough we change things in our day to day life even in our long term ambitions, our targets, our lifestyle, our attitudes and even sometime our principles.

This is all based on a central point of our purpose and that is to live well or with the main objective of, earning enough money to live well. Let us call this our pivot. Hence everything arround this pivot can cange but nothing should disturb this pivot. Once the green flows in we are ready to make small, medium and sometime big changes to all the above.

Once this pivot changes - all hell breaks loose in our heart and in our mind we then become instruments of our emotion and will lay all blame of our sorry state to whoever has made this change. Of-cource this will begin by questioning the need for change, question the wisdom of the person who has brought about this change, finding loopholes in the case for change and we all end up bringing all kind of emotions to the forefront and generate negative thoughts.

But in our fast life did we miss something which actually resulted in the change and took us by surprise, did we miss an oppurtunity somewhere down the line?

We as managers are always trying to create a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plans for our organisation, but when it comes to our own life's continuity after a "disasterous change" we know we have forgotten that.

Are we ready for change?.

Emotional Stability: The old new thing which is always a either a inthing or a thing of the past is EQ. the emotional equivalent of intelligience quotient (IQ).

The British Council Professional development cource on EQ is always full. The demand for this programme is so high that in some cases you may have to wait 8 months to get a seat in the EQ class.

I would like to assume that there is a need for emotional improvement in each one of us, and quite a lot of us are emotional vampires (just read the book by Albert Bernstein by the same name), which makes us violent enough to suck others emotionally dry.

Each one of at some point have claimed our close associates (read as friends/wives/husbands/father/mother) to be short tempered/hyper/nervous/self centred and many more. But I wonder if we will ever realise our emotional state, and how many are we emotionally sucking dry.

Change: the big buzzword in the industry now (even in my organisation). I have a personal feeling that everyone one wants to change and at the same time no body wants a change, I would want to go for a holiday to place which is a change from my monotonous place, but at the same time if I am told "hey there your finances are in mess, you need to change your mind set and get that in order" I would probably say "buzz off I am happy as I am"

Everyone says change is constant, and yes they re bloody right - day changes to night, I change my clothes, you change your car, I always want different food each day which is a change, you will change your hair style, I will change the shape of my beard. Then we must be ready to change our habbits.

What is it that scares the hell out of us when our organisations say "we are going to change"

Why Crysanthimum?

When the blogspot prompted me to name my blog, the first thing which came up was a flower, and what better than a crysathimum, vibrant, colourful, luxuriant and a deep auro of energy in these flowers creat an impression which is long lasting, I wanted my blog to be just that.