Change Leadership | Ask The Expert Series 1-7

Change Leadership

“Only when there’s a sense of urgency, there will be change.”  Ms. Meenakshi Sarup

In this CorporateTrainerConnect.com (CTC) Ask The Expert Series article, we speak to Ms. Meenakshi Sarup, founding partner of THE CHANGE BUSINESS.  With corporate experience in 2 of the largest MNCs – Oracle Corporation and the TATA Group, Meenakshi has trained programs in Change Leadership, Business Presentations and Communication Skills, NLP, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Law of Attraction to a diverse audience across many countries over the last 2 decades.

CTC Q1.  What are your top 3 tips for a business leader who needs to transform his business to handle the disruptive changes in the environment?

Meenakshi’s Answer:

According to me, these are the 3 critical skills that any business leader needs to start building in their team that will help the team be more agile in responding to any change. These are meta-skills that you need whatever the industry or size of the organization:

1. Emotional resilience – when I talk about emotional resilience then I’m talking about the ability of a person and a team to bounce back from failures and setbacks and try again or try something else. Implementation of any change – whether it is a change in processes or systems or rules and regulations or technology – will mean that there are times when things don’t work.

What happens to your team when that happens? Do they dust themselves off, take a pause, re-calibrate and then start again? Or do they become discouraged and withdraw into their shells?

As a business leader you can help your team rebound by:

• Re-focusing on the big picture – remind your team of the ultimate goal, and refocus on how to get there
• Discuss and talk about lessons learnt – this means that a setback can be processed, learnt from and then the team moves on. It also means that it is acknowledged. So set up a meeting – formal or informal to do this
• Share your own stories about setbacks that you rebounded from, the more recent the better. This makes it OK for them to have faced one, everyone does.

2. The Ability to Learn – a critical skill that everyone, including business leaders, need in order to be agile with change is the ability to learn – be it new ways of doing things or new ways of thinking about things.

3. Communication Skills – by far the MOST important skill of all that you need to help your team build is to help them build their communication and relationship building skills. And I am talking about the broader definition of Communication – which includes not only presentations, emails and conversations but also your actions – because sometimes your actions speak louder than words. In order to persuade people to change you need to understand their perspective. You can only influence and persuade people from their perspective, not your own.

CTC Q2.  In promoting diversity and inclusion, how can a team build better engagement especially when it consists of members from different generations and perspectives?

Meenakshi’s Answer:

This one is easy – talk to each other! Many times it’s as simple as that. But I’m talking about conversations at a deeper level than the transactional. On a normal workday, the conversation remains at a surface level, we need to go to the deeper level to understand different perspectives. When we are able to see the other person’s motivations and beliefs, that is when we can agree to disagree.

This can actually be fun – it doesn’t have to be serious. When people are having fun together and are able to share not only about the work but about themselves – its when we are able to see the other as a whole person, not only how they are in the role that they perform, that’s when real inclusion happens.

As part of one of the workshops we do, one of the activities we run is called 4-3-2-1. Participants are given 4 minutes to find 3 other people and find out 2 things about them that are interesting, and one of those things must be unique and unusual. We get groups together to do this and it’s a lot of fun. And then we get them to share what they found out – not about themselves but about the others they met. As people share, they start finding commonalities and find themselves surprised as well – that quiet young gentleman’s hobby is to go racing in Malaysia over the weekend, that mature-looking lady has recently completed an ironwoman. And they become a community and a team. When there is a foundation of trust and respect in a relationship, that is where it is possible to accept diversity and yet include everyone.

As a business leader, you need to create these opportunities – for your team to bond -consciously. If the only time they have deeper conversations is when they are trying to resolve differences and disagreements, then the foundational relationship has not had time to be built. Think about a leader you really admire, my hunch is that they did not only interact with you on work, or that the teams that they lead were also having interactions and conversations that were not only about work.

CTC Q3.  With the threat of AI and technology replacing mundane skills in the workforce, what advice would you give a business leader in transforming their workforce?

Meenakshi’s Answer:

Treat AI as a friend and not a threat. Think about how you can collaborate with AI and technology. If the mundane skills in your workforce are taken over by technology, how wonderful is that? Now you have an experienced human being that you can utilize to improve performance, to make things even better!

Connect with Meenakshi  at this link: https://corporatetrainerconnect.com/Trainer/meenakshi-sarup/

“The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.”
– Charles Kettering

Click on the following links to read other what other Experts have to say in building our future skills:

1. HTTPS://CORPORATETRAINERCONNECT.COM/ARTICLE/APPLYING-DESIGN-THINKING-AND-AGILE-STRATEGIES-TO-INCREASE-REVENUE-ASK-THE-EXPERT-SERIES-1-1/

2. HTTPS://CORPORATETRAINERCONNECT.COM/ARTICLE/KEEPING-OUR-MOTIVATION-AND-PASSION-GOING-ASK-THE-EXPERT-SERIES-1-2/

3. HTTPS://CORPORATETRAINERCONNECT.COM/ARTICLE/COMPLEX-PROBLEM-SOLVING-THE-MOST-DESIRED-SKILL-FOR-2020/

4. HTTPS://CORPORATETRAINERCONNECT.COM/ARTICLE/CRITICAL-THINKING-AND-INNOVATION-ASK-THE-EXPERT-SERIES-1-4/

5. HTTPS://CORPORATETRAINERCONNECT.COM/ARTICLE/TEAM-BUILDING-BUILDING-A-HIGH-PERFORMANCE-TEAM-ASK-THE-EXPERT-SERIES-1-5/

CORPORATETRAINERCONNECT.COM PLATFORM

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. This article is part of the series from our newly launched CorporateConnectTrainer platform where we help connect corporations to trainers in the region. You can now search, qualify and connect directly with your best-fit trainer on one single platform, saving you time and hassle. We aim to share the subject matter expertise of our qualified trainers on the CorporateConnectTrainer platform through these articles.

Written by Janet Yung, founder of Trilogy People Performance Consultancy. We enable learning for businesses and individuals by bringing you programs, learning, and design delivery services, and technologies cum platforms, that will aid you and your team to build skills and be ready for current and future business needs.