For twenty out of the last twenty-seven years, I struggled to find a ‘label’ that made sense (and didn’t take me half a day to explain) when people asked me what I actually do for a living! Depending on who was asking I’d select from a whole host of acceptable answers ranging from: Management Consultant, Marketing Consultant, Business Developer, Senior Executive, Communications Specialist, Corporate Culture Specialist, Organisational Development Expert Productivity Expert, Trainer, Presenter, Downsizer, Upsizer, and the list went on. One of the best ones was ‘Champion of Change’ but that felt so cheesy even I would cringe whenever I said it. There was no one overarching ‘tag’ to describe a professional who worked on both the hard and soft issues faced by business. No ‘title’ that fit someone who understood the commercial needs of a business whilst at the same time nurturing the human capital side of things. This may sound strange now, but back when I started my career, Management Consulting was a relatively new thing and Corporate Culture was rapidly becoming a pseudonym for an expensive corporate hug-a-thon!
People like me didn’t have a label, and we certainly didn’t fit the mold. We were almost a secret society of hired guns; inevitably recruited by word of mouth to come and ‘fix’ things when a company found itself in crisis. And the sought after ‘fix’ was only ever to address one half of the equation! At first I was hired to come and reconcile positions to find missing money or to put in marketing strategies to make more money. Then when word got around about good results in that arena, I started to get hired to come and ‘fix’ underperforming teams and ‘motivate’ people. Ultimately it led to designing internal communication and management frameworks to help people work productively (and play nicely) together. The ‘jobs’ of Change Management and Change Leadership didn’t really exist and if they did, were clearly seen as a Human Resources ‘airy-fairy-feel-good’ thing that didn’t really connect with bottom line results. But a funny thing kept on happening. No matter which angle I was hired for, a head and heart improvement was the outcome. I’m certainly no genius, it just seemed obvious to me that if you wanted to get better commercial outcomes, you needed to work with the people responsible for those outcomes; connect what they needed to what the company was trying to achieve. Not in a smoke and mirrors tricky kind of way but authentically and sustainably.
To complicate matters I then launched uROk.tv in 2002 as a Personal Development resource for the ‘man in the street’. After working with thousands of corporate citizens I came to realize that before I could help people in a professional sense, they needed help in deciding what really pressed their buttons on a personal level. I was immediately labeled (again) as an Aussie Female Tony Robbins. A motivator, woot woot! Get up, shake your body, hug someone and ‘believe’ your way to success. Even after writing and releasing ‘uROk 33 Day Challenge – Dream Your Life, Live Your Dream’ I still couldn’t get the positioning right. I found myself sitting smack bang in the middle of two very different markets. It seemed I had to choose between jumping up and down shouting the hard-core promises of changing your life by simply reading this wiz bang new book, or be relegated to the hippie camp of meditators and spiritual speakers advocating ‘omming’ your way to a happy life. Material success and personal joy it seemed were like oil and water; they just didn’t go well together. To honour your soul’s urgings meant relinquishing material success and conversely, if you wanted to build wealth, then make sure to squash down those heart longings and just ‘go for it’ and take no prisoners!
Until that is, the day it all fell into place for me (well kind of!). I was asked to present to a large professional networking group and as is the custom I had to provide a professional bio and a short introduction for my two hour workshop. The audience was to be a mixed bag of corporate managers, small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs and I could speak on anything that tickled my fancy. After hours of hammering away at the computer and too many drafts too count I gave up and decided to take a sauna break to let my mind shrink back to normal. I felt refreshed and sitting out on my back deck enjoying the sunshine, marveling at the beauty of nature, it hit me like the proverbial tonne of bricks. Change Agent! That’s what I am! I am an Agent of Change. At the heart of everything I’d ever done professionally and personally was this one core theme: to effect a positive change that could provide the gateway to a sustainable path for future growth. Head and heart HAD to play together because real change could only ever be birthed at an individual level and sustainable growth required the collaboration of two or more people. I felt I’d struck gold and everything would be so easy to explain, position and market from there on in. HAH!
True, I’d found a label that worked for me but the road ahead wasn’t as smooth as I initially thought. I immediately googled ‘Change Agent’ to see if there were others like me, to see if the term existed and how others were using it. Zip, nada, nothing. Not one result from my search, save for some scientific references and stuff about chemical reactions. No matter, I surmised, after all when I came up with the name Big Picture Management for our company back in 1993, everyone who heard it thought they’d heard it before, so I trusted my gut and began to use the term. Now when people asked me what I did for a living I’d confidently respond “I’m a Professional Change Agent” fully expecting to see the light-bulb go on – but it didn’t. I was met with more quizzical stares and the inevitable “What’s that?’ response. So back around the merry-go-round I went, finding myself referring to my comprehensive list of old labels again in order to explain further.
Somewhere around late 2005 I decided to change my title to ‘THE Change Agent” and set about promoting this term everywhere I appeared on the internet. Now I don’t believe for an instant this was my idea or discovery alone. As with all great break-throughs, the concept is already ‘out there’ floating around in the ether, ready to be claimed by many people simultaneously, but within what seemed to be mere minutes, it had taken hold at the sharp end of my profession. Suddenly there were ‘Change Agents’ galore but I doubt whether any of us were really doing the same thing in the same way. It seems funny to think of it now, as a quick google search these days will yield hundreds of results for “Change Agent” and it would seem that it has always been an acceptable label for people like me. It is now firmly entrenched in management and change leadership theory and practice, yet I’m still not convinced the majority of people know what it means to be a Change Agent.
So let me share with you what it means to me. Being a professional Change Agent means making a living, helping people and business effect positive changes (in any and all areas) to facilitate sustainable growth for the benefit of everyone involved. It is the design, implementation and execution of a strategy that involves three simple steps: Examine, Imagine and Reason (which by the way just happens to be my Corporate Change model) and the engenderment of a feeling of camaraderie amongst those involved that causes them to rally together to make it happen. It means taking risks and being willing to think outside the square. It is the union of head and heart where both soft and hard needs are met. It is a job that requires fearlessness, passion and bucket-loads of energy and belief. It is still an intangible skill that relies upon flexibility of process and is most often guided by intuition born from width and depth of experience. It is an ever evolving, ever changing, slippery customer that just as you think you’ve got a handle on, changes colours like a chameleon, and sends you back to the drawing board. There is no place for ego as a Change Agent because the best success you’ll ever have is when you can walk away when your job is done and have people think they did it all by themselves. The best Change Agents are simply clear channels to enlighten, empower, facilitate and guide. Think of it like the old Maxwell Smart/99 dynamic. She gives him the idea, he says ‘Shh, I’m thinking of a plan’ then he regurgitates the same idea back to her as his own plan!
Many volumes have now been written on the ‘science’ of change and there are certainly a plethora of tools that are indeed useful and effective for manifesting change at both an individual and corporate level. And, as I said earlier, I have my own models and processes for corporate change and the uROk 33 Day Challenge is a synthesis of these concepts applied at the individual level. At the end of the day however, I still think there’s a little bit of magic involved in any successful change initiative. I believe it’s more art than science. You can be shown (and indeed agree and understand) all the reasons in the world why you should change, you can even have your hand held as you go through the motions of change but unless you can engage your heart in the process, and emotionally connect to the outcomes, you will inevitably fall way short of your mark.
Tune in next time for some insider tips on how to Be Your Own Change Agent in both life and business.
So, how many psychiatrists did it take to change the light-bulb? Only one, but the light-bulb had to want to change!
With love and light,
Sari
PS: Remember uROk! Go out there and Dream Your Life, Live Your Dream starting right now.
