Friday Thoughts with Lucy

Work, people, change and whatever else has caught my attention this week.

Can I have an easier life please?

I've been thinking about growth this week.

Except, perhaps slightly controversially for someone who runs a business, I’ve realised I’m not particularly interested in making Inclusive Change bigger for the sake of making it bigger.

I want it to be profitable. I want us to do really good work. I want to pay people properly and, controversially, pay lots of tax. I want to work with organisations where we can actually make a difference. But I also want work to be easier.

And I don’t mean easy. I think there’s a difference.

Making a difference

I’ve spent years adding things to the business. A client needs something, so we create it. I spot a problem, so I develop something that might solve it. A conversation gives me an idea for a course, a workshop, a toolkit or a new way of doing something.

I love that bit. I’m probably not going to stop having ideas.

But every new thing also needs explaining, marketing, selling, administering and delivering. At some point, adding more isn’t necessarily making things better.

We do this in workplaces all the time too.

Someone isn’t confident about neurodiversity, so we add some training. People aren’t communicating well, so we add another meeting. Managers are struggling, so we give them another toolkit. People are stressed, so we introduce a wellbeing initiative. A change isn’t landing, so we send another email explaining the change.

Sometimes those things are exactly what’s needed.

But sometimes I wonder whether we need to stop asking “What else can we add?” and start asking “What could we make easier?”

I was thinking about this during our Leading Change Without Leaving People Behind session this week. We talked a lot about what happens to people during change, particularly when they lose some of their control, certainty or predictability.

One of the things I keep coming back to is capacity.

You can communicate brilliantly. You can have a good change plan. You can explain why something is happening. But if the person receiving all of that is already at capacity, giving them more information, another meeting and three things they now need to learn isn’t necessarily going to help.

Sometimes we need to take something away.

The Snowflake Generation (Spoiler: I don't think they are)

I’ve also been on the radio this week talking about whether young people really are the “snowflake generation”.

I don’t think they are.

I think we sometimes forget just how much we’ve asked this generation to deal with. They’ve grown up with austerity, Covid, social media, climate change, disrupted education and being constantly told that the jobs they want might not exist. We’ve told them they can be whoever they want to be while, at the same time, the world seems increasingly determined to make them pick a side on everything.

And then sometimes we look at them struggling with all of that and decide that what they need is more resilience.

Maybe they do need resilience. We all do.

But perhaps we also need to look at what we’re asking people to carry in the first place.

The same applies at work.

How can we make work life easier?

I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks talking to managers about neurodiversity and reasonable adjustments. Some of the questions they ask are difficult ones, and that’s prompted the series of articles I’ve been writing recently.

But quite often, when we get underneath the diagnosis and stop trying to find the perfect “neurodiversity solution”, we’re looking for the thing that’s making someone’s job unnecessarily difficult.

Can we communicate this differently? Does this meeting need to happen this way? Does everyone have to work in exactly the same way? Is this process actually necessary? What does the person need to know? What is the standard we genuinely need them to meet, and what’s just there because we’ve always done it that way?

Not everything can be removed. Not every job can be redesigned. Not every change can be made comfortable and not every difficult thing should be avoided.

That’s not what I mean by making things easier.

I’m thinking much more about unnecessary difficulty.

The extra process. The unclear instruction. The meeting that could have been something else. The ten-page document when someone needs three pieces of information. The new initiative added to the six initiatives we’re already trying to implement.

And I’m applying the same thinking to my own business.

What do we actually need to do really well? What can we stop doing? What have we made more complicated than it needs to be? And what would happen if, instead of automatically adding something else, we made something easier?

I don’t have all the answers to that yet. I’m still working it out.

Have a good weekend,

Lucy

P.S. If you haven't signed up for our FREE Manager's Toolkit for Inclusive Teams webinar on 15th October, there's still time! Click here for more information and registration