How Anthropology Unleashes Your Employees’ Talent

As you may know, our mission at Simon Associates Management Consultants is to help organizations change. Whether it’s a large high-performing organization or a mid-size owner/operator, helping businesses change is our focus and our specialty. It’s exciting work!

But, change is something that people hate. The brain hates it. The culture hates it. We see this all the time with our clients. Most organizations have a hard time implementing new ideas and new ways of doing things, even if they are good ideas and better, more productive ways of doing things.

So, what to do? How can you successfully change your organization? As corporate anthropologists, we have found that what works over and over again is “a little anthropology.” Watch this webinar and you’ll learn why and how you can do it too.

webinar

New Eyes. New Discoveries.

In this webinar, I will first help you understand the pain and challenges of change and why humans just hate to do it. Then we will dig into the building blocks needed to change people. If people can learn to see things with fresh eyes, they can visualize the change they want to bring to their organization and then “do” it. Finally, we take a short tour through a ChangeMap™ process.

Changing times require adaptable company cultures

Many clients come to us because the times, they are “a-changing” and they realize they have to adapt. Their clients are changing. There is consolidation in their industry. There are new technologies that are coming on board. There are all kinds of things happening that amplify the need for adaptation.

As your own organization faces change, it’s important to think about the changes you want to make, especially regarding your culture, so you can prepare your teams and your talent in advance and guide them through the transition. Here, I’ll briefly touch on how to do that, but to get the full story, I urge you to watch the webinar. In the short term, think about the following eight ways to guide your team through change and come out the other side more engaged, more cohesive and more productive.

Here are eight steps to take you through a ChangeMap process:

1) Visualize the future. Really create a picture with lots of detail.

2) Make the undesirable desirable.This is key!

3) Plan small wins to learn and test the results. These are your practice steps.

4) Figure out who the influential people are and engage them as leaders in the process.

5) Over-communicate.You cannot say it often enough. People delete the message before they hear it.

6) Celebrate small victories.The celebrations are essential.

7) Hold a funeral to say goodbye to past practices. Really!

8) Keep good metrics. You’ve got to be able to measure before and after so you can show the naysayers that you’ve made progress.

Letting go of old habits is hard but necessary when things are changing

The tremendous value of anthropology lies in how it helps people see things with fresh eyesTo survive in business, you have to think about things in new ways. If you don’t, you may become an archaeological ruin. 

At Simon Associates Management Consultants, we specialize in helping businesses that need or want to change. Please contact us to discuss how we might help your organization successfully adapt to the massive changes coming at you today so you too can soar.

From Observation to Innovation,

Andi Simon, Ph.D. Corporate Anthropologist

Andi Simon, Ph.D.
Corporate Anthropologist | President
Simon Associates Management Consultants
Info@simonassociates.net
@simonandi

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