If you consider yourself a leader, whether on the front line or in the C-suite, and if you don’t like what you’ve got, why don’t you change it? If your world is all screwed up, then rearrange it. If you don’t like what you see, why don’t you fight it? If you know something’s wrong, why don’t you right it?
Perhaps it is time to raise a little hell.
In the end it comes down to your thinking. And this is where we might be of assistance.
We are proud to introduce our video series, “Ruprecht on Leadership,” where agilityIRL co-founder Jim Ruprecht shares the fundamentals of our BHG Framework for leading organizational change.
Where so much advice about leadership and leading organizational change is of the “where the rubber meets the sky” variety, Jim’s comes with the leadership scar tissue of having been the guy on the hook for a change effort’s success. The BHG Framework is a product of Jim’s career leading the creation of 9 new organizations, renovating 4 under-performing ones, and redesigning 2 others that were doing fine but were designed for the past rather than the future.
The framework is based on Jim’s on the job research of leading thinkers’ concepts and theories that he then field-tested in the organization he was leading at the time; these ranged from small, local startups, to global, 300-person teams. Throwing out those concepts and theories that didn’t work, Jim took those that did, built upon them, and integrated them into a common framework—the BHG Framework.
This video series is for leaders from the front-line to the C-suite, who have the brains, heart and guts to make that corner of this world that they have the good fortune to lead a better place for all parties with a stake in its success.
If you are one of these people, welcome to Ruprecht on Leadership.
BTW, the entire video series is free of charge.
Leading organizational change did not come naturally to me. My formal education and early career work were in Quantitative Methods, or QM—the solving of real-life problems using mathematical models and techniques.
Accordingly, I approached my first organizational change effort like it was an engineering problem to be solved. To my horror, I learned that when the irresistible force of logic and reason met the immovable object of feelings and culture, feelings and culture won—not some of the time, all of the time.
Through the school of hard knocks, I learned that cultures do not behave rationally, or in accordance with the rules of a Newtonian clockwork world. Rather, they exhibit nonlinear behavior—something that was completely foreign to me. I was way out of my comfort zone.
It was clear that I needed to learn my way into this leadership and organizational change stuff and I did it the way you would expect a QM nerd to do it: research, experimentation and integration.
I did the research to identify the leading thinkers on the topic. I read what they had published, I attended classes or workshops that they taught, and lectures that they gave. Then I took the concepts and theories that they taught home to whatever organization I was leading at the time, and took them for a test drive—I field-tested them in real life. I came to treat each of the organizations I’ve led as a laboratory in which I could conduct leadership experiments. I threw out what didn’t work and built upon what did. Finally, because these now field-proven concepts and theories came from a wide variety of often disparate sources, I integrated them into a common framework that I continue to build out to this day.
I guess that’s the value I bring: I’ve field-tested the concept and theory; sorted what works from what doesn’t; and integrated this diverse body of work into a common framework.
We call this framework for leading organizational change, our “BHG Framework,” and its fundamentals are the basis for this video series.
Because it is a framework—not a methodology, program, checklist or collection of nostrums—it has broad applicability.
Whether you are contemplating a modest tweak or a wholesale organizational transformation, it doesn’t matter. Your organization’s function, size or type, be it for-profit, public, private, non-profit, or government agency, doesn’t matter. Where your organization may be in the hierarchy of some larger organization doesn’t matter. Whether the customers your organization serves are internal or external doesn’t matter. And regardless of what may be motivating the need for change, be it Agile adoption, a merger or acquisition, response to a systemic quality problem, adjusting to a post-pandemic world, purging institutional racism, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. The BHG Framework is applicable.
This video series is for enlightened and motivated leaders, from the front-line to the C-suite, who simply seek to make that corner of this world that they have the good fortune to lead, a better place for all parties with a stake in its success.
If you are one of these people, welcome to Ruprecht on Leadership.