Page 131 - Make Work Great

Organic Growth

good job role-modeling and encouraging, then growth will occur in
its own time.

Organic Growth
How do I know this will happen? Consider the simple elegance at
work here. Your additions in progress are people you selected as being
both capable and receptive. Having learned something about overtness
and clarity from you, they will eventually notice a single instance else-
where in their work lives where one of these different patterns might
be useful. Perhaps one will realize that clarifying the need for agree-
ment will help with a diffi cult customer. Perhaps another will decide
that overtness about capability will be useful in sharing information
with a new manager. Sooner or later, such realizations will come.
When they do, it’s almost certain that your new additions won’t
think of themselves as “attempting cultural change.” Rather, they will
be trying to create a positive outcome for themselves. As a result, they
will automatically select a situation with a high likelihood for success.
Remember, you selected them because they are highly capable. And
because they learned the new patterns through your role-modeled
examples, they will be even more fl exible and targeted in their appli-
cation of them than you are. (This is to your credit: you had to learn
the patterns at least in part from a book; they had the benefi t of see-
ing you demonstrate them in real life.)
This means they are likely to use their new patterns successfully
and receive positive encouragement in the form of the results they
wanted. This reinforces two notions: the idea that the new pattern
should be used again, and the idea that their relationship with you
is a source of positive, useful information. Both of these lessons will
accelerate their next attempt to try another new pattern. Organic
growth takes care of itself.
What if their fi rst attempts fail? Perhaps, to stay with our exam-
ples, a diffi cult customer gets more diffi cult or a new manager is
unreceptive. If fl edgling attempts don’t work out as intended, does

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