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January 02, 2006
Blocking and Tackling Gone Sour
FedEx is currently running a series of TV commercials that take humorous aim at the overuse of football metaphors in business. So, let's quickly laugh at ourselves in commenting about blocking and tackling -- a descriptive phrase for what often separates entrepreneurial and/or innovative breakthroughs from disciplined organizations that can and do sustain success.
Any organization that has success eventually faces the transition from start-up, innovator and entrepreneur to disciplined enterprise. The key question is whether that transition will be successfully made, or will the organization fail as a 'flash in the pan'? Most commentary on the failure of making the transition focuses on founders (see this post as an example). But, organizations going through a transition from entreprenuerial to disciplined cultures also stumble at times because of a well known phenomenon at work in any organization of any size facing profound behavior-driven change: blocking and tacking each other instead of the problems and challenges at hand.
Change strikes fear and anxiety in most of us because it raises questions about our job security, our affiliations and even our sense of who we are and what we want to accomplish. These anxieties are very real. The question for all of us is how we can best respond to the anxiety (as opposed to how we might fool ourselves into thinking we can extinguish or ignore it). Put differently, the best question is how to respond to and channel anxiety into a constructive energy and effort aimed at getting the organization and ourselves through the transition at hand?
Too often, however, people -- and especially leaders -- choose to block and tackle the change at hand: to throw body blocks in the path of change. They claim all manner of 'principle'. But, their actions and words are transparent to nearly everyone as the work of people who do not want the change to happen. Indeed, much of the criticism of founders amounts to a subset of this larger pattern: people who prefer to stand in the way of change -- to prevent change. It's just that the person involved is a founder instead of some other executive or player.
When people inside organizations block and tackle change itself instead of blocking and tackling the challenges and obstacles needed to make change happen, the rest of the organization shudders and, eventually, loses heart. In addition to meaningful language, energy and effort are the scarcest resources needed to get through a period of profound change. And those who 'block and tackle change itself' are folks who destroy energy instead of create it. They are the change destroyers -- regardless of how high flung their stated reasons or explanations.
Blocking and tackling? Yes, it's a critical aspect of any organization's transition from entrepreneurial culture to the disciplined culture of sustainable growth and performance. But, make sure that it is the array of critical underlying challenges being blocked and tackled and not the overall change and those who are truly trying to lead it.
