LEADERSHIP: HONORING “RITES OF PASSAGE”

the demarcation of transformation

35 years of experience as a change agent for companies like Black & Decker, American Express, and UPS taught me the relevance of performing a rite of passage  initiative during my Securing Corporate Viability workshop.  Primitive societies appreciate the necessity of ritual when individuals or groups are  transforming from one state to another—for example, moving from adolescence to adulthood , leaving college for the workforce, or from being single to married. The process of clarifying cultural-values and focusing an organization on a vision of the preferred future, affords an excellent opportunity to honor a transformation–the passing of old and the birth of a new culture.

Using cultural-values clarification as a rite of passage

Values help people navigate successfully in unfamiliar territory.  An additional benefit of cultural-values is the impact of their future tense—vision.  Vision and values can be compared to flip sides of the same coin.  Values link the future of individuals to their past.  The largest single determinant of how we choose to behave today is the conscious or below conscious expectation of what the future holds in store for us.  Values establish boundaries for behavior, but people can’t live by rules alone— there will always be situations not covered by existing regulations.

Mother Nature hates vacuums, so the space between our ears is filling 24/7with pictures of the future… whether we like them or not.  According to Dr. Ronald Lippitt, before the age of five we were programmed negative at a ratio of 12:1.  That means left to our own devices we will sense 12 negative possibilities to every positive.  Without a predisposition towards scepticism, we’d be inclined to follow incompetent managers off a cliff like a herd of lemmings.  I’m sure some of you have experienced sleepless nights with what I refer to as “chattermind”— unproductive metal dialogues with ourselves that elevate anxiety.  The only way to cope with chattermind , is to work at filling the empty space between our ears with positive images of possible futures.  The art of “visioning” is easier to describe than do.

Your history stops at this very moment.  Looking back, you’ve accumulated a wealth of opinions from your faith, life experiences, books that allowed  you  to access  centuries of history, and your formal education.  Your memory bank is filled to overflowing—you couldn’t possibly remember or make sense of it all.  So the human brain adapts by distilling information into a set of fundamental beliefs.  These beliefs form your perceptual screen—each person has a unique way of seeing the world.  Even when viewing the same image, two minds will not necessarily register identical conclusions or emotions—you make sense of the world through unique lenses ground by your personal experience.

The uniqueness of personal values can be a challenge to parents, coaches, and leaders who are asking individuals to perform as a team.  The task can be daunting because individual perspectives about what makes the world go around will be different.  Shared values are at the root of winning teams, great companies, and effective families.  Winners know how to move a group of people beyond their personal or cor- values to embrace the team’s cultural-values. When the process is executed well,  a sudden “guestalt” will occur–and you’ll have a  transformed  group on your hands.  There will still be work to do however, because behavior always lags behind intent, you will have to hold people’s toes to the fire to prevent “retreat to the familiar”.