AWARENESS KEY IN MAKING CHANGE
AS CHANGE practitioners, you must be aware of your hidden sides. Self-awareness training is key to ‘getting over yourself’ to effect the change. A lifelong project for sure, the better you are at realising how your actions facilitate or hinder the process of relating and interacting with your clients, the more successful you should be in gaining their trust, being authentic, and appreciating their world views and experiences.
Some psychometric tests, like the Riso-Hudson Type Indicator, the FIRO Element Band and the Leadership Development Profile assessment, are useful in raising awareness for anyone who takes them, and provide recommendations for improving interpersonal relationships with others. A values-driven, authentic and trusted consultant is likely to be very self-aware and can build selfawareness in others, which then increases openness to change.
Emphasis on technical aspects of change management are quite important to the success of the change effort. Assessing systems, processes, structures, policies, regulations, etc, are indispensable to creating more efficient and effective organisations. At the end of the day, however, they are enacted through people. My suggestion is that a key leverage point is the people: develop the people’s capacity to continuously cultivate their dream organisation.
Marina Ramkissoon, PhD, is senior lecturer in the Psychology Unit, Department of Sociology Psychology and Social Work and associate dean – Graduate Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the West Indies, as well as productivity ambassador, for the Jamaica Productivity Centre.
Dr Ramkissoon has more than 10 years’ experience teaching human resource development, work motivation, organisational learning and social psychology, and will expound on this at the ‘Cracking the Productivity Code Workshop’, which takes place February 7 at the Jamaica Employers’ Federation Conference Room, 2A Ruthven Road, St Andrew, starting at 9 a.m. For more information, call the Jamaica Productivity Centre at 9221598/948-6168; email:jpc@cwjamaica.com; or log on to www.jpc.com.jm.