Change. It’s a word we use everyday, in a myriad of different ways. It can be interpreted wrongly in the blink of an intonation, or it can be seen as the best thing that’s ever happened to us.
“You’ve changed.”
When it comes to our careers, or our businesses, we are constantly in a state of change. For example, as we grow, mature and evolve on a professional level, our priorities as to what we want from our networks, both personal and professional, may change. Similarly, we may find that we need to adapt our skill sets and behaviour to survive in a new business environment – or if we start a new life as an entrepreneur after years in corporate.
Change can be seen in terms of those diametric opposites – the beauty and the beast. Managed change, or change over which we can exert some level of control, can be a massive positive and give us incredible benefits. Better knowledge, a greater passion for what we do, more money, a new-found understanding of who we are, and what we need to do in order to be happy and successful. But it can also have an ugly side because to get to that place, we have to go through self doubt – and often face the fact that some people won’t understand or appreciate our evolution. Sometimes we are unsure whether we are even good enough for promotion, or to run our own business, to be a part of new networks.
Sometimes we doubt whether or not we can even survive the change.
But take heart from the best in the business. For example, Steve Jobs saw that there was incredible beauty in a new way of making animation – but it wasn’t ‘pretty’, and sort of matte, and didn’t have the glow of Disney. It would involve changing the way people watched cartoons. Some people may in fact have seen this change as a bit of a beast.
The result, of course, was PiXAR.
So who wins out in your change management – beauty or the beast?
That comes down to your ability to see it for more than something skin deep.
