Work Across the Seams of Your Company

The gauntlet of change is cruel, and change agents are exposed to all of its dastardly personnel.

Since this is the case, leaders need to be seam operators – they operate across the seams of the company.

Two things seam operators don’t do:

• We don’t get involved in day-to-day processes outside of setting the operating principles.
• We don’t need to know too many details; we’ve already been through a lot of this before, and we don’t need it explained again.

I tell my team all the time, “I don’t want to know or hear about how sausage is made unless someone died.  I get it.  It’s sausage.  Tell me what I need to know to get things moving.”

Find out what is breaking down within the seams of your company.  Change agents identify problems and then find ways to fix them or bring in people who can.