Jamie Parker opened the session by introducing herself as a recovering command-and-control manager — a phrase she used deliberately and returned to throughout the hour. Growing up in authoritarian management environments, she had absorbed the standard lessons: check your emotions at the door, leave your personal problems at home, it's not personal, it's business. The line she used to describe the assumption: it's the Tom Hanks "A League of Their Own" line — there's no crying in baseball.
Except, as Jamie said, business is personal. Change is inevitable. Whether organizations are facing changing markets, changing customer demands, or changing technologies, the reality is that business involves change, business involves people, and the combination means emotions are always in play.
Lean transformations involve substantial change — not just in what people do and how they work but in how they think. The default outcome, when leaders ignore the human side of that change, is what Jamie described as natural human reactions that hold the work back. Slower adoption. Limited impact. Eroded sustainability. These aren't optional risks. They're predictable consequences of treating change as a technical project rather than a human one. The countermeasure isn't softer leadership. It's purposeful leadership through change.
The session walked through three change constructs (Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the competency model, and the change curve), the foundational steps for setting up any change well, and then an eight-step framework for leading through each individual change. Jamie was direct that the framework looks like a lot when you first see it. The first time through any change, applying all eight steps is real work. After two or three changes, the steps become habits. The work that felt heavy on the first pass becomes the way the team operates.
Jamie Parker is a Lean leadership coach at Process + Results, where she helps organizations practicing Lean move from employee resistance, inconsistent performance, and improvement stagnation to highly engaged frontline teams solving problems and continuously improving toward organizational goals. She works with leaders through her Process + Results Lean Leadership Transformation Model.
Jamie has 17 years of operations management experience across retail, service, and manufacturing environments, including six years practicing Lean. Before launching her coaching practice, she lived the challenges of leading change inside organizations that didn't always make it easy. She has facilitated workshops for the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, the American Society for Quality, and Fortune 50 executives, in addition to years of coaching and facilitating in her formal management roles. She authored Chapter 6 of "Practicing Lean," edited by Mark Graban, and has facilitated webinars and podcasts in partnership with Gemba Academy. Jamie is based in Colorado and is active with the Colorado Lean Network.
Jamie's framing of the central problem started with a personal story. Earlier in her career, working as a retail manager facing substantial change, she and the other managers attended a change management training. The training taught a familiar three-category model: enablers, fence-sitters, and resistors. The advice for handling resistors was direct — take them out of the equation by giving them busy work that had nothing to do with the change, just to get them out of the way.
The trainers asked the participants to write three column headings on a piece of paper — enabler, fence-sitter, resistor — and to sort each member of their team into one of the columns. Jamie thought about Kevin. Kevin complained about everything. Kevin made everything harder than it needed to be. Kevin was a resistor. She wrote his name down.
She went back to her store and managed Kevin like a resistor. He acted like one.
The diagnosis Jamie offered in retrospect: labels are the problem. Labels seem permanent. Once she had decided Kevin was a resistor, she didn't leave him any room to act, behave, or think differently. The label closed off the alternative outcomes. The path forward, Jamie said, is to stop labeling and move from a place of judgment to a place of respect. The shift aligns directly with the respect-for-people pillar of Lean. Everything else in the session sat on that foundation. The change constructs, the framework, the techniques — all of them depend on the leader treating the people experiencing the change as people with normal human reactions rather than as obstacles to be neutralized.
Jamie walked through three change models that practitioners should understand and, more importantly, should teach to every team member rather than keeping confined to managers or change agents.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Most practitioners have seen the standard pyramid. The relevant point for change leadership is that change triggers fear of needs not being met. When change is introduced, people slide down the pyramid. They become fearful about job security, financial stability, fitting in with the team, status as the expert, identity as the competent person who had the previous system figured out. The hierarchy isn't a checklist for change leaders to work through. It's a reminder of which fears get activated when the familiar gets disrupted.
The competency model. Jamie illustrated this one with her niece Emory learning to tie her shoes. At Emory's youngest age, she was unconsciously incompetent — she didn't know how to tie shoes and didn't care, because all her shoes were Velcro or slip-ons. Shoe-tying bliss. Then she went to school and saw other kids tying their shoes, which made her consciously incompetent — still didn't know how, but now aware that she didn't know. That awareness is uncomfortable. It triggers the Maslow-level fears about fitting in, about being slower than peers. Then Emory practiced and became consciously competent. She can tie her shoes if she focuses, doesn't always get it on the first try, takes longer than fluent tiers, but can do it. With more practice, she'll become unconsciously competent — able to tie shoes without thinking about it.
The change-leadership point: when organizations introduce change, they move people from unconsciously competent (expert in the old way) to consciously incompetent (aware of the new way but not yet able to do it). The new state is acutely uncomfortable. Edgar Schein called this learning anxiety. Schein's framing of the fears that drive it:
Jamie's secondary point about the competency model included a leadership trap. Sometimes, when a learner is in the consciously competent stage and trying to do the new thing, the leader gets impatient and does the task for them. Emory's mom, trying to get out the door, sometimes ties Emory's shoes for her because the seven-year-old takes too long. The instinct is understandable. The signal it sends to the learner is that they aren't trusted to do the work. Multiply that signal across a team adopting a new system, and the adoption stalls.
The change curve. Based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's grief cycle, originally developed for grief through death but applicable to any loss — including the loss of the old way of working. The standard sequence: denial and shock, fear and anger and frustration, bargaining, acceptance and hope, enthusiasm and commitment.
Jamie made three specific points about the curve that practitioners often miss.
The curve has an ending on the far left and a new beginning on the far right. Most change introductions assume those are simultaneous — the old way stops, the new way starts, the launch is the implementation. The curve says that's not how it works. There's a process between the ending and the new beginning. People can't simply switch over because the launch happened.
There's a dip in the middle of the curve, and people often get stuck cycling through it. They start to accept, hit an obstacle, return to frustration, start to accept again, hit another obstacle. The pattern isn't linear.
The arrows showing the curve moving in one consistent direction are misleading. People skip steps. They move sideways. Kübler-Ross herself noted that the stages aren't stops on a linear timeline — they're tools for identifying and framing what someone is feeling. The same applies to change. The curve is a vocabulary, not a path.
Jamie identified three foundational steps that have to be in place before any individual change can be led well.
Step 1: Stop labeling. Move from judgment to respect. Don't sort team members into enablers and resistors. The label closes off the outcomes the team needs.
Step 2: Teach the change constructs to every team member. Not just managers. Not just change agents. Not just CI practitioners. Everyone. The teaching normalizes human behavior, reduces the fear that comes from feeling alone in the experience, and creates shared language that supports open dialogue when change happens. Jamie's tip on how to teach: don't do it from a purely academic or informational standpoint. Share stories. Invite others to share stories. Create activities that let people experience the change reactions in a safe space rather than just reading about them. Slides and lectures don't produce the shared understanding the team needs. Stories and experiences do.
Step 3: Create psychological safety. Jamie acknowledged that the topic could fill weeks of content on its own, but pulled out two specific levers worth attention. The first is how leaders respond to failure — when a dashboard turns red, when someone makes a mistake, when there's a service failure with a customer, the response shapes how safe people feel reporting future problems. The second is the framing of process and results. Traditional organizations tend to be results-only — hit the number, hit the number. The Lean framing is process plus results — care about results, place them in the context of process. The combination is what makes psychological safety operationally real rather than aspirational.
With the foundations in place, Jamie walked through the eight steps for leading through any individual change. The framework is repeatable. Every major or medium-sized change goes through the same eight steps.
Schein's framing — which Jamie quoted directly — is that culture change isn't an outcome you can go after as such. The change goal has to be defined in terms of a specific problem you're trying to fix. The core message is the articulation of that problem and what it's worth solving.
The core message isn't an elevator pitch. It's not a sales argument designed to get buy-in. Jamie was careful with the language — she used air quotes around "sell," "convince," "buy-in," "get on board." All of those framings position the change as something being done to people who need to be persuaded. The core message framing positions the change as a solution to a real problem the team is already living with.
Two questions structure the message. What's the pain — the problem we're trying to solve and why it matters? Jamie's observation about the Lean community: practitioners are good at the first part (what problem are we solving) and often skip the second (so what — who cares, what's the pain of leaving the problem in place). And what's the pleasure — the vision for the post-change future and how things will be better, not just from a corporate metrics standpoint but for the real people affected by the change?
Jamie used the ABCs of organizational culture from the "Creating a Kaizen Culture" book. Artifacts are at the top — the stuff. In a Lean environment, that's the 5S tape, the Kanban cards, the visual management boards, the standard work documents. Behaviors are next — what people do. Together, artifacts and behaviors make up the visible what. Underneath sit the core beliefs — the invisible why. Belief drives behavior. The artifacts and behaviors above the line are downstream of the beliefs below it.
Change initiatives that ignore the underlying beliefs hit harder resistance than change initiatives that address them. Jamie's example: if a team holds a shared underlying belief that getting work done is how they add value, and leadership introduces daily huddles that take 15 minutes out of production, or Kata routines that pull people away from their workstations, or gemba walks that interrupt the flow of operational work — the change isn't just asking people to do something different. It's asking them to act against a belief they hold. The fear, pain, and resistance are greater because the change has a deeper layer of opposition than the surface workflow change suggests.
How to surface underlying beliefs when they're invisible by definition? Jamie's diagnostic: look at the gap between what the team says they do and what the team actually does. If the team says they blame the process not the person, but in reality, when failures happen the first question asked is who was involved — there's a gap. The gap is where the underlying beliefs live. Investigate what has happened in the past that would make the actual behavior make sense. The investigation usually surfaces beliefs that nobody has stated explicitly but that everyone has been operating from.
Once the underlying beliefs are surfaced, the next question is what alternative beliefs the team would need to hold for the change to take hold. Those alternative beliefs become central to both the communication about the change and the behaviors that leaders model going forward.
Jamie marked this step as the one to underline or bold. When introducing a specific change, retrain or revisit the change constructs with the most impacted team members. Every time. The first few times this looks like a full retraining. As the team gets more familiar with the constructs, it becomes a quick revisit — "remember when we did the activity on the change curve? We're going to experience that curve again with this change."
Beyond revisiting the constructs, involve the most impacted people in the change decision when possible. When it's not possible — when the change is mandated from above, coming from a different department, or driven by a global decision the team has no input on — involve the impacted people anyway, in a different way. Listen to their concerns without trying to change their minds. Jamie's framing: mine for gold. Objections equal gold. The mining surfaces one of two things. Either you learn about a legitimate concern that needs to be addressed and worked through, or you learn about a concern that's rooted in fear rather than fact — in which case you now understand which fears are being triggered, which lets you partner with the person through them.
The contrast Jamie drew was sharp. Mining for gold and treating objections as valuable produces one kind of response. Ignoring Kevin and giving him busy work to keep him out of the way produces the opposite. Same person. Different approach. Very different outcomes.
Whatever amount of communication a leader thinks is enough is almost certainly not enough. Jamie's instruction: write down how many times you think you need to communicate something. Double it. Double it again. Keep going.
The mistake organizations make is treating communication as a formal launch event — a team meeting, a shift huddle, a presentation deck. Communication has to extend beyond formal events into every interaction. The change is part of the ambient conversation, not a one-time announcement.
The varied dimension means using all three learning modalities. Auditory — I tell you, you listen. Visual — I show you using pictures, videos, charts. Tactile — we do it together through simulations, walkthroughs, hands-on practice. Different people learn differently. Communication that relies entirely on one modality misses the team members who need the others.
The ongoing dimension means not stopping when the implementation is "done." The change-curve work continues after the launch. The communication has to continue too.
Jamie quoted George Bernard Shaw on the topic — the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. Most communication failures aren't about content. They're about leaders mistaking having said something for having communicated it.
Edgar Schein's framing — and John Kotter's, in different language — is that culture is shaped through repeated successes that confirm the new core beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts. The repeated successes don't happen on their own. Leaders have to plan for them, look for them, and celebrate them when they appear.
Jamie's recommendation: plan the short-game wins in advance. Know where they're likely to come from. Don't wait for them to surprise you, because if you're not watching, you'll miss them.
The mistake leaders make when looking for wins is to look only at results and metrics. The competency model says you'll often see a productivity dip during the first weeks of a change because people are consciously competent and slower than they were when they were unconsciously competent in the old system. Looking only at metrics means missing the wins entirely during exactly the period when the team most needs to see them. Wins live in process improvements, behaviors, shared experiences, and learning. Those wins are visible if leaders are looking for them.
Jamie used an Easter egg hunt analogy. The little kids in her neighborhood wandered through the grass aimlessly. The older kids — the ones the parents were trying to bribe into participation with cash-filled eggs — had a plan. They knew where the most likely hiding spots were. They went straight there. When a likely spot didn't have an egg, they didn't circle the tree hoping to manifest one — they moved to the next likely spot. When they spotted an unexpected egg on the way, they grabbed it. The pattern translates to short-game wins. Have a plan for where you expect them to be. Stay flexible when they aren't where you expected. Grab the unexpected ones when you find them.
This step parallels Step 4 — frequent, varied, ongoing — but the focus shifts from leader-to-team to team-to-leader. The three modalities apply to feedback gathering the same way they apply to communication.
Auditory: "Can you explain it to me?" They tell, you listen.
Visual: "Can you draw it out for me? Can you take a picture or a video so I can see what you're describing?"
Tactile: "Can you show me?" Then, after they show you, "Can I try it now?" You experience what they experience.
The mechanism for receiving feedback matters as much as the modality. Jamie told the story of Taylor, a plant manager rolling out a workflow change that had been developed by four members of his team but was being mandated across 18 plants. Taylor started by communicating and asking for feedback. The feedback he got came almost entirely from the four people who'd been involved in the development plus the two or three people who complained about everything. The other 50 team members weren't saying anything meaningful.
Jamie suggested a different mechanism. Taylor put a flip chart at the actual location where the workflow change was happening, with two columns — plus and delta (what's working well, what could be better if). He left markers and sharpies. He told the team to capture their feedback as they went through their shifts. He went home. The plant ran 24 hours. He came back the next morning to multiple pages of feedback on both columns.
The mechanism worked for two reasons. First, it was safe — writing on a flip chart isn't being put on the spot in front of a leader or a meeting. Second, it was easy — the flip chart was at the exact location where the implementation was happening, so capturing a moment of friction or success was a matter of grabbing a marker rather than remembering at the end of the shift.
Jamie's broader point: when you're not getting the feedback you expect, the problem usually isn't that people don't have feedback. The problem is the mechanism. Make it safer and easier, and the feedback shows up.
The thread that runs through the framework — the change constructs taught to everyone in Step 2, the change constructs revisited with the most impacted team members in Step 3 — extends into Step 7. Make change discussions the norm. Not just at the kickoff of a change. Throughout the change. As an ongoing part of how the team talks about its work.
The discussions use the shared language the team developed when the change constructs were taught. Where do you think you are on the change curve right now? Why do you think that is? Where would you like to be? What would need to happen to get you there? Which quadrant of the competency model do you find yourself in? Since you're consciously competent right now, how can we make the most of that period before you become unconsciously competent?
The conversations are what build connection. They're what convert change from something happening to a team into something happening with a team. They're what surface the shared experience that prevents the labeling Jamie warned about in Step 1. As Kübler-Ross said about the grief cycle, the stages aren't stops on a linear pathway — they're a framework for identifying and discussing what people are feeling and how they can move forward.
Lean practitioners apply improvement cycles to the work on the floor — the work that operators and frontline staff do. Jamie's argument: apply the same cycles to leadership itself. The process of leading change can be improved. The skill of leading change can be improved. The framework presented in the session can be refined based on what's learned through practice. If practitioners learn things that improve the model, Jamie wants to hear about them so she can incorporate the learning into how she teaches it.
The improvement framing closes the loop. The leader who applies PDCA to operational work and not to their own leadership behavior is missing the most leverage opportunity available to them.
Jamie closed the substantive content with a story about Ben, a former direct report at a previous organization. She was chatting with him about a change his new company was going through — they were changing the incentive calculation for all 600 employees in his department, including the managers. Jamie asked how it was going for him.
Ben's exact words, as Jamie quoted them: "Well, I managed through the change curve pretty quickly on this. So now I'm really just focused on helping my peers, the other plant managers, move through it as well, so they can better support their teams through the implementation."
The response is what Jamie said the framework is for. When a team learns to navigate the change curve, individuals don't just move through their own change reactions more quickly. They become able to help their colleagues move through theirs. The team starts to develop a shared capacity for change that compounds with each new change the organization faces. Over time — Jamie said a year, two years of consistent practice — the cumulative effect changes the culture. Change itself becomes less painful as a default condition of the organization.
Jamie ended with a comment for the practitioners who would inevitably think "this won't work in my company because we change too often" or "my boss doesn't have the patience for this." She acknowledged that most of the people watching weren't the CEO of their organization. The honest framing she offered: take pieces of the framework from wherever you are in the organization. You have influence. You have impact.
The Mother Teresa line she closed with: I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples. The framing for change leadership: practitioners at any level can cast stones that ripple. The cumulative impact of those stones across a team, a department, or a site changes what the organization is capable of doing with change over time.
The framework Jamie walked through is fundamentally about leadership behavior. The eight steps don't require software to execute. A leader committed to the discipline could implement the framework with a notebook, a flip chart, and a willingness to have the right conversations at the right times.
What infrastructure does is preserve the discipline at scale across many changes, many teams, and the time horizons over which culture actually shifts.
The first place infrastructure earns its keep is in tracking the changes themselves. A team going through a single change can hold the work in shared awareness. An organization going through dozens of overlapping changes across many sites needs a way to see what's in flight, what's been implemented, what's surfacing resistance, and what's working. Without that visibility, leaders can't see the patterns Jamie was teaching. They can't tell whether short-game wins are accumulating, whether feedback mechanisms are producing input, or whether changes are stalling at the consciously incompetent stage and need additional support.
The feedback mechanisms Jamie described — the safe and easy mechanisms like Taylor's flip chart at the point of implementation — work at the scale of one team and one change. At the scale of an organization with many teams and many changes, the same principle needs to be operationalized. A way for any team member affected by any change to surface a "plus" or a "delta" without having to be put on the spot in a meeting. A way for the leader of that change to see what's coming in across all the teams affected. A way for patterns in the feedback to surface so leaders can see whether the resistance is a one-team issue or a system-wide signal that something needs to be reconsidered.
The short-game wins Jamie emphasized in Step 5 also benefit from infrastructure. Planned wins that are tracked are wins that get celebrated. Unexpected wins that surface only get caught if there's somewhere to capture them. Wins that get celebrated repeatedly build the repeated successes Schein identified as the mechanism for cultural shift. Without a way to capture and share the wins across the team, they evaporate.
The retraining and revisiting work Jamie described in Step 3 — going back to the change constructs each time a change is introduced — depends on the constructs being available and usable for the team. Material that lives in a deck on someone's hard drive doesn't get reused. Material that lives in the system the team uses for its improvement work is available when it's needed.
The improvement-on-the-improvement work in Step 8 — applying PDCA cycles to the practice of leading change — is the same kind of improvement work that Lean practitioners apply to operational processes. The infrastructure that supports operational improvement supports leadership improvement the same way. A leader running an experiment on their own change-leadership practice can use the same tracking, the same metrics, the same review cadence that they would use for any other improvement experiment.
None of this changes the framework Jamie taught. The eight steps are the eight steps. The three change constructs are the constructs. The shift from labeling to respecting is the shift. What infrastructure does is preserve the practice when the practice has to operate at the scale of an organization rather than at the scale of a single skilled leader doing the work for one team at a time.
What's wrong with sorting team members into enablers, fence-sitters, and resistors? The sorting creates labels. Labels seem permanent. Once a leader decides someone is a resistor, the leader treats them like one, which produces the resistance the label predicted. Jamie's first experience with this model — she labeled Kevin a resistor based on his complaining behavior, then managed him like a resistor, then watched him act like one — illustrates the self-fulfilling pattern. The shift she advocates is from judgment to respect — recognizing that what looks like resistance is usually a normal human reaction to change, and that the person showing the reaction has the same capacity to navigate the change as anyone else if given the support to do it.
What does Edgar Schein mean by "learning anxiety"? The anxiety that comes from being moved from unconsciously competent (expert in the old way) to consciously incompetent (aware of the new way but not yet able to do it). Schein identified four specific fears that drive learning anxiety: fear of temporary incompetence, fear of punishment for incompetence, fear of loss of personal identity (especially for people whose identity was tied to expertise in the old system), and fear of loss of group membership (worry about being slower than peers, or about embracing the change while peers resist). The fears are normal reactions to the move into the consciously incompetent stage. The change-leadership work is to acknowledge and ease the fears rather than dismiss them.
Why does Jamie say the change curve isn't linear? Because real people don't move through the stages in order. They skip stages. They move sideways. They cycle through frustration and acceptance multiple times. They get stuck in the dip. Kübler-Ross herself noted that the grief stages aren't stops on a linear timeline — they're tools for identifying and framing what someone is feeling. The same applies to the change curve. The value of the curve is as vocabulary for discussing the experience, not as a path that has to be followed in sequence.
Why teach the change constructs to everyone, not just leaders? Because the teaching normalizes human behavior. When the whole team understands the change curve, the competency model, and the fears that drive learning anxiety, the experience of change becomes shared. People stop wondering whether something is wrong with them for feeling what they're feeling. They stop interpreting their own reactions as failures. The shared language creates the foundation for the open dialogue that Step 7 of the framework depends on. Limiting the teaching to managers or change agents preserves the language gap that the framework is designed to close.
What's the difference between getting buy-in and getting clear on the core message? "Buy-in" framing positions the change as something happening to people who need to be persuaded. The leader's job becomes selling the change. The framing treats team members as obstacles. The core message framing positions the change as a solution to a real problem the team is already living with. The leader's job becomes articulating the pain of the current state and the pleasure of the future state in a way that connects to what team members already care about. Jamie used air quotes around "sell" and "convince" and "buy-in" specifically because the framing those words imply is part of the problem.
Why does Jamie say to focus on underlying beliefs rather than just artifacts and behaviors? Because artifacts and behaviors are downstream of beliefs. A change that asks team members to behave differently without addressing the beliefs that produced the original behavior is asking for compliance rather than commitment. When the change goes against a deeply held belief — for example, asking team members to leave their workstations for huddles when the team believes that productivity is how they add value — the resistance is much greater than the surface workflow change would suggest. The work of surfacing underlying beliefs is harder than the work of changing artifacts and behaviors, but it's what determines whether the change actually takes hold.
How do you surface underlying beliefs when they're invisible by definition? Look at the gap between what the team says they do and what the team actually does. If the team says they blame the process not the person but the first question after a failure is "who was involved" — there's a gap. The gap is where the underlying beliefs live. Investigate what has happened in the past that would make the actual behavior make sense. The investigation often surfaces beliefs that nobody has stated explicitly but that everyone has been operating from.
What does Jamie mean by "mining for gold" in objections? The reframe of how leaders treat resistance. Instead of dismissing objections or labeling the people raising them as resistors, treat the objections as valuable information. Mining for gold means listening to understand what's behind the objection. One of two things will emerge. Either the objection points to a legitimate concern that needs to be addressed and worked through, or the objection is rooted in fear rather than fact, in which case the leader now understands which fears are triggered and can partner with the person through them. Either outcome is more useful than ignoring or pushing past the objection.
Why double and double again the amount of communication you think is enough? Because most leaders systematically underestimate how much communication is needed. The mistake is treating communication as a launch event — the announcement, the deck, the team meeting — rather than as an ongoing thread that runs through every interaction. The actual experience of going through change requires the message to be heard, understood, processed, and revisited many times. George Bernard Shaw's line that Jamie quoted captures the failure mode: the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. Most leaders think they've communicated. The team often hasn't received the communication yet.
Why use all three learning modalities — auditory, visual, tactile? Because different people learn differently. Communication that relies entirely on one modality reaches only the team members whose preferred modality matches. Auditory communication — telling and listening — works for some. Visual communication — showing pictures, charts, videos, or asking team members to draw what they're describing — works for others. Tactile communication — walking through the work together, running a simulation, hands-on practice — works for others still. The same applies in reverse to gathering feedback. Asking "can you explain it" gets auditory input. Asking "can you draw it out" gets visual input. Asking "can you show me" gets tactile input.
Why are short-game wins important during a productivity dip? Because the productivity dip during the consciously competent stage is real and predictable. If leaders look only at metrics during this period, they'll see results going down and conclude the change isn't working. The team will see the same thing. Without short-game wins to balance against the metric dip, the team loses confidence in the change. Short-game wins in process improvements, behaviors, shared experiences, and learning provide the evidence that the change is producing positive results even when the topline metrics haven't caught up yet. The wins also build the repeated successes that Schein and Kotter both identified as the mechanism by which culture shifts over time.
What was the lesson from Taylor's flip chart? That the mechanism for receiving feedback matters as much as the willingness to receive it. Taylor had been asking for feedback and getting almost none from most of his team. Putting a flip chart at the location where the change was happening, with markers and a simple plus/delta structure, produced pages of feedback in less than 24 hours. The mechanism worked because it was safe — writing on a flip chart isn't being put on the spot — and easy — the chart was at the point of implementation, so capturing feedback in the moment was a matter of grabbing a marker rather than remembering hours later. When feedback isn't coming in, the problem usually isn't that people don't have feedback. The problem is the mechanism for offering it.
How do you change a CEO who manages from command and control? Jamie acknowledged she had limited success with this directly. Sharing TED Talks, doing experiential work with senior leaders who were committed to traditional management — the traction was minimal. Her shift in tactic: focus efforts where you are in the organization, and be what Simon Sinek calls cloud cover for your team. Manage up in the language the senior leaders care about — risk aversion, customer experience, hitting numbers — without passing that style down to your own team. Your team doesn't need to know how you're managing up. They experience your leadership directly. The senior leaders care more about results than about how you produce them. If you can deliver the results without command-and-control behavior toward your team, you build evidence over time that the alternative leadership style is more effective, not less. The argument that lands with senior leaders is the effectiveness argument — when we lead this way, the results are better — more than the respect-for-people argument, however much the respect-for-people framing is closer to the actual reason for the shift.
What sparked Jamie's own transition away from command-and-control management? Two specific moments. The first was a conversation with her boss at the time, who pointed out to her the lives she was already impacting through the way she led — talking through specific team members whose lives were different because of opportunities she had given them. The conversation reframed her career in terms of impact rather than role. The second was Simon Sinek's "Leaders Eat Last" keynote at an AME conference in Jacksonville, where Sinek's framing of leadership chemistry and the circle of safety gave her the conceptual structure for what she had started to sense. Mentors like Steve Kane and Kevin Meyer from the Gemba Academy community contributed to the shift as well.
What books does Jamie recommend on change leadership? Edgar Schein's work — referenced repeatedly throughout the session — is foundational, though Jamie cautioned that the books are academic and dense, which makes them a fit for some learners and not others. "Creating a Kaizen Culture" is the source of the ABCs of organizational culture (artifacts, behaviors, core beliefs) that the session used. John Kotter's work on change is referenced. "Practicing Lean," edited by Mark Graban, contains Jamie's own chapter on her leadership journey. Jamie's broader point: her preferred mode of learning is learning by doing rather than learning through books — practitioners should pair reading with experimentation rather than treating books as the destination.
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