What do you as a leader have to do to inspire, activate, energize, motivate people in the direction of where you want to go? In this interview Paul Tolchinsky talks about himself and his sources of inspiration, shares what change and positive leadership mean to him, explains what energy consist of and tells us why he want to be part of the Berlin Change Days. This interview is a prelude to his workshop ‘Bringing Energy to Your Organization. A Revolution of Positive Lead...'.

About Paul Tolchinsky
Who is Paul Tolchinsky?
I am an organization evacuator; I see my work as helping organizations to achieve their potential. For me ‘achieving your potential’ means: Do you have the right strategy, structure, or organization culture that helps you to achieve greatness?

What or who inspires you?
I had three mentors in my life:
1) A man from the UK, who saw the potential of people in organizations. His main question was: How do you create places of work that are interesting, meaningful, fun and profitable? After forty years this is still my question today.
2) My second mentor was a Japanese man who I met while spending time in Japan in the late 1980’s/early 90’s. His focus was: How do you bring the voice of the costumer into everything people in a company do?
3) The third person that inspired me was a woman in the USA who took her community activism into corporations. In this way she introduced the concept of ‘whole scale change’, and together we started implementing this in companies around the world. She showed me that you can engage the many to make the important decisions for the company as quickly and easily as getting engaged the few.

What does change mean for you?
For me change is a process, or a set of processes. There are two elements of change; 1) the technical part of the change itself (technology, structure, new systems), and 2) the human part of the change (how do you build understanding and comfort into people in order to support systemic changes?). These two things should be aligned and integrated in order to have a successful result. When I think about change I think of these two things simultaneously. 

About his workshop: ‘Bringing Energy to Your Organization. A Revolution of Positive Leadership’.

Your workshop is about positive leadership. What do you mean with this?
Firstly, change begins with the leader. A leader should be willing to change, or at least look at how he can act and behave differently to support the change in the system. Secondly, change is about unleashing and mobilizing energy in the direction of the goal. I formulate the leadership question as: What do you as a leader have to do to inspire, activate, energize, motivate people in the direction of where you want to go? And how do we do this in the 21st century?

Research over the last 20 years shows that it’s easier to create a short future than it is to solve yesterday’s problems. Here in Europe we call it ‘positive psychology’, in the US ‘appreciative leadership’. An appreciative, positive focus is much more powerful, successful, much less time consuming and a more satisfying way of thinking about changing. In America we say: 'you can rest on yesterday’s successes, but you can only do this for so long'. The challenge is how we can create energy and activate people in the direction of making things better. Take this mentality of people feeling they are already the best they can be, and inspire them to make them even better.

What does that demand from a leader?
A leader who only focuses on facts, figures, performance, is focused on yesterday’s data. The shift is to focus on how you get people energized. Energy is a function of three things:
1) Meaning: People need to understand why we need to change; they need a clear purpose, direction and vision. If we can think about a forward, a future with purpose and meaning that we can support, we are much more energized. How do we as leaders communicate this purpose and connect people emotionally to this?
2) Hope: People need hope. If they’re not hopeful, they’re not energized. Hope is a function of seeing results and small steps forward. It’s about changing my believe system from ‘it’s not possible’ to ‘maybe this time it will be different’, so overcoming skepticism that most employees have about all change.
3) Power: You have to believe that you can make a difference, have a voice that matters, feel that you have the authority and freedom to act in direction of the vision. If I feel powerful I am more activated and motivated, more energized to make something happen.

It isn’t enough to do one of those three. The leadership challenge is how to get them all aligned for this one purpose. And how you can create meaning, hope and power is different in different cultures.

Can you give practical examples of how you supported companies?
My European example is a successful company in Austria with positive energy that has to grow faster and need to change. We began with the issue of meaning. In a series of workshops, people in smaller groups were engaged in defining a shot future and in thinking about what this meaning means to them and their work. So we began to get the whole system aligned on why we are doing this. These discussions let to talk about action; how would we know we are making progress in this direction? We created simple communication tools (visual displays, simple forums) to share results and see the progress, which in turn created energy to do more. So over the past months, there has been a lot more energy and enthusiasm, more people believe that change will happen and that they will be successful, and the energy is more directed towards specific milestones and projects. Across the company 15 different groups are working on different elements of the change, 30% is engaged in making this happen. This is a step into the direction of how many can decide for the whole.

In the USA I worked with a company to successfully manage the three aspects of energy. How do you, over the course of a long change process, continuously keep the purpose of the meaning visible and active in people’s minds, and how do you continuously celebrate your successes? Through Friday pizza parties, quarterly celebrations of results, pictures on the websites of achievements of milestones, etc. the company reminded the employees that they were living and doing what they said they were. They literately achieved their strategy; they implemented a 5 years change strategy in 3 years.

So what can participants expect from your workshop?
I’ll show 1-2 videos of examples of creating this kind of energy in companies, share these two case studies and examples of what we’ve done to activate, and will foster discussion about what these three things mean to us as participants, either as leaders or as consultants leading change. How do we think about these three aspects of energy, how can we incorporate them and make them very practical? The heart of my session is centered around this leadership question.

The Berlin Change Days

How did you become interested in the Berlin Change Days?
In searching for communities of people who are thinking about change and leadership differently, I discovered the website of the Berlin Change Days. I looked at last year’s conference program, and the thing that most intrigued me is that the conference consists of a series of dialogues, discussions and explorations. For me this is the best kind of learning environment. I will lead a session, and in that context be quoted 'an expert', but I am not an expert. I learn more from discussions and dialogue than from presentations.

Why do you want to be part of the Berlin Change Days?
It brings together a community of people interested in these topics without one particular approach, methodology, point of view to it. I like the idea that we bring together people with many different perspectives about change, in the broadest kind of way, to talk about it. That’s the reason why I submitted the workshop idea on energy. It's a great concept and interesting idea, implicitly we always think about it, but we do not necessarily always talk about it explicitly.
I hope to bring clients to the conference, it’s a chance to see friends and of course I am looking forward to spend some time on sightseeing and enjoying the city of Berlin!