People & Culture at Gowling WLG

Deon Blyan

Deon Blyan is the National Director of People & Culture at Gowling WLG. With a 25-year career spanning diverse sectors, he is passionate about helping people thrive in dynamic organizational cultures. Deon holds a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership and focuses on leading culture-building initiatives, supporting a people-first strategy and modernizing approaches to the Firm member lifecycle. Reporting directly to the Chief People Officer, he leads P&C services, talent acquisition and alumni relations, bringing a modern approach to change management, project management and communications.

Gaining clarity and stability within complexity

Change can take a toll on any organization, creating instability and stress for those within. It doesn’t have to be this way. I believe we can navigate change and reinforce stability when we face it directly and gain clarity for key foundational factors to hold on to when things fluctuate.

The Kurt Lewin model of change occurring through three states—current, transition and future—provides a compelling framework for understanding the impacts of change. In the current state, people are frozen like an ice cube in the current ways and will need to unfreeze to enact change through the transition state and then refreeze in the new way to achieve the future state. It’s during the transition state as things seem to flow uncontained like a melted ice cube where instability and stress can be magnified and individuals in the organization will seek clarity and understanding, ask questions and present challenges to the proposed new way.

Through those three states, change also occurs on two levels: the organizational level and the individual level. Organizational change is only achieved when individual change is enacted and the individuals within the organization will often fall into one of two categories: individual contributor or leader.

An organization’s culture will be the key foundational factor that will reinforce stability within the complex flow of change. When the culture is fostered as the cumulative result of how people in the organization act and why they do what they do, it can become a deliberate source of balance during the transition and future states. The structure of the organization can be an important supporting facet to this as well. When the leadership competency framework establishes the scope of leaders to include change advocacy, then these individuals become critical voices to be leveraged as they interact with their teams throughout the states of change..

“Having memorable, tangible and actionable values are crucial for supporting leaders’ ability to meet the heightened expectations placed on them for navigating and guiding change.”

Organizations set high expectations for their leaders and should be prepared to offer the support that will help them thrive within those expectations. Whether it’s a process, a technology or a philosophy, the people most impacted by change will look to their leaders to make sense of it for them. Are leaders truly equipped to fill that role?

Make no mistake, change can be uncomfortable for leaders as those around them challenge the values and norms that underpin the organization. When this happens, it can cause them to go through a sometimes-exhausting exercise of explaining those values in the context of the challenge repeatedly. In the case of a leader, this will occur internally and then externally as those who report to them demand context and understanding, multiplying the pressure on them to be secure in the organization’s values.

By approaching its culture in a deliberate way, making the intangible tangible, organizations can establish an important bedrock of stability in times of change. Understanding that culture is the outcome is a critical starting point. This enables the organization to reengineer it to determine the inputs that shape it. The organization’s values, employment or practitioner experience and purpose provide solid elements to build on. Core values defined as how we act represent the most important place to start.

In her book Built on Values (2011), Ann Rhoades explains that leaders drive values, which drive behaviours, which drive culture, which drives performance. If an organization’s values are vague and intangible, when challenged they become detractors rather than stabilizers, looming questions take the place of resolution and leaders don’t know exactly what to drive. Having memorable, tangible and actionable values are crucial for supporting leaders’ ability to meet the heightened expectations placed on them for navigating and guiding change.

Align this with an unwavering organizational purpose and these become highly empowering elements for leaders to drive behaviours that strengthen culture and in turn, bring stability in times of change. John Izzo and Jeff Vanderwielen (The Purpose Revolution, 2018) define purpose as an organization’s aspirational reason for being, particularly when it comes to making life better for its employees, practitioners, clients and the community.

In theory this all might sound fine, albeit still a little vague. But making the intangible tangible can be done with some practical actions and involving the people in your organization in those steps is paramount. Taking the time to engage a wide range of people within the organization in conversations, workshops, focus groups and surveys are great ways to ensure core values are authentic and applicable to the organization. Equally, because purpose most often begins from a very personal place, organizations should look to those within to help define its “why we do what we do” statement and consider its heritage, founding and story to shape it.

With the appropriate time and attention paid to these steps for defining values and purpose, we not only ensure a very strong result, but we also gain the opportunity to reinforce and refocus the organization on the importance of these elements through the interactions in the process. This can also serve as an example of a change initiative, but because it relies so much on input from those within the organization it can be one that is more comfortable and safer, galvanizing people around inspiring things that will help them thrive together through less comfortable change in the future.