How to find a job you love can be very challenging, especially in this economy.  Many people can’t find a job let alone find a dream job.  Dream jobs can seem like an unrealistic proposition when it appears that jobs are scarce.

The truth is, to find YOUR job, you must be willing to first see the job you have as your Day Dream Job!  I am not trying to put “lip-stick on a pig,” here or get you to look at your situation through a pair of rose tinted glassed.  No, an effective stratedgy for landing your dream job is to figure out a practical way to play to your strengths in your current work so that you can iterate your way to the ultimate work experience you desire.

Here is the truth, it’s ok to have a day job while you develop your dream job.  Don’t think you’re the only one who had a day job while chasing a dream job. Leonardo da Vinci did too. In his book How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci author Michael J Gill talked about how da Vinci often had to serve as a party planner for the patriots sponsored who sponsored him.

He wrote, “it’s amazing to imagine a genius of da Vinci’s stature devoting him this time to the design of pageants and balls costumes and other yet as kenneth Clark points out this was expected of Renaissance artist Madonna.

Leonardo da Vinci, widely regarded as one of the greatest artist ever live, work a day job while he pursued his passion.  The chances are great that you will too, but that doesn’t mean you have to be miserable.

It is counterproductive when we talk about pursuing our dream job to the detriment of our day jobs. Pursuing our dream job while holding down a “real” job is not a mutually exclusive idea.  It’s the platform and the prison principle that is the problem.

Here’ s what I mean:
If you’re patient, deliberate, and intentional about your work your day job can be a wonderful platform from which to launch your dream job.  But if you demonize your day job and rail against it, it becomes a prison you’ll try to escape from.

The truth is we need to find a way to leverage our day job in order to give lift to our dream job.

All I am saying is:  Don’t give up hope.  Get clear about what skill sets, resources, and relationships you will need.  And take simple, consistent, and committed actions right where you are to turn your day job, into a day dream job, that will launch you into your dream job!

Makes sense?

OK, now… let’s go to work!

No matter if you are a newly appointed CEO charged with directing a organization wide change management plan, or a family man who must win buy-in from his wife and 3 kids on moving to Utah, understanding change management strategy and tactics will come in handy.  

When I was completing my masters, a few years back, in Organizational Leadership one specialist on change management, in my opinion, stood out.  His handle on fostering and directing large scale change was notable.

Harvard Business School professor, John P Kotter, a leading thinker and author on organizational change management authored several highly regarded books on change management strategy.  Leading Change’ (1995) and the follow-up ‘The Heart Of Change’ (2002) describes a very useful model for understanding and managing change in eight stages. With each stage Kotter lays out, he acknowledges a key principle relating to people’s response and approach to change.  As humans, in general, we do not like change.  We resist change. Yet change is a necessary part of a growing life.  Whether that life be a person’s life or the life or an organization.

That is why I find that these eight principles create a solid framework for any organizational leader who is responsible for executing a change management strategy.

Here is Kotter’s eight step change management model (note: this list is not exhaustive and is meant to provide a quick framework to help you consider and construct your own change management process on the fly):

1. Increase urgency - inspire people to move and make objectives clear, real and relevant.  To urgently move away from disaster and to move towards a promising future is critical.  As a change agent, it’s important to not just list all of the benefits of change, but also list and amplify all of the reasons why you should not stay the same.  Take the opportunity to loosen the emotional ties to the status quo.  This will create a natural sense of urgency for the change you are proposing.
2. Build the guiding team - get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels. In his book Good to Great Jim Collins talks about getting the right people on the right bus, into the right seat.  When executing a change strategy it is crucial to get the key role players involved early.  You do not want them to just be compliant, you want them to be the engineers and evangelist for the change as well.  The only way to do this is to build a team that wages war against a common enemy, and invite your people at every level to own their value and contribution towards this unified front.
3. Get the vision right - get the team to establish a simple and clear vision and strategy.  It will be important to focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.  People buy on emotion first, and then justify their purchase with logic.  Do not underestimate the power of emotion in the persuasion process.  And the best way to do this is by sharing the right vision, the right story, that is big enough, and clear enough to include their best interest and desired outcome.  Your vision must always be articulated in terms that illustrate a positive outcome for the one you are communicating to.  This is what is meant by getting the vision right.
4. Communicate for buy-in - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and always appeal and respond to people’s concerns and needs. De-clutter communications – make technology work for you rather than against.  Make sure your message and methods stay congruent.  Make it easy for others to own the message and communicate it.  A common problem with organizational mission statements is clutter.  The mission statement is too long, and too abstract for employees to remember, let alone connect with.  Keep the objective, the benefits, and methods clear, simple, and actionable.
5. Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders – reward and recognize progress and achievements.  This ensures and sustains buy-in by all that are involved.  When you empower action you promote ownership and generate greater allegiance to the plan and process.  You must find ways to empower action at every level.
6. Create short-term wins - Set aims that are easy to achieve – in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.  Change is always uncomfortable and requires intentionality.  If people are not experiencing pay-offs in the short run, they will get discouraged, and distracted which will lead to non-compliance in the process of change.  Find ways to create short-term wins.
7. Don’t let up - Foster and encourage determination and persistence – ongoing change – encourage ongoing progress reporting – highlight achieved and future milestones.  This is where you will want to encourage people to operate like an ant.  Simple, consistent, and committed actions win.  Celebrate the wins, and be mindful to fan the flames of momentum.  steady action is critical to successfully creating any kind of change.
8. Make change stick - Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.  If you want to understand a culture, listen to the stories that are told within that culture.  If you want to change a culture, change the stories that are told within that culture.  Create experiences that will serve as the fodder for new and better stories.  We must remember “change” is not the objective.  Change is the process.  No one changes for the sake of change.  We enter into a change process for what is promised on the other side.  To make change stick you must translate your future desired outcome into your present day approach to doing life.  Find daily rituals, and touch-stones that cement the key components of change into the context and conditions of the organizational environment and culture.

I have articulated Kotter’s eight steps here in my own words (how I have come to understand them).  If you want to read a more in-depth description of this model, it is explained more fully on Kotter’s website www.kotterinternational.com (note: this is not an affiliate link).

Related to Kotter’s ideas, and particularly helpful in understanding the pressures of change on people, and people’s reactions to change, see a detailed interpretation of the personal change process in John Fisher’s model of the process of personal change.