What’s the one thing you can do as a leader to affect the success of your team and ultimately your business? Be really good at leading change and then develop your organization to do the same. Any change. At all levels. The C-suite is often bombarded with the latest and greatest leadership philosophy to focus on – communication, collaboration, innovation, efficiency, etc. The way to success is focusing on a singular purpose.
It’s my mission to be the voice saying ‘leading change’ is that singular purpose.
Change has been a constant for many years in business but recently the pace of change has picked up from accelerated digital transformations to the personalization of the customer experience. Combined with inflation and supply chain insecurities, the discomfort, stress and frustration around change have skyrocketed. And while each specific change requires specific elements of learning, the approach and behaviors to be successful leading change are consistent and remain the same.
The choice of words will guide your vision and implementation of a change project. Words matter. They are tied to personal experiences, shared understanding and visceral, or emotional, reactions to what we do. This is why we at Rebel Success for Leaders intentionally speak about leading change vs managing change. In many studies of what went wrong with change initiatives across many different industries, lack of attention to the people elements of change are often found to be the culprit. Managing change brings forth thoughts of Gantt charts, processes and tools – the stuff of change. Leading change brings up images of inspiring people to follow a shared vision. It’s aspirational and challenging.
Leading change well includes the human and cultural aspects as well as the details.
Below are a few specifics of why excellence at leading change can be a powerful skill as well as career differentiating.
A Shared Vision Inspires
A compelling vision that inspires others is critical to leading successful change initiatives. People need to know what they are working towards and why that’s compelling. Otherwise, you as the leader will be pushing a boulder up a hill for a very long time, alone. The vision for the future is one that will compel the team through challenges and rally them behind any initiative.
Beyond sharing your vision and aligning folks to it, the critical unlock is that they need to adopt this vision as theirs, too. Empowering the team to take part in shaping and ultimately creating the details towards this vision can be very humbling for many leaders. It requires letting go of control of the vision and allowing others to participate.
Success is never about your vision but it’s always about their ‘why’.
How has the vision connected to who they are, how they see themselves being valued and the expertise they see themselves delivering to the organization? Once this critical connection between your vision and their why has solidified, those nagging fears your team has about the change and what it means for them, can begin to quiet and be replaced with excitement for a choice they’ve made for themselves.
Now, giving up control of your vision can get very messy and without careful monitoring can turn disastrous. Consistent messaging and communication needs to be in place and reinforced. As the leader, you are all alone at the top and are unable to be everywhere at once. So how do you effectively maintain these threads of consistent vision as well as empower the organization to engage their why.
A key strategy to guide this activity is to enroll change champions across the company.
These individuals are respected experts positioned around the organization and can speak in support of the change with consistency to the vision. They are also great conduits to gain a pulse on the sentiment of the organization. So they lead both as core team members and extensions of your leadership role.
Connected Purpose
Innovation and collaboration are at their best when ideas from many people are used to build a path forward. As a leader of change you need to get input and insights from all levels of the organization, especially the front lines. Local ideas are built by experience of working in that given area and on a problem for some time. They are richer. As a leader, you need that insight and creativity to build an even more compelling vision than you could have built on your own in isolation.
Engagement is a much talked about concept in the business world because engaged employees give of themselves to their work. They bring a unique perspective and set of experiences that only they can bring to the challenge. If they are just showing up to collect a paycheck, they apply all that brilliance elsewhere. As a leader of change, you need this engagement behavior across the team to realize the 1+1=3 multiplier effect. Remember that effective change is not as much about your vision as their why.
So how do you connect to their why, or their purpose? Getting to know your team as individual human beings with a complete set of concerns, hopes and personal connections is a foundational requirement. A positive workplace culture is another great element for success. A more direct technique that is widely known in business circles is personal development. Unfortunately, in this case widely known doesn’t also mean well practiced.
People remember how you make them feel and investing in them is a wonderful way to create a positive connection.
When you invest in bettering the person vs measuring the person, that connection and loyalty grows as does the trust to be open and share ideas. Personal development uncovers and exposes more aspects of purpose and the team can engage more fully. So develop the team, invest in them, and teach your leaders and managers to be really good at this.
People Development is the Unlock to Engagement
People don’t remember your actions as much as they remember how you treat them. In today’s business climate, the combination of societal and generational dynamics has transformed this quote to the next level. People remember when you invest in them. Investing in people also means developing them.
This shift in perspective also brings up two important points when considering leading change in organizations: 1) the shift to a collaboration approach from a one way and 2) it opens the door wide to a need for personalization. Policies, safe work practices, expectations, missions etc. set the foundation for how people are treated. The concept of investing in people conveys that the leaders care enough about the individual to develop people into better versions of themselves. Once you’re invested in and developed to grow, guess what happens? You begin to contribute at a much higher level. The collaborative potential for you and your organization is immense.
Organizations struggle with the shift from normalizing behaviors and policies for everyone, to customizing and personalizing development deliveries for the individual. The toolbox of the expert change leader needs to contain enough tools to work across what’s common, along with a few specialized tools that work in the personalized space – typically in the people area.
Shifting Perspectives to Collaboration
Flexibility and adaptability within the context of organizational talent represent some of the biggest differences between the mindset of leading change and that of managing change. There’s something about a crisply organized spreadsheet, project plan, timeline or Gantt chart. It brings order to chaos and puts everything nicely in its place. The effort that goes into these documents is supreme, and any good project manager plans some flex or contingency into the plan. These tools give the leader and the team a sense of comfort at what’s ahead of them and how to progress down the path cohesively as a unit. Tools help us manage change effectively and efficiently. They are critical to success.
The mindset of leading change requires a different approach because the people aspects are put at the center. Humans by nature are complex beings that don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet. They bring an infinite amount of diversity into the mix. Leaders require skills to nurture and develop those diverse capabilities that each person brings. Nurturing diversity is not something that is typically part of leadership development courses. It requires a level of flexibility and adaptability that incorporates development of the individual as well as establishing team norms and practices.
There’s a cultural norm in most corporations for accepted control mechanisms that govern and guide business. Controls in these instances create a level of comfort and ‘known and expected’ operations. Controls also increase efficiency. The challenge corporations have with truly exploring the benefits of flexibility, adaptability and diverse opinions is, to some degree, the requirement to relinquish control. The classic Either – Or argument is set up and lines are drawn in the sand. Control wins out and unfortunately, an infinite amount of untapped potential in the people of the organization is left on the table. Leadership development that is focused on flexibility, adaptability and embracing diversity innovates new paths and creates a desirable AND position.
Skills and Behaviors are Adaptable Everywhere
Long gone are the days when majority of the people remain in one company or even in one industry. Not only are people interested in expanding their career experiences, but they are being more and more guided by their life stage to find meaningful work and have an impact regardless of industry. There’s a bigger realization today of the opportunity to transfer skills and experiences. Those in the innovation ecosystem understand the value of diversity of thought and experience to open the doors to what’s possible. It’s critical to assemble a diverse team and then have skilled leaders to empower and engage all of that diversity – not leaving anyone sitting on the sidelines.
Change is constant across almost all industries as well as social enterprises. The behaviors and skills of effective change are transferrable everywhere. The key pillars of people development, communication, setting a vision and organizing work are universal. When excellence is built in those areas and combined with a breadth of career experiences, the sky is the limit.
Before we get too ahead of ourselves, some of you are thinking – Wait a second! The concrete industry is not the same as banking! It’s very true that the execution of the details with industry experience is critical and unique. It’s also true that the approach different industries take to leading change and developing leadership behaviors have a lot of similarities. The key pillars of people development, communication, setting a vision and organizing work guide all change initiatives.
Leaders also need a triage mindset as they move into unfamiliar industries or segments.
The ability to quickly understand current state, identify gaps to make the change successful and to understand which elements they themselves need to quickly come up to speed on is critical. Leading change is not only about the details of the initiative, but also about the personal approach you take to leading change.
The Path to Career Differentiation
There are three big reasons why being an effective leader of change will differentiate your career: 1) there’s a global gap of leaders who lead change well, 2) these success skills and behaviors complement any expertise depth you’ve built, and 3) people love to work with and for leaders who do this well. It seems logical to build these skills into expectations of leaders. But when have you seen a job description that talked about expertise in the area of leading change as a requirement? In contrast, it’s very common to see articulated needs for project management and opportunities to build skills.
Some of the success skills needed to be an effective leader of change are: true collaboration, agility, a spirit of innovation and a grounding in customer centricity.
These skills are not well known or well-practiced in change leadership.
Which is why it’s my mission to equip 1000 change savvy leaders with at least 60% of them women. These success skills will broaden and compliment your well-developed expertise in any area.
Who doesn’t love working for and with someone who invests in them, truly hears their diverse perspectives, and incorporates their ideas into a bigger shared vision of the future. These leaders are magnets for talented people who love to work for great leaders. Such leaders are also likely to experience higher retention rates and satisfaction within their teams.
Leading change well can truly feel like waving a magic wand some days in comparison to leading poorly. The behaviors and skills do not eliminate challenges, but they are very effective in positively leading through change. I take teams from frustrated and stuck to communicating seamlessly across boundaries, influencing for success with unique ideas, and confidently leading change with ease.
