Are you leading change or is it leading you?

Bill Poole, CEO of Lifelead International and author of Journey to Newland, has 25 years of change management experience and has worked with Coca-Cola and Bank of America.

In this webinar, he spoke about how organisations get stuck chasing change, instead of leading it, and as a result their change programmes fall short of ROI and/or organisational expectations. Too many people do not fully understand the nature of change; for change to work it has to be transformational and based on changing mindsets, not simply introducing skillsets.

There are many good change programmes led by excellent professionals, but all too often there are links missing that are vital to the organisation’s ability to cope with, and lead, change. They are:

• Leadership. Not just management, but the ability to truly lead, which must also incorporate the ability to change within oneself.
  
  
• Awareness. The cultural buy-in is difficult to measure; the meassage must be that the mindset is more important than the skill set.
  
  
• Emotion. All too often ignored. Change creates emotion and so the transition must be dealt with on an emotional level.
  

Emotion and Change are inextricably linked and there is a need to face these emotions or they could send your programme off the rails. Emotions are what drives people, for good and bad.

For example, there will always be those who resist, who are sceptical, and this is usually an emotional reaction. These are the people who need clear awareness.

Linking in these factors with your change efforts will help to ensure that you are leading change.

So what are the warning signs of change leading you, instead of you leading it? There are many indicators, the most common of which are shown in the table below:

The above shows that if the mindset is too analytical, at the expense of intuition, then the organisation risks not being in control of change. If you over-analyse, change will “eat you alive”. Therefore, there is a need to build an intuitive skillset not just to cope with change, but to be ready before it arrives.

When starting out on transformational change, it is important to identify and nurture the “transformers”: the early adopters who have the skills and the enthusiasm. Transformers add to the capability in the early stages of transition, as well as helping to move the culture from ‘leaders of followers’ to ‘leaders of leaders’.

Transition is the most pivotal and dangerous part of transformational change. Simply put, it is the point where the need for change is accepted and the organisation moves forward as one: if you don’t make transition, you don’t make transformation. Paradoxically, if the leaders of the organisation do not make the personal transformation of changing their mindset into accepting transformational change, then the organisation will not make the transition.

The ABCs of Transformation are:

• Awareness,
• Behaviour,
• and Change.

You cannot influence someone’s awareness; the way to get behaviour so it is habitual is through the culture and the leadership. Great leaders are visionaries: they have vision, and see it in the mind.

There are four types of change: economic, structural, process, cultural. The first three offer the quickest route to results. Cultural change takes time, and that is often a definitive problem: you need to change your culture, but something also needs to be done now. However, there are some core capabilities that derive from cultural change that can be used in an economic, process or structural change, so that once you are in transition, the mindset is there to allow culture change. These core capabilities can be used to pull through the other types of change.

There are five core capabilities:

• leading change,
• developing leadership,
• building teams,
• valuing differences,
• and optimising communication.

It is vital that all these capabilities are approached and dealt with in an integrated fashion, and that surrounding them is a flexible framework to track and manage the change.

One of the most vital aspects of this framework is having a common language that can be used across functions, levels and locations. A good common language has simplicity (take the intangible and make it simple), symbolism , simulation, scope (must be able to be used at more than one level), and systems.

Common language benefits:

• unifies groups
• brings quick awareness
• creates 3rd party reference points
• provides a safe environment for feedback
• a humane tool for dealing with resistance
• has instant impact (situational 360)
• becomes a platform for vision and strategy
• adds a resource for personal, team and organisational dept

Bill went on to detail how his organisation applies metaphors to create a common language that can be used in any situation to create awareness and, most important of all, to lead change.

This webinar was hosted by www.hr.com.