Stop Managing Change and Start Leading Change
How to make transformational change successful
People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.
– John C. Maxwell – Leadership Expert
High-performing leaders move fast and believe that when they have shared information once, that’s enough. It’s perplexing when the change they communicated hasn’t been implemented. When we speak, we must take into consideration that not everyone listens, learns and adopts change at the same pace. A one-time communication just isn’t enough.
Who is a change leader?
A change leader is a leader with a strategic, proactive, and people-centric approach to change management. They step in with an intentional leadership presence that leverages inspirational influence, high-performing teams, and communications. Their style of work maintains a disciplined focus on successful change.
Successful change isn’t a race, it’s a pace
When implementing change, speed isn’t always the answer. Many times, you have to slow down to speed up.
Successful change involves strategy, planning and execution for people and process. But it also needs to involve pauses to gauge the adoption by the team. I’m a results-focused leader, so this lesson wasn’t initially in my leadership DNA. My biggest learning around the importance of pauses happened when I was implementing sales culture and process into a professional services firm. I was a new leader brought in to lead bold growth. I was confident that I had what was needed to be successful: enterprise sales experience, a successful track record growing markets and teams, internal executive sponsorship, and use of the firm’s proven sales process.
I was surprised, and frustrated when the implementation and execution didn’t go as planned, and the sales processes weren’t being adopted. With help, I learned that I hadn’t communicated enough, and I hadn’t paused to measure the gap between where I was, and where the team was. I was racing ahead on a path familiar to me, but not to them.
Pause to measure the gap
Help came from a conversation with the firm’s change management SME. She put the change situation into perspective for me. She helped me realize I hadn’t read my audience, nor done enough communications work with them. Her advice was that a messaging strategy could take up to 13 times and needed to be delivered in three different mediums. She encouraged me to keep reading the team and intentionally confirm their buy in, over and over. With that, I adapted my communications approach and paused to let others buy in, and be a part of setting the pace of change. The hardest part was getting comfortable with what felt to be repetitive messaging and too slow a pace. That’s what it took to read my audience properly and get change adopted.
The most unpredictable variable of change
The case for change isn’t what you would expect as it’s not a business case, nor a use case. It’s a personal case for change, and I think it’s the hardest part because it’s connected to human behaviours, including changing human behaviours.
Each of us are uniquely hardwired in our personalities, therefore making each of us unique in how we learn, and adopt change. Talking about making and planning the change is the easy part. It’s the executing and performing, week after week, in changed conditions that gets uncomfortably difficult.
A multi-year, large-scale service delivery transformation is where I got my people change learning skills. The change was a dramatically different operating model. What had been heard from the leadership team during the lead up was different than what was seen in their behaviours when implemented. Several of them were unsettled, and not doing their best work. They were struggling with the change, and it was affecting them personally.
There was no undo button.
We’d missed assessing change adeptness and building the personal change for each leader. We hadn’t taken the time, nor given them the space, to reflect on what change meant to them personally.
Know your case for change
Our experience allows us to see the traits that support successful change leadership.
What type of traits does a successful change leader possess? The best change leaders will:
Hold a strong and consistent growth mindset
Be accurate in their self-knowledge and self-awareness
Own an unwavering belief in their personal abilities, i.e. self-confidence
Be comfortable with making decisions in conditions without precedent
Be neither an extreme introvert, nor extreme extrovert
Easily handle massive amounts of new information
Be hardwired and disciplined to focus on the right things over a long-term period