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5 Key Behaviours of Leaders Who Embrace Change

Change-agile leaders demonstrate five integrated behaviours that, together, create a competitive advantage for the organization and a much greater chance of moving forward with the change.

They do the following:

  1. Share a compelling, clear purpose: Purpose is the key to actions. Change agility requires an answer to the question “Why?”, so that people can fight their natural instinct to resist change. The answer needs to tap into what is meaningful and important, providing an irresistible invitation to get on board with the change. Here is a belief to consider: people don’t work for numbers, rather they need to share the belief that they are creating value in some way. If you can’t articulate a clear purpose behind the changes being made, it is unlikely that your employees will be able to embrace and implement them.
  1. Look ahead and see opportunity: Most leaders view this as the role of senior executives. To infuse change agility into your culture, mid- and front-line leaders, who are closest to the markets, customers, and daily operations, need to be encouraged and incentified to see opportunities in what they do every day. They need to look beyond this month or this year to identify the upcoming trends and take action. History is littered with market leaders who didn’t see the opportunities ahead or take action o them.

In order to build this behaviour into the organization, leaders should:

  • Make opportunity-seeking part of the regular conversation. Simply asking questions like “What are our customers talking about? What do you think they will want a year or two from now? What new trends do you think will impact us?” sends the message that looking ahead is important.
  • Provide space to experiment. When a potential opportunity is identified, allow individuals or groups to experiment with ways to take advantage of it. Minimize the need for multiple layers of sign-off as it makes the culture too risk-averse and greatly slows momentum.
  • Advertise successes. Nothing breeds success like success. Tell the stories at company events and recognize middle and front-line leaders who are looking ahead and identifying opportunities. Show that the status quo is not enough anymore, rather everyone needs to contribute and their suggestions are welcomed.
  1. Seek out what is not working: The old adage says that bad news doesn’t travel up. During a merger and acquisition process of business units, there will be bad news that the organization needs to learn from. But for real learning to occur, people need to feel psychologically safe to share the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Also, upper management needs to be accountable for any mistakes or missteps that occur and also need to reinforce the things that are going well.

Consider this example:

A manager was leading the integration of several internal units into a merged organization. This integration created a new team of direct reports for him. Over the course of the integration, he worked on creating psychological safety for his team to discuss the challenges of working together and of the integration overall. They used a trust framework to openly talk about what they were doing to build and break down trust with each other. Individuals discussed what they brought to the team and what they needed from their fellow team members.  They did pulse checks to assess their alignment and where there was still work to do. They had difficult conversations. This type of open conversation and psychological safety cascaded through the new 250-person organization. It culminated in a two-day meeting for the entire organization that included open conversations about what was working well and what opportunities and challenges this new organization needed to address for its clients. The meeting also included a read-out of the employee engagement survey scores that, in the midst of the turbulence of integration, were among the highest in the company’s history.

  1. Promote calculated risk-taking and experimentation: Robert Kennedy, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, said, “There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” Too often, our traditional organizations’ first response to a risk is to ask, “Why?”  Change agility requires leaders to ask “why not?” and to establish opportunities for pilots, prototypes, and experimentation. Experimentation is an integral part of R&D. While an overall strategy informs the researchers’ focus, any R&D scientist will tell you that there are sometimes dozens of experiments that don’t get results and that, without the failures, they couldn’t find the successes. Mistakes are opportunities to learn and there is no point in focussing on them, rather learn from it, fix it and move on.
  1. Look for boundary-spanning partnerships: As work becomes more complex, it takes teams and cross-boundary collaborations to build products, attract customers, and achieve results.  Change-agile leaders and organizations are replacing functional silos with formal and informal opportunities that allow for the rapid flow of information and decision-making around a product, customer, or region. For example, a mid-level learning and development leader at a global tech company that is growing rapidly through acquisition is having growth and development opportunities for key talent and this has been critical for retention, and enhancing the employee experience has become a strategic focus. Learning and development teams are dispersed across the organization, working independently to address business unit needs. Looking ahead, the leader sensed that the company was also going to be focusing on efficiency in response to market changes and the continued integration of the acquired companies. Seeing the opportunity to improve the employee experience and create cost efficiencies across the learning organizations, this leader brought together her fellow learning leaders. They designed and implemented a new shared services organization that centralizes training development and vendor management. It will create standardized branding and processes, leverage appropriate tools, and create cost savings from consistently negotiated contracts. This creates a more consistent employee experience across learning functions and more efficiently addresses learning needs across the company.

These five behaviours, when used in concert with each other, create culture shifts that increase change agility for everyone. They are shifts that need to be made at all levels of leadership. They can mean the difference between success and just being an also-ran.

Today, change is becoming the new norm and although humans are not usually happy about change as it is not comfortable for them, it totally depends on how it is dealt with by the upper management and how much support, encouragement, and training are offered to achieve the results expected from the change. This needs to be clearly and articulately explained to the employees from the beginning and all questions and concerns need to be addressed and dealt with early on in the process.

Sandy Chernoff
Sandy Chernoffhttp://softskillsforsuccess.com/
SANDY'S 30 years of didactic and clinical teaching in study clubs and continuing dental education, coupled with her almost 40 years of Dental Hygiene practice bring a wealth of experience to her interactive soft skills workshops. With her education background she easily customizes interactive sessions to suit the specific needs of her clients. Her energetic and humorous presentation style has entertained and informed audiences from Victoria to New York City. Sandy’s client list includes law firms, teaching institutions, volunteer and professional organizations and conferences, businesses, and individuals. Her newest project is turning her live workshops into e-learning programs using an LMS platform. Her teaching and education background have helped her to produce meaningful and somewhat interactive courses for the learners wanting the convenience of e-learning options. As the author of 5 Secrets to Effective Communication, Sandy has demonstrated her ability to demystify the complexities of communication so that the reader can learn better strategies and approaches which will greatly improve their communication skills and ultimately reduce conflict, resentment, disappointment, complaining, and confusion. As a result, the reader will be able to increase productivity, efficiency and creativity, improve all the relationships in their lives and ultimately enjoy a happier, healthier existence! Sandy blogs regularly on her two websites on the various soft skills topics that are featured in her workshops and e-learning programs.

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