Every Leader’s Job
It’s World Bee Day! I’m planting four apple trees this weekend to help our little winged friends…
Leaders wear many hats. Vision, strategy, incentives, experience, engagement, empowerment, communication, and accountability are just a few items at the top of any leader’s standard work.
One item that gets routinely overlooked is change and change management. All businesses change and evolve on a continual basis. Indeed, there are three certainties in life—death, taxes, and change. Those who don’t adopt a strategy to manage change end up with organizational cultures that organically define themselves. The water cooler becomes the source of ‘truth’ and the rumor mill runs rampant.
A common error in judgement occurs when leaders make the assumption that their people will quickly and rationally process and navigate change. We tend to lump our people into groups and assume that the team will respond to change in a predictable, consistent fashion. We announce a change once, maybe twice, and expect our people to quickly get on board and follow orders. Leaders are routinely ‘surprised’ when they wave their arms, say ‘follow me up this next hill’, turn around halfway up the hill only to see team members milling about, scratching their heads, working at competing aims, and stuck wondering what following the leader up the hill means for them.
The reality is that we are all different. Every member of a team has a unique set of change curves that is akin to a fingerprint. We all wear a one-size-fits-you pair of lenses that we see and interpret the world through. Assumptions of sameness quickly break down because for any individual change event that occurs—an acquisition, product sunset, or process change, to name just a few—each team member is going to process said change event differently.
To make this point as plainly as possible, suppose you’re a leader with a team that consists of just five humans. Since each team member will navigate a specific change event at different speeds and with varying degrees of efficiency, the probability that the team moves successfully through the change event uniformly approaches zero very quickly. This is why acquisition integrations take 2-3x longer than anticipated and don’t yield their forecasted returns. This is why most technical and digital transformations fail to be completed on time and on budget and fail to meet predetermined outcomes.
Therefore, it should be obvious that every leader’s job is to help their team members understand, process, and navigate change. If we put “managing change” at or near the top of our leader standard work, engagement will rise and the average return on investment for new projects and major change events will improve. The enhanced clarity and communication that is a natural offshoot of purposefully managing change will foster improved organizational trust and accountability. Helping team members see the ‘why’ and benefits of a change event for themselves as individuals, the team, and the business overall is time well-spent.
So how can you build change management into your business’s cultural fabric? Here are three recommendations:
First and foremost, think of yourself as a coach. If you haven’t already done so, learn about the profession of coaching and adopt a coaching mindset. There are myriad options to grow your capabilities as a coach. Instead of charging ahead and doing this yourself, think about adopting a company-wide coaching training program for all leaders in the business to ensure consistency and alignment. If you’re the CEO, drive this initiative from the top-down.
Second, learn about the principles of change and change management. Start with Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese and go from there. John Kotter has published several books on the subject including Leading Change, and Prosci’s ADKAR model is featured in ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government, and our Community by Jeff Hiatt. In a similar vein to the coaching point above, adopt a company-wide change management education program to ensure consistency and alignment.
Finally, weave change management into all change events (acquisitions, partnerships, business transformations, etc.) on the front-end during the planning stage. If change management is an afterthought, then it’s too late. There’s an entire cottage industry out there to help your business get up to speed. Businesses like Prosci, Kotter International, and Conner Partners specialize in change management education and implementation.
In my past, I neglected to consider how my colleagues and team members were navigating the change that occurred in our business. We paid a steep price for not having a laser focus on managing change. If you’re looking for high return-on-investment ways to build your capabilities as a leader, look no further than the adoption and practice of change management principles.
