Leading Change: Pulling It All Together

When we began this LEAD 365 alumni blog six months ago, we had some intentional objectives:

• Provide you with some review of the content you experienced in LEAD 365.
• Provide you with some new content being covered in the most recent classes of 365.
• Provide you with other thoughts on the content that might not make it into 365.
• Provide you with a forum to share your insights about being a person worth following.

Today’s post is about the content in Session 10 on Leading Change. It’s after this session that some participants tell me, “It’s all coming together for me now.” 

I can imagine some participant saying at this point of their year:

• I see why understanding myself is important. (Session 1: A Leadership Framework and Session 2: Feedback and Public Speaking)
• I see why understanding how anxious people behave (myself included) is important. (Session 3: Living Systems)
• I see how culture eats strategy for breakfast, and as such, why being intentional about shaping culture is so important. (Session 4: Shaping Culture)
• I see why building a great team is huge and I see how to do it. (Sessions 6 and 7: Building a Great Team and the retreat)
• I see the importance of creating clarity around the team’s purpose, vision, and values. (Session 8: Casting Vision)
• Now I see why all of the above is necessary in order to effectively lead change.

Leading change is one of the main things a leader must DO. It is also something of a culmination of the topics covered in prior sessions.

Thanks to a suggestion from one of you, we changed one of our books a while back and are now using Switch instead of Quick and Nimble for sessions that relate to shaping culture, creating vision, and leading change. This book does a great job of describing how important it is to connect with emotions when leading change. Human emotions are a powerful force and, over time, will win out if you don’t address them in the change process.

In the session on Leading Change, we shared our thoughts about why so many people resist change:

• It creates some unknown consequences for the future and the unknown scares most people.
• It often leads to shifts in power, and those that currently have power may not like the possibility of losing it.
• Doing things a different way, even if we believe it is the right thing to do, is often uncomfortable (like crossing my arms in a different way). Most humans avoid being uncomfortable.

We also shared thoughts about how to calm people’s fears and reduce the overall resistance when introducing change:

• Share why the change is taking place and share all of the information that is relevant and appropriate.
• Share the vision over and over and over (remember the 7×7 ways lesson on communication at the team building offsite?).
• Remember that the leader won’t handle change well unless she is in a healthy place, sand the team won’t handle it well unless their relationship with the leader is in a healthy place.

We mentioned that leading change will lead to conflict! Because of this, a leader’s willingness and ability to lean into healthy conflict is huge. You heard me say that I believe the ability to lean into healthy conflict is THE most important thing we teach. If one thousand leaders in West Michigan start engaging conflict well in the next ten years, I believe this one act would lead West Michigan to be to leadership what Silicon Valley is to technology. This willingness to lean into difficult conversations greatly affects important decisions, key relationships, and a team’s willingness to pursue a common vision. This probably describes 80 percent of what leadership is about.

This number one topic is so important that rather than dive into it here, I will wait and dedicate an entire post to it next week.

Have a great week… and lead on!

Rodg

Image by Greg Rakozy. Used under Creative Commons Zero license.