Tag Archives: change management

Who Should Be Responsible for Managing Change?

Effective change doesn’t happen by accident.  It is the result of careful planning and thoughtful execution. Leaders play a pivotal role in change because they possess legitimate power to sanction the change, establish the vision, provide direction and resources, and hold organizational members accountable. Everyone looks to the leader for guidance and that person must model the way for the rest of the organization.

Change would be a much tidier process if that were all it took – an effective leader who knows what to do and how to do it and is at the front leading the charge.

But as important as the leader’s role is, it isn’t the leader who ultimately executes change. Change (from simple to complex) is always a matter of people in impacted areas making the transition from the way things are now to the way they’re supposed to be in the future.

Transition at the people level involves, among other things:

  • Answering their questions about why and what it will mean for them
  • Describing how things will be in the future
  • Helping them understand whether or not they will be in that future
  • Involving them to co-create that future
  • Providing a credible plan for moving forward that speaks to them at their level
  • Communicating frequently and reliably about what’s happening now and what will happen next
  • Learning new skills and applying new knowledge
  • Becoming part of a new work group

Pregnant Businesswoman Leads Boardroom Meeting

How does this all get done? Who is leading the charge on this? More to the point, who should be leading the charge on this? Continue reading

Leading Change in the Middle

Leading change is challenging enough even when your job title is President or Chief Executive Officer. However, when your title isn’t President or Chief anything and you lead in the mid-level of your organization, leading change is even more challenging. That’s because:

  • YOU didn’t get to decide on the change
  • YOU didn’t get to set the vision
  • YOU may or may not have been involved in developing the change plan or the messaging
  • But YOU ARE expected to execute the change for the unit you lead

Businessman Addressing Meeting Around Boardroom Table

What can you do to lead change effectively in the middle? Continue reading

Impacts of Organizational Change

People prefer stability. It may seem odd to read that as the opening sentence of a blog on the subject of organizational change, but let me say that again. People prefer stability. It’s part of the human condition. For all of the inevitability and necessity of change that we talk about, we actually prefer things to be stable and predictable.

When change occurs – and it always does - we find it disruptive. Exactly how disruptive a change may be is highly individual. The amount of disruption we experience is a function of how much the change affects our individual construct of reality – the routines, preferences, habits, patterns, and ways we understand things. As we all know, this disruption can range from minor inconvenience to the “sky is falling.”

Sparks of blue water on a white background ...

It is axiomatic that the level of change management that must be applied to a change effort is directly proportional to the amount of change people will experience. If this is true, how do you assess the impact of change in order to plan for the level of support? Where do you look and what do you examine?

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