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A recent case study in the Harvard Business Review asked, "Leadership Development: Perk or Priority?" A provocative question perhaps, but the real question should not be whether to invest in leadership development, but how. more +
"If getting organisations to change was all about common sense then successful change programmes would be commonplace, and we all know that's not the case"
With managing change successfully becoming increasingly important, maybe it's time for leaders to look at change differently.
Business is hard. Competition gets more fierce and investors and other stakeholders get more difficult to please. In many sectors, the big strategy plays have been played - companies have acquired to gain share and scale or divested to release shareholder value and leaders are under pressure to unveil the next value-creating move.
This has led to the increasing realisation that the next big jump in value must come from inside. Large companies must finally show that they can grow organically, transfer best practices from one site to another, and leverage their experience and expertise to improve year-on-year performance.
This puts the focus squarely on leaders and leadership. If more value can now only come from squeezing it out of existing operations, then leaders need to be good at helping their people improve. They have to be good at helping their organization to change.
Since many companies track record of making major change happen is less than stellar, this may require some leaders to re-appraise where they focus in helping their businesses meet the new challenge.
Creating an emotional connection to the journey
First leaders need to make use of the fact people are influenced much more powerfully by their emotions than by other influencers such as logic, authority or repetition. In short, if people are to make a permanent change in the way they behave, they have to want to and desire is an emotion.
Understanding the important prerequisites for learning
If you really want to make a change programme a success, then it must be built around helping your people learn through their own success. This means understanding that people learn through practice, that it takes time, often requires supporting people through coming to terms with the loss of realising they need to get better. Most importantly, it requires an understanding that people only learn when they have to which means they won't learn in the absence of a stretching challenge.
Understanding the skills of successful implementation
Finally, leaders need to understand that implementation does not equal project management. Good implementation requires the expert weaving together of the right targets, structures, tools, plans and leadership interventions - with the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. Implementation is a skill and discipline in itself. Most organizations need to start with an acceptance that they're not very good at it and need to learn it.