The Art of Change Leadership

Driving Transformation In a Fast-Paced World

Cheryl Cran

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781119124757
• eBook ISBN: 9781119124764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Be an transformational leader during times of rapid organizational change

The Art of Change Leadership represents a major milestone in the study of change leadership. An approachable yet thorough guide for leaders and team members that illustrates how to increase speed and agility during times of intense technological innovation and fast change, this resource focuses on the ways in which you, as an individual, can harness your unique abilities to lead cultural change and personal leadership in a positive and proactive way. Through eleven comprehensive chapters, explore the need for increased human brain speed, how to improve your focus, the body/mind connection, agility within a team setting, improving productivity, communication with your team, and more.

Technology, globalization, evolving business models—these are just some of the variables impacting the competitive landscapes across virtually all industries. To keep up with the changes that these and other factors are creating, it is critical that you are able to understand what change leadership is, why it is important, and how you can leverage it in your workplace to positively impact your company.

• Explore research on change leadership vs. change management to improve business
• Leverage technology to improve productivity and adaptability to rapid change
• Evolutionary approaches to change leadership that include energy management and innovative mindset approaches
• Discover questionnaires, assessments and quizzes to assess your change leadership agilities

The Art of Change Leadership is a (r)evolutionary text that prepares you to increase your team's speed and agility, and to thrive in today's continually evolving business environment.

Chapter 1
Why Do Organizations Need Change Leaders?

The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.

—John Kotter

The future workplace is now—is your organization ready?

Are you ready?

We need change leaders now because the fast pace of change has made it an imperative. Why?

Because fast change means there is a need for people to adapt quickly. The truth is that change involves human beings who must be willing to move away from the familiar and move toward the unknown and embrace it.

The art of change leadership is to understand the fundamental of change from a human point of view. When we as change leaders consistently use strategies to improve our own approach to change and then share those strategies with those we lead, then we can effectively create sustainable organizational change. That's the goal of this book, to provide the human (feelings, thoughts, and behaviors) and the structural (steps to be taken) strategies as well as the behaviors (action/execution) that will drive transformation in our fast paced world.

In the past 10 years, there have been massive changes. The Conference Board surveyed 1,020 global chief executive officers (CEOs) in 2014 and asked them to rank their top business challenges. Human capital, customer relationships, innovation, operational excellence, and corporate brand and reputation emerged as the top five challenges. Although these challenges may have been similar a decade ago, at the core of these challenges is the underlying theme—the need to change the solutions. The solutions to the top five challenges are not the same that would have been applied even a year or so ago. The challenges require new solutions, which in turn requires change.

Human capital is the biggest issue keeping many CEOs up at night—it used to be that employees would find a career in an industry, remain in that industry for 20-some years, and then retire. My, how things have changed! Now, employers are faced with the reality of changing employee attitudes about work and life. The increase of technological innovation has created greater access for employees to educate themselves, to seek out other opportunities, and to seek more meaningful and impactful work. Generations of workers are finding that there is value in working smarter not harder and having fun at work. The changes needed to master the human capital challenge include having change leaders who can drive transformation in the fast paced and fast changing workplace reality. Imagine organizations that have recognized the need to build the future workplace today and to prepare their leaders for ongoing and rapid change. Imagine organizations having leaders who are able to inspire, share knowledge, and provide resources to their teams while creating a work environment that is open, creative, collaborative, and focused on transformational experiences for the employees and the clients.

The leadership skills that have been used for the past decade are not the skills that are going to create next level growth or expansion for organizations. We need change leaders with upgraded operating systems to inspire and create new approaches, new processes, and new ways of connecting to create an organization with happy employees.

Customers have become right-now consumers who want what they want and they want it now—not yesterday! Amazon Prime and its two-day delivery is still not fast enough for some of the drone-loving customers who want their deliveries today. Years ago the customer could wait. I remember a situation when I worked in banking: I was right out of high school and was promoted from bank teller to side-counter customer service. This was in the 1980s when customer service was not a “thing” and a customer came to the side counter and I jumped up ready to serve him. My co-worker who had been in customer service for years yanked me back down and said, “Don't get up so quickly or the customers will always expect us to jump.” I was in my teens at the time and remember thinking how silly that was. Fast forward to today and the customer IS king or queen and drives all solutions from the business perspective and also from the individual consumer perspective. In fact, I find that customer expectation of stellar service has gone up so high that there is a pervasive culture of never satisfied customers out there. So what does that mean for organizations? It means that the continued and increasing demands from customers are creating the need for adaptable and customized solutions. The ability to provide creative and innovative customer care requires a change of mind-set around what constitutes good service and a change in customer delivery processes. We need change leaders to transform customer processes.

Innovation is something that keeps many CEOs up at night as he or she struggles with staying one step ahead of the competition. An innovative culture requires teams of people to be thinking in new ways that are continually focused on creative solutions. Leaders and employees who may have been working in a culture in which new ideas were not valued are finding the new economy and new workplace demands creativity and innovation mindsets. The approaches, strategies, and processes all need to change in order to shift to a culture of innovation. We need change leaders to focus and create environments and structures that support innovation and creativity. Organizational executives need to value new ideas and create opportunities for employees to share ideas, to openly spend time creating, and to be rewarded for innovative product ideas, customer service improvement ideas, employee engagement ideas, and more. Many organizations are establishing forums and labs for innovation; for example AT&T and the AT&T Foundry™ innovation centers are fast-paced and collaborative environments. AT&T and technology providers work in the AT&T Foundry to deliver applications and services to customers more quickly than ever before.

The AT&T Foundry works in projects combining business, design, and technical resources. Since its launch in 2011, the AT&T Foundry has started more than 200 projects and deployed dozens of new products and services. Projects focus on areas of significant business or technology interest and typically involve external start-ups, innovators, entrepreneurs, academics, and inventors. Projects are organized in short sprints designed to determine success or failure quickly.

Another area that is undergoing massive change approaches is the operational excellence of the organization overall. Many organizations have policies and procedures that were established decades ago and that may or may not have relevance to today's business reality. When our team conducts organizational assessments with our consulting clients one of the questions asked is, “What are the policies and procedures you have in place that are not serving your actual objectives?” A company may state that their objective is for absolute customer satisfaction and yet the operations and processes hinder that same objective.

For example a company that has been in business for over 30 years or more may have had a policy to give absolutely no refunds to the customer, and today that same company has a direct competitor who does provide refunds for the same product. Does the policy need to change? That may seem like a stupid question and yet there are many organizations in which the operations and methods have not been changed, updated, or modified to meet the current customer or employee reality. We need change leaders in operations to lead operational excellence and to help drive transformation in the organization.

The corporate brand and reputation focus from the survey mentioned earlier is a key area for company success in the next few years. It used to be that you could manage brand and reputation by “spinning” content to ensure the best possible image was put forward. Now with social media and outspoken customers a brand slipup can go viral in seconds. Larger corporations have had social media staff for the past five years focus on brand and reputation management by focusing on Twitter feeds, YouTube video comments, and more. In addition, individuals within companies are recognizing the need and value to have a personal brand to promote skills for new jobs, for promotion opportunities, and more. I read recently that new parents are buying URLs for their babies either prior to birth or right after birth to ensure brand protection. The need for rapid adaptation to the brand and reputation challenge is an imperative. We need leaders of change to lead everyone within the company to be brand advocates, to leverage all channels of strategic brand promotion, and to see the interconnection of company brand with each individual's representation of the brand.

A Need for Breakthrough Transformation

All the items discussed here provide insight into the areas that CEOs will be focused on in the next few years. However, there are new trends that are shaping the future of work and that have to be factored in when looking at driving transformation in the workplace.

The trends that are impacting business today are increasing technological innovation, Generation Y impact on the workplace, and cloud computing.

Technological Innovation

Let's look at the impact of technological innovation: 10 years ago if someone told you that you would share most of your life both private and personal for the world to read, watch, and hear, you would have said they were nuts. We now live in a 24/7 information-packed reality where we can find out virtually anything we want about anyone at any time. Who would have thought that we would be living more public lives, building online communities, sharing photos, videos, and personal stories, communicating, collaborating, and accessing information all through the use of technology? It is the impact of technology that is radically changing the way we live and work, and organizations must be adapting to the technological revolution that is upon us. The need for organizations and their leaders to guide the change of technological transformation is absolutely essential. Eric Qualman, the creator of Social Media Revolution videos, states a statistic that in the next few years we will not have a Fortune 500; rather, we will have a Fortune 100. That is, the rapidity with which technology is impacting business and the ability of businesses to respond will determine whether the company will still be relevant in the next few years.

The organizations that are focused on technological transformation are well positioned to be successful and relevant. Often when I speak to groups of traditional organizations (those who have been in business for over 30 years or more) I notice that there is an obvious opportunity for many of these companies. The obvious opportunity is to get everyone in the company on board with the technological solutions that can be utilized. I was facilitating an executive retreat with a company that had been in the telephone business for over 20 years and now wanted to rebrand to let its customers know that they were now a technology company. When we were going through the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis with the executive team, the vice president of sales stated that she did not need to know the technology because her team had full knowledge of it. I stopped and looked directly at the VP of sales and then the CEO and said nothing. I waited for the CEO to say something to the VP and then I said, “Let me get this straight. You are rebranding to be a technology firm and yet you don't need to know the new technology?” The room was silent. Then I went on to say, “In the past it is true that a leader did not need to know the technicalities of the work that the team members did, but in today's reality the leaders must know as much as they possibly can about the technology in order to have relevance with the team.” The CEO had been accepting the approach of the VP of sales because he was not willing to engage in a dialogue with her about how she needed to step up and be more proactive in her role and to learn as much as she could about the technology. This company had a need for breakthrough transformation in order to achieve the objective of being a technology firm rather than a telephone firm. The attitudes and the behaviors of the executives needed to fundamentally change in order to transform and drive business forward. I am happy to say that as a result of that two-day...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: The Art of Change Leadership—Driving Transformation in a Fast-Paced World
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Why Do Organizations Need Change Leaders?
• Chapter 2: Fast Changing World Needs Leaders Like You
• Chapter 3: Hack the Status Quo: Change Manager or Change Leader?
• Chapter 4: Upgrade the Leadership OS to Be a Change Leader Who Drives Transformation
• Chapter 5: The Change Cycle Transformation Tool
• Chapter 6: Help Lead Others to Be Change Leaders Who Drive Transformation
• Chapter 7: Technology and People—The Impetus for Change
• Chapter 8: Tools for Transformation
• Chapter 9: The Art of Adapting to Multiple Personalities, Different Generations, and Cultures
• Chapter 10: The Three-Step Change Process Model to Leading Personal and Organizational Change
• Chapter 11: Thrive While Driving Transformation That Changes the World
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement