Bottom line: I’m advocating that for a change to be successful you need people to follow it, and followers follow leaders! My view is ‘change leadership’ and ‘change management’ are two different concepts. I’ve observed in my career that when change is ‘managed’ by the change team, people feel the change is being ‘done’ to them. In my experience, that approach alone has yielded mixed results.
Change leadership affects organizational change
From experience when leaders and the team are driving the change it’s more successful. With so much jargon in business, I originally accepted that ‘change leadership’ and ‘change management’ were interchangeable. When I started studying ‘change leadership’, I reflected on my experience and how rare it is to see the organization leading the change. If 50% of change initiatives fail1, could a lack of leadership be impacting success? I.e. a missing piece of the puzzle.
A client was facing mounting pressure from Private Equity owners to overhaul their entire operations. This included changes in technology leading to a reorganization. What I observed was:
- Change teams struggled to get leadership and the broader business involved, due to competing priorities etc.; and
- Even worse, the CxO was ‘good’ with the change, provided they didn’t have to change!
Sadly, my experience was not a one off in my career, nor unique, having validated it with fellow Management Consultants.
Needing more than anecdotal evidence, I found that Burke (2018), noted “what has not been as clear from the literature is the impact of leadership on organization change” (p. 298). However, he concluded that:
“it seems reasonable to assume, nevertheless, that because there is mounting evidence that leaders affect organizational performance in general, surely they have an impact on organizational change in particular” (p.298)
Thus, with change leadership we have an opportunity to increase the success rate of organizational change, which I find incredibly exciting!
How can you be a ‘change leader’?
If we need ‘change leadership’, how do you get followers to follow? Here is my thinking, organized under Lewin’s (1958) three steps of change (unfreezing, move, refreezing). I’ve taken influence from Schein (1980,1987) and the latest systematic review of change methods by Stouten et al (2018):
Unfreezing
1.Understand the underlying need for the change – seeking and making decisions on the need to change with evidence from multiple sources will increase the likelihood that people will want to follow. Scale your approach to the decision to avoid ‘analysis paralysis’.
2. Communicate the rational – many organizational members can be reasoned with by simply sharing the “Why”. The change leader will be most influential when “why” is presented with a combination of storytelling and facts and figures.
3. Create psychological safety – leading people to change their behavior is going to cause anxiety. Old behaviors have led each team member to be successful so adopting new behaviors is risky. The change leadership must lead with empathy, fallibility, and curiosity for the organization to try something different and take a risk.
Move
4. Scan the environment – be curious and understand from your teams what’s going on above/beneath the surface. Change efforts cannot take hold until unconscious reactions to the change are addressed.
5. Co-create plans – identify your leaders of change and co-create a plan. Engagement leads to commitment. Empower your change leaders though developing and promoting change-related knowledge/ability.
6. Identify short-term wins and reflect on intervention experiments – celebrating success of progress will reinforce that what the team is doing leads to results and should be continued.
Refreezing
7. Monitor and strengthen the change process – it’s important you continue with creating psychological safety and make it a learning experience. Allow change recipients to provide feedback and so you may adjust based on their experience (continuing to co-create).
8. Institutionalize change in the culture and practices – it’s critical as a change leader you’re integrating the change into the bigger organizational system e.g. HR practices, power/authority structures etc. to sustain it.
Change management is still needed, and we need more of it than change leadership. I’m sure you’ll agree organizational change can be uncomfortable – from experience, the uncertainty can lead to anxiety, frustration and/or anger. Thus, there must be processes for the change to be empathetically managed and controlled. Hence the importance of ‘change management’ and why we need both.
Every organization is going through change. As you think about your organization, the change it’s going through, and the members of the change… How empowered and/or excited are they to execute the vision?
This article could not have been written without the feedback and input of Lorena Daniel, Akshay Bhatia, Shatdal Kumar, and Warner Burke. For which I’m grateful!
References:
- Gibbons, Paul (2019): The Science of Organizational Change. United States: Phronesis Media
- Burke, W. Warner (2018). Organization change: Theory and practice, 5th Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
- Lewin, K (1958). Group decision and social change. In E. E. Maccoby, T. M. Newcomb, & E. L. Hartley (Eds.). Readings in social psychology. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
- Schein (1980). Organizational Psychology (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
- Schein (1987) Process Consultation, Vol. 2: Lessons for managers and consultants. Readings, MA: Addison-Wesley
- Stouten, J., Rousseau, D. M., & de Cremer, D. (2018). Successful organizational change: Integrating the management practice and scholarly literatures. The Academy of Management Annals, 12(2), 752–788.
- Burke, W. Warner; Noumair, Debra A. (2015): Organization Development: A Process of Learning and Changing. New Jersey: Pearson Education
- Falbe C. M. and Yukl G. (1992) “Consequences for Managers of Using Single Influence Tactics and Combinations of Tactics,” Academy of Management Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 638–652.