At the end of May leaders and experts representing over 40 organisations attended the Gofore Leading Change breakfast event to discuss change capability, particularly from a leadership perspective. To help your change leadership journey forward, we listed the key insights of these discussions.
Leadership plays a crucial role in supporting changes. The biggest challenges identified were:
- Creating a common understanding and communicating the change in a consistent manner: We need a clear, shared vision and articulation of the change from leaders. Without that, the rest of the organization cannot develop a comprehensible and credible picture of the objectives and the significance of the change.
- Leadership’s commitment and ability to lead by example: Mere rhetoric is not enough. How can leaders demonstrate through their actions – also after the initial enthusiasm and other possible emotional waves – that the change is important and necessary?
- Creating psychological safety: Change can have negative impacts on some groups, or there may be a lack of clarity about the impacts of the change and people’s ability to influence the outcome. How can individuals and teams be encouraged to contribute to advancing the change in the best possible way in such situations?
Tip 1: Leader, understand your own role and responsibility in leading and supporting changes
It is crucial for a leader to be involved in defining the change and its significance together with the core change team. Leadership demonstrates that the change is important and timely by actively participating in communicating about the change and engaging in discussions with their stakeholders.
Since psychological safety is a critical factor in enabling change enthusiasm and tackling change resistance, a leader must understand how to create conditions for open and, if necessary, even critical discussions.
Tip 2: Develop organization-wide change capability
Change management should be developed as part of leadership competencies. The need for change capability is not limited to top management alone, as it is also relevant for many other roles within organizations to know how to support people through changes. Middle management often plays a dual role, being both the target of change and the promoter of change. Therefore, it is important that supervisors have tools both for self-management and for integrating change-related topics into team-level discussions.
Additionally, roles that drive change at a practical level, such as project managers and communication specialists, have better chances of success when they have sufficient understanding and resources to implement changes in a people-centric manner.
Tip 3: Introduce and establish models and tools for change management
Organisations today are constantly undergoing numerous changes. Establishing change management models and practices as part of the organisation’s internal toolkit not only accelerates the initiation process but also enhances the implementation of changes and increases the likelihood of successful outcomes. Models and tools can include best practices for, e.g., stakeholder-specific change communication, employee engagement, and measuring the impact of changes.
Get in touch to discuss how change capability can be developed for your organisation. You can find Gofore change management professionals on this page.
Would you like to learn more about organizational change capability? Register for our autumn webinar, where we will approach the topic from the perspective of organizational change maturity.
