Leadership impact and change management (5)

Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.” (Victor Frankl).

One of the most constant things in life is change. At the organisational level, change is normally associated with movement to a future profitable state, through some necessary transitional phases. Change in this regard is an essential opportunity for an organisation to reposition itself, in order to benefit from changes in the operating environment. Change management in this context becomes an act of transitioning individuals and teams in the organisation into a desired future state.

Thus, while change is broadly about moving from one state to the other, change management is more concerned about the processes, strategies and activities, which are developed and implemented within the organisation to support individual employees to adapt to change. Specifically, it is about supporting the people that are impacted by the change to go through their own individual transitions.

An organisation that embraces change and executes it efficiently will always evolve and thrive through effective change management systems. The main goal of change management is to prepare people to leverage opportunities presented by change processes, so that they can benefit from change initiatives and innovations within the organisation. What makes change management necessary is that changes within or around the organisation ultimately impacts how people do their jobs.

This impact is especially situated within the scope of employees’ differences in personal awareness, perceptions, temperament, beliefs, mindsets and behavioral tendencies. For instance, some employees will rapidly embrace change, while others will be slower, and possibly even reluctant to accept change. In some instances, change will bring joy and relief to some employees, while some others will be upset and stressed by the change.

Importantly, change management provides the process, tools, structure and systems that support individual transitions precipitated from an organisational future state. To reach the future state, individual employees would need to adapt a structured and intentional approach to new initiatives. It is the responsibility of organisational leaders, as the major change agents to support their employees through the transitional stages and every phase of the change.

Using organisational coaches and/or change coaches in this regard is always useful and rewarding. The benefits of using coaches or adopting coaching techniques in change management become manifested in the leadership styles that effectively implement and sustain the change. It is a style of leading with vision, not tradition; being enablers, not a controller; being facilitators, not experts; and being the link, not the end.

Experience has shown that when leaders do the above mentioned and live by those values, the people that they lead would become more empowered. The empowerment is manifested by the people being more self-reliant, self-managing and self-motivated. The greatest benefit of people empowerment in this regard is the passage it creates for a radical rethink about what can be achieved in the future compared with what has been achieved in the past. It is an evidence of successful change management due to positive leadership impact.

The three key words that make empowerment to work are: responsibility, authority and accountability. People empowerment in change management is thus the process of transferring responsibility, authority and accountability from the leaders to the people. The major advantage that this confers on organisational leaders is that it helps them to do and achieve more through people than they could have ever done without them.

Essentially, impact leaders always provide the enabling environment, space and platform for others to contribute to corporate growth and development. A team is more than a group of people or a collective of individuals contributing to the working of the whole. A team comprises people linked in a common purpose, and are organised to work together to accomplish a specific objective. The ability to weld very different people together to produce magic is the major gift of the organisational leader.

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart says” There’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary people can accomplish if they are given the opportunity, encouragement and incentive to do their best”. Therefore, expose your team members to challenges and stand by them to ensure that they remain focused and motivated. Nothing changes in your organisation until your people change. Organisations as we know them are the people in them; if the people do not change, there is no organisational change.

Changes in technology and processes are effective only to the degree that these they are associated with changes in the mindsets of employees. This suggests that there is need for internal drivers of change within the organisation. An example of an internal driver of change is the readiness of the workforce to adopt the change. Simply put, if employees do not have the subjective beliefs that change is needed or the organisation is capable, initiatives are more likely to fail.

Emmanuel Imevbere