Change Leadership: Keys to Riding the Wave 

“Your success in life isn’t based on your ability to simply change. It is based on your ability to change faster than your competition, customers and business.”

– Mark Sanborn

Constant uncertainty dominates today’s workplace. Rapid technological change, increasing globalization, growing competition, cultural evolution, and post-pandemic employment shifts all contribute to an environment where leaders can’t simply make a change and move on. Now, change is always in progress or looming on the horizon. 

If you feel like there’s never firm ground underfoot, you’re right. Successful leaders at every level must boldly chart new directions as they navigate treacherous waves of change–or else they’re swamped by emerging threats (AI, anyone?). 

You’ve Made a Decision–But Can You Get Buy-In?

Change leadership is further complicated by increasingly empowered employees. More than ever, employees want to feel involved, consulted, and considered as you plot a new course. If they are excluded you can expect, your change to fail–people revert to old habits, and your organization falls behind.

Once you’ve decided how to respond to marketplace changes, you must not only clearly communicate how your organization is adapting, but positively shape employees’ reactions. Otherwise, your workforce feels undervalued and disrespected–negative emotions that rank high among the reasons employees quit.

What Makes a Change Leader? 

Dynamic change leaders push teams and organizations to constantly improve their performance. To get employees to support change initiatives, leaders must:

  • Describe a clear purpose so employees know what they’re aiming for

  • Set out performance expectations

  • Make performance data transparent to everyone

  • Give people the tools they need to execute the change

  • Invest in professional development and upskilling

  • Give employees genuine autonomy to make decisions

  • Listen to–and act on–suggestions

Watch Jim Hemerling discuss 5 ways to lead in an era of constant change in this Ted Talk

Change Leadership Can Be Learned

If you feel like you’re not one of those people who’s not good at shifting on the fly, don’t worry. Like all vital leadership skills, you can build your abilities as a change leader.

Great change leaders don’t possess some inborn instinct for knowing what to do when confronted with change. Effective change leadership involves asking questions, gathering data, talking to stakeholders, and forming a clear picture of the coming threat and how best to respond.

Once a change is decided on, a successful change leader excels at all three phases of the implementation process: preparing for the change, implementing the change, and actively working to sustain the new approach. 

Read how the Society of Human Resources thinks about leading change in this article by Randy G. Pennington

Who’s a Change Leader?

Changes don’t just happen at the top, or to entire organizations. Maybe your single team needs to change its focus or how it executes projects to keep up with industry changes. It’s the team leader’s job to recognize that need, gather information, weigh options, formulate a plan, and roll out that change with employees’ help.

Everyone from senior leaders to frontline employees have a role to play in executing new initiatives. For employees to get on board, they must understand the reason for the change, the nature of and implications of the change, and what it will mean for their individual roles.

A Master Change Leader

Jack Welch spent more than 20 years as the CEO of GE, during which Fortune magazine named him Manager of the Century. During his tenure, he completely transformed this legacy business, quadrupling sales. Welch was famous for challenging established norms in GE’s operations and looking for new ways to grow revenue. 

In his first year in the job, Welch visited the company’s nuclear reactor business in San Jose, Calif. It was 1981, just two years after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, yet division managers presented Welch with a rosy forecast that they would sell two or three reactors a year, as they’d done prior to the disaster. In fact, no orders had come in since.

Welch immediately gave the division team a reality check. “Guys, you’re not going to get three orders a year. In my opinion, you’ll never get another order for a nuclear reactor in the U.S.,” he told them. 

Instead of telling managers what to do next, he asked them to come up with a plan to refocus their nuclear expertise toward selling services and nuclear fuel to existing reactors. When they objected that staff would be demoralized, new staff were brought in to execute the division managers’ service-business sales plan.

The result? The division’s earnings grew from $14 million to $116 million in two years. And when Welch retired 20 years later, GE had never received another reactor order.

CHEAT SHEET: 4 Ways to Make Change Stick

Sure, you’ve rolled out a change at work. But how do you make it the new normal and keep your team from backsliding into old habits? Our tips: 

  1. Be the change. To inspire others to adopt a new method or behavior, model it yourself.

  2. Stay positive. Your upbeat mood inspires confidence that your change was for the good.

  3. Ride to the rescue. If your change meets with resistance, seek to understand why. Identify obstacles to acceptance and work to overcome them.

  4. Persist. Watch for and actively counter underminers who revert to old ways.

Read how to Revamp Change Leadership as part of becoming a stronger leader in the book Twelve Skills: the guide to becoming a stronger leader and accelerating your career.  

Resources on Change Leadership:

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About Us

Ed Barrows and Laura M. Downing have nearly 60 years’ experience as certified coaches and university professors who work with high-potential leaders in the world’s top organizations. They’ve distilled their knowledge and research into twelve fundamentals leaders need most to advance in their organizations today. Learn more at www.twelveskills.com.

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