Leadership Styles

How To Lead Change Effectively

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The 4 key themes on leadership styles that are most effective in leading change are outlined below.

(1) Good management alone is not enough

Key additional factors are:

The realisation that a focus on people before process is in the long run more productive than a job or task centred focus

Getting the balance right between a task orientation and a people orientation and knowing when and where to move to the most appropriate position on that spectrum

Having the flexibility to adopt leadership styles that are appropriate to the level of development and maturity of the people involved

“Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.”

Bennis

(2) Leadership is required

Leadership is required - in the form of leadership styles:

That in some way transcends short-term goals and focuses on values and higher order needs and provides meaning for people

That also addresses their deepest fears.

(3) The importance of a people-centred leadership styles

The importance of a people-centred leadership that:

Addresses people’s anxieties and fears:
- Generally about the uncertainties of the current environment and:
- Specifically about the impacts and consequences of a step-change initiative.
People cannot work well if they are experiencing emotional turbulence. They need to be calm and have their emotions under control to perform effectively.

An effective leader recognises the unconscious and unexpressed fears of his people and does his/her best to address these concerns because he/she knows that by doing so he will have a calmer and more focused workforce.

(4) Recognising the emotional dimension of leadership styles

Recognising:

That emotions are essentially contagious. The leader's emotional state and the energy that he/she creates is "contagious". In a sense, it "infects" the organisation.

the content and the style of the leader's communications need to resonate with their followers’ emotional reality. Establishing this connections enables the leader to shape peoples sense of purpose and direction and to motivate them to move in a particular direction.

Daniel Goleman refers to this as Primal Leadership, and he asserts that leadership style can impact about 70% of an organisation's emotional climate, and he claims that this in turns drives 20-30% of business performance.

The other 5 factors

The quality of leadership that the change leader provides is one of the top 5 factors that will determine the success of the change initiative.

The other 4 factors are:

(1) Determining that you are embarking on a step change that sits outside of business as usual and needs to be handled as a specific initiative.

(2) Using a programme management based approach to your step change initiative

(3) The thoroughness of your pre programme review and planning process

(4) The extent to which you identify and address the cultural change in your organisation that is required to deliver the step change and the desired business benefit.

Pulling It All Together

By convention we speak of change “management” but the reality is that change involves leadership as well as management. Leadership styles matter, as the primary causes of failure in change initiatives are all people related, and to do with emotions. So change leadership requires some very special qualities in the person[s] leading the change.

How you are as a person is as important as what you say and do.

Major organisational change has a big emotional impact on those people most directly affected by it. The human impacts of change, and the failure of so many organisational leaders to address this, lies at the root of much change failure.

So we can conclude that effective change management can only operate under a style of change leadership that has a strong focus on the people side.