The Change Leader's Roadmap

INTRODUCTION Imagine having mastered the leadership of change in your organization. Imagine . . . your mission-critical changes are being readily adopted by your organization and being used to deliver extraordinary results. You are getting the outcomes you need, and your business is reaping the rewards of them. Your change efforts are running smoothly without major disruptions. Your stakeholders and employees are engaged, committed, and pulling their weight. Change work is getting done on time, and your budgets are being met without costing your operations. For many in organizations, their history with change makes this possibility hard to imagine. For us, it is the possibility that we commit to create in reality. In this book, we introduce you to The Change Leader's Roadmap (CLR), a change process methodology that will dramatically increase your ability to navigate your organization's changes, and its transformation, successfully. The CLR has been developed through thirty years of application in large organizations across all types of for-profit industries, government, military, and global nonprofits. It will help you plan, design, and implement a comprehensive change strategy and process plan to deliver your results at optimal speed and cost. It will build your confidence in how best to attend to the most challenging aspects of transformation-the human dynamics-helping you design a change process that engenders commitment and engagement of stakeholders and devotes needed attention to mindset, behavior, and culture change. It will help you stay on track when new information or circumstances arise that would otherwise thwart your effort with conflict, chaos, and resistance. The path of failed change is easy to find because research shows us that the large majority of change efforts fail to produce their needed ROI. Organizational change is pressured, constant, and competitive, and it has become much more complex and dynamic than in previous decades. It is tougher than ever to succeed at organizational change. In difficult economic times-and in our increasingly competitive world-leaders have little choice but to press for more with less, cut corners, try to attend to their highest priority changes while keeping customers satisfied, and get results as fast as possible. Not only are leaders responsible for more complex changes, but the social, technological, economic, and political terrains they must navigate during change are shifting faster than they can keep up with. The name of today's game is: "Change as fast as you can to stay ahead of your competitors!" With the marketplace operating at hyper-speed, leaders have their hands full, to say nothing of their heads, minds, and hearts. While they intend to do the best they can with what they have, they too often resort to old command-and-control practices that will not get them what they need, while dangerously taxing their workforce. Getting the chaos under control is an understandable instinct, but the current modes of managing change are not working. Does the following sound familiar? We see many leaders overloading the workloads of their employees with change on top of change on top of pressured operating requirements. They believe they have no extra resources, yet still need to get the change work done with what they have. We see an over-reliance on standard change practices applied to all projects, even if some changes are more complex and emotionally tumultuous than others. In such changes, traditional approaches such as project management and change management are not always sufficient. We see superficial attention to upfront change strategy, absentee sponsorship, and the drive for quick fixes. We see too much delegation without clear design requirements for what the outcome needs to achieve. We see leaders under-attending to the human dynamics inherent in change-with little patience for people's needs and reactions, ignorance about the cultural implications of the changes they are making, and sidestepping the need to engage people in shaping their futures. An assumption on our part is that, under pressure, leaders believe that all this "human stuff" takes more time and resources, and they don't have them. People will just have to deal with it. The risk of this-especially in an economic downturn-is the tendency to increase control, speed, and mandate-in many ways doing more of what actually doesn't work. However, there is a leadership opportunity here-to step back, pause, gain greater perspective, learn from the past's unsuccessful patterns, and set up your organization to actually achieve the results it needs from change, still with the most expedient resources and pace. When things are most challenging, as they are right now in many markets, the time is right to give serious consideration to what you already have going for you in leading change and to learn specifically what you need to do differently to catapult your results. This assessment is the starting point for recreating your organization's ability to succeed in change. The challenge to leaders is to understand what this renewal of change capability requires. This book and its companion, Beyond Change Management (Anderson & Ackerman Anderson, 2010), provide that understanding. We have written these two books as a set to support the evolution of leaders and consultants to become successful change leaders-knowledgeable of what transformation requires and capable of providing it. These two books are designed to alter your paradigm about organization change, from burden to necessity, from distraction to focus, from checklist to strategic orchestration. They provide the pragmatic approaches to guide organizations realistically through the dynamic river of ever-changing economic, business, and social environments. First and foremost, the change game clearly needs new leadership thinking and approaches. Change is not the enemy; in fact, it is the only road to the future. Leading change successfully requires new perspectives, practices, and ways of treating people as they change. Beyond Change Management outlines much of this new thinking. Without question, the nature and complexity of change has evolved over the past thirty-five years. We are not dealing with the more manageable, controllable types of change that dominated the 1970s and 1980s-developmental and transitional change. The most prevalent type of change in organizations today is transformation. Developmental and transitional change can be tightly managed. Transformation cannot. It requires a broader and deeper knowledge of the people and process dynamics of change, a knowledge that stretches beyond change management and project management. It demands a close and intelligent partnership between the tangible requirements of change-organizational and technical-and the intangible human and cultural dynamics of change. Leaders must create the capabilities, infrastructures, mindsets, and behaviors they require. Both leaders and consultants must learn how to masterfully guide transformational change-in style, skill, and strategy. Both leaders and consultants must evolve to become competent conscious change leaders-a new caliber of leader for a new type of change. Transformation demands shifts in leadership and employee mindset, culture, ways of relating, and the ability to course-correct. These are not easy shifts to make. However, over our three decades of consulting, we clearly see that the level of awareness, perceptiveness, and openness of leaders and consultants has direct impact on whether change succeeds. Time and again, our clients' results are directly proportional to the degree that they address their mindsets about people, organizations, and change; shift their leadership style and behavior to be more co-creative and engaging; and transform deep-seated cultural norms to unleash the human potential in their organizations. In the absence of conscious awareness, change processes and their outcomes are disappointing. We offer these books to compel leaders and consultants to step into the role of consciously shaping the transformation of their organizations. We believe they are in need of a comprehensive approach for leading transformation with a greater focus on what it takes to succeed: (1) a meaningful context for transformational action; (2) guidelines for thinking strategically about how to plan the process of transformation so that results are realized in both the bottom line and the culture; (3) knowledge of how to ensure that the people who must make the change happen want to change and can succeed; (4) the infrastructure to support and expedite change; and (5) a methodology for doing so. The context and guidelines for thinking strategically about the people and process dynamics are featured in Beyond Change Management. This book provides the methodology-The Change Leader's Roadmap-and the recommended infrastructure. Beyond Change Management describes the conceptual underpinnings of transformation and what it takes to lead it to become more than a leader-to become a conscious change leader. This book describes the approach to put these concepts into practice. Beyond Change Management explores the theoretical foundations, and this book offers the pragmatics. We have written both books simultaneously to blend conceptual understanding with tangible steps and tools. Together, they provide an integrated and balanced approach to this essential evolution in the fields of organization development, project management, change management, and sound management in general. Building your company's change capability is like...