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Transformational Change Module 3: Change Leadership

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MODULE 3: CHANGE LEADERSHIP

Overview:

Traditional leaders surrounded themselves with other leaders who thought like they thought.  Change leaders know the importance of surrounding themselves with other leaders who have very different perspectives.  In times of slow change, constancy of thought may be a value.  But constancy of thought is more likely to be a threat in times of great change. Different ideas are needed for new and emerging issues.

Change leadership is designed for rapidly changing environments.  It assumes that the focus needs to be on preparing for the future and not on maintaining the past.  Change leadership constantly scans the environment looking for trends and then anticipating what those trends will call for us to be able to do in three years.

Change leaders don’t resist those emerging trends, they anticipate and prepare for them.  They work to identify the skills and capacities that will be required for success in the future and then work tirelessly to prepare their staff and their organizations to be successful when the future becomes the present.

Strategies:

  • The rEvolutional Leadership ModelTM
  • The Situational Leadership Theory

Resources:

Strategies: 

A review of the literature will yield numerous methodologies to leadership styles and approaches.  There are strengths and weakness to each of these various approaches and styles of leadership and each will have its supporters and critics.  An organization should carefully review the options and approaches available to help them decide which approach is best suited to their organization. Once an approach(es) is chosen all current leaders should be fully trained on the model(s) and new leaders should receive training as they come on board.  This will create a common knowledge and understanding of the leadership styles and approaches the organizations expects of its leaders.  A brief description of two possible models is explored below, one focusing primarily on leading change and the other on leading and supporting staff.  Additional information on both models is provided in the resource section.

1: The rEvolutionary Leadership ModelTM (by Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, now known as Social Current)

The rEvolutionary Leadership ModelTM  was developed to help leaders to navigate the turbulent waters of change within their organizations. The model specifies four capacities that Change Leaders need to develop within themselves, within their teams, and throughout their organizations. 

The four capacities are: 

  • Cognitive 
  • Emotional 
  • Spiritual and 
  • Behavioral

We can envision the four capacities as ways to help us to acquire answers to the three questions we have to develop to successfully bring about strategic change. The questions are:

  • WHAT do we need to do? 
  • WHY do we need to do it? 
  • HOW will we manage to do what we have decided we need to do?

We will seldom succeed in our strategic change initiatives unless we engage everyone in a process that discovers and then fully explores the answers to those three vital questions. The COGNITIVE capacity helps us to answer WHAT we need to do. The SPIRITUAL capacity helps us to answer WHY we need to do it. And both the EMOTIONAL and BEHAVIORAL capacities help us to answer HOW we will manage to do what we have decided we need to do. 

  • The COGNITIVE CAPACITY is about managing our vision, our plan, and our communications. 
  • The EMOTIONAL CAPACITY is about managing our emotions, our relationships, and our energy. 
  • The SPIRITUAL CAPACITY is about managing our culture, our beliefs, and our identity. 
  • The BEHAVIORAL CAPACITY is about managing our teaching, our skills, and our habits.

THE COGNITIVE CAPACITY

  • The cognitive capacity speaks to our patterns of thought and how to change them when they need to be changed. Our patterns of thought tend to remain consistent until we make a decision to change them. 
  • Maintaining the status quo is a strong force within all of us. The decision to change the status quo is not an easy change to bring about. We tend to revisit our patterns of thought when they stop working for us. We then come to accept that we need to make a change. Then we talk with others about our sense that we need to make a change. 
  • When our organization sees we need to change to prepare for a future that is quite different from our past, it is our patterns of thought that we need to address first. Our patterns of thought give us a way to make sense of our world. When we decided we need to move from our existing patterns of thought, it initially causes some confusion. We often figure out the patterns we have to stop before we figure out the new patterns we need to start. Looking for the new patterns is an important process. 
  • As we consider new patterns of thought, we want to engage as many perspectives as possible. Accessing many different perspectives helps us to consider things we would never have considered under the old status quo. It affords us the opportunity to ask questions we may not have been able to ask and find answers we would never have found.  
  • Preparing for a change in our patterns of thought calls for us to study the trends in the field, frame a vision for the changes we need to make, decide what skills and capacities we’ll need to develop within our organization to support the new vision and then form a plan to help us to get where we need to go. 
  • All of this is contained within the cognitive capacity. This capacity guides us on what we need to do.

THE EMOTIONAL CAPACITY

  • The emotional capacity relates to what we feel. This may have been the most underdeveloped and underappreciated capacity before “The Great Resignation,” but most leaders have significantly elevated its importance since The Great Resignation. 
  • Most organizations considering strategic changes now recognize the importance of improving the emotional supports provided within their workplace. Everyone has emotional needs. If we don’t know what we need, we can’t hope to meet those needs. We need to find ways to design a future where we can help everyone who serves with us and to help all those we seek to serve to identify and meet their emotional needs. There are many elements to this new design. 
  • Our supervisors must be trained to help those they supervise to identify and address their emotional needs. And we need to develop our teams so they, too, can provide emotional supports to their fellow team members. Developing the emotional capacity within any organization to meet the emotional needs of their workforce always starts at the top. 
  • Leaders can’t successfully guide the change process unless they are taking care of themselves: getting the proper amounts of sleep, watching their diet, exercising, and maintaining an appropriate work/life balance. Exhaustion and fatigue impede executive functioning – the ability to make good choices, solve problems, learn from mistakes, communicate clearly, and learn from mistakes. Wellness is a major part of HOW we manage the changes.

THE SPIRITUAL CAPACITY

  • The spiritual capacity relates to what we believe, what we value and who we are. At the core of most of the things we do every day is a set of beliefs and values. These beliefs and values get established as a part of our identity and then get translated into a set of behaviors and then, these behaviors, over time, become the habits that guide or limit us.
  • These habits come to form the basis for many of the decisions we make every day. Many, if not most, of the decisions we make every day are made more from habit than from any conscious or deliberate decision-making process. 
  • Within organizations, these beliefs and values and behaviors and habits are often called culture. Culture is connected to identity. For that reason, our cultures either permit or oppose change. What we do and the ways that we do what we do really matter within organizations. That’s why the status quo is so difficult to change. When we introduce a strategic change, we are, by definition, announcing that some elements of our culture will change. 
  • When we do this, we don’t want to repudiate our past to prepare for the future. We don’t want to say what we’ve done in the past and the ways that we’ve done them were wrong. Instead, we want to say, “What we’ve done in the past and the ways that we’ve done them were right for that point in time, but things have changed in our environment, and we need to make some adjustments. Our adjustments may seem to be very different, but they’re more like a next step for us.” 
  • At the center of our spiritual capacity is our sense of self and our sense of purpose. For many, our culture and our Mission may be seen as being synonymous. All Missions have evolved over time. It is wise to review how our Mission has changed before. Our Mission evolves when emerging environmental conditions cause the change. This is the WHY.

THE BEHAVIORAL CAPACITY

  • The behavioral capacity relates to what we do, to how we act. The behavioral capacity is dynamically interconnected with the other three capacities. We are guided in our behavioral patterns by our patterns of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. 
  • To change our behavioral patterns, we need to also change those other patterns that are interconnected with our behavioral patterns. That’s why we sometimes fail to make the behavioral changes that we know we need to make. 
  • Resistance to changing our behaviors can be seen as being driven by three forces: some can’t change because they don’t have the skills; some don’t change because they have deeply entrenched habits, and some won’t change because their belief structures seem to conflict with the changes we are trying to enact. 
  • Some organizations are setting themselves up as learning communities that are designed to facilitate teaching and learning. These organizations see mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow and work to establish coaching and mentoring as daily occurrences. It’s much easier to teach new skills in a learning community environment. 
  • Some organizations are training their supervisors in effective ways to help staff to substitute their old habits for some new habits. Since this substitution process is what a number of staff do with those, they seek to serve almost every day, this approach has been seen as being a relatively safe and easy way to help to usher in new habits. 
  • The belief resistance is sometimes just a cover for anger over the change itself. Sometimes it is grounded in a misunderstanding about why the change is being made or what the change actually represents. 
  • Spending sufficient time discussing the WHY of the change often helps to allow progress to be made on implementing the HOW.

2: The Situational Leadership Theory 

The Situational Leadership theory is one originally developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in 1969 while working on Management of Organizational Behavior.  The model has evolved over the years and in 1985 Kenneth Blanchard introduced a revised version in A Situational Approach to Managing People,

which has become known as The SLII® Model.  The model is designed to help leaders recognize there are different developmental levels within their staff that can change with the task at hand or over time as the staff members skills, knowledge and attitudes might also change.  The model then helps leaders choose the most appropriate approach to work with the staff on that task.  The leaders style blends a mixture of directive and supporting behaviors based on the staff members performance readiness around a specific task.  The following graphic and definitions below from the “Leaders” website (https://leaders.com/articles/leadership/situational-leadership/) help to provide the evolution of the model and an overview its details.

Explanation of Situational Leadership

There are four different leadership styles paired with four levels of team members’ Performance Readiness® or maturity. In chronological order, the leadership styles rank from least ready (requiring the most amount of direction and support) to most ready (requiring the least amount of direction and support). 

Telling (S1)

Followers who have the lowest amount of Performance Readiness require the highest amount of attention. For example, this leadership style is typically used when someone is new to their role, not a self-starter, or failing to meet standards. When an employee cannot make decisions for themselves, a telling leader calls the shots. They set clearly defined goals and deadlines and also regularly check in on progress. 

Selling (S2)

Selling leaders serve as an influential, supportive figure for those who show interest in learning how to execute a job well done. This Situational Leadership style is used when providing motivation, growing buy-in, and building trust. In essence, a selling leader proves themselves as someone capable of leading their team members. 

Participating (S3)

A participating leader creates a collaborative, encouraging environment where input is welcome. While the employee at hand might be more experienced and capable than those requiring the telling or selling styles, they still need support. When practicing this style, hands-on leaders let the team member do the decision-making but help as needed. 

Delegating (S4)

This Situational Leadership style is practiced when dealing with experienced, competent, and motivated team members. These team members are granted the highest level of autonomy because they’ve proven they can successfully direct themselves. With this type of person, business owners and managers can be more hands-off, yet still offer support if the person needs it. 

Because Situational Leadership is a leadership model, it is best defined by how it is put into action. For example, leaders make it applicable in their organizations by: 

  • Analyzing: Situational managers focus on identifying and analyzing team members’ performance readiness factors, which helps them adjust their style of leadership. 
  • Adapting: This type of leader can quickly shift out of the four influencing behaviors. Even if they’re dealing with more than one person at a time, they can still seamlessly transition based on the needs of those in the room. 
  • Influencing: Rather than using authority, those practicing situational management build influence, which comes from building trust and a safe work environment.
  • Serving: The purpose of Situational Leadership is serving others by being flexible with what employees need from the person guiding them. 
  • Developing: Followers’ growth is the primary goal of a situational leader. Because of this, they often serve as a coach who guides their team members through learning experiences and opportunities. “
“I probably stopped learning a while back. I still took in new ideas, but I didn’t focus on the new ideas. I am back to learning again. I find many of the new ideas to be quite helpful.”