Transformation is rampant in today’s organisations. Given the number of failures, it is forcing executives and consul tants to expand their awareness of what is required and their skills for handling those requirements. How can executives or consultants expect to succeed in the transformational journey if their guidance systems don’t allow them to see or understand the variables they face along the way? Transformation is unique in two critical ways. First, the future is unknown at the start of the change process and can only be created by forging ahead with the intent to discover it. Without having a clear goal, leaders are forced to proceed into the unknown, dependent on broader sources of information and support to formulate a new future and put it into place. As the future state is not clear at the beginning, the process for getting there cannot be clear either. A timebound predetermined plan is not possible. As the change process cannot be ”managed”, a new way of leading it is needed. Secondly, the future state is so radically different from the current state that a shift of mindset is required to invent it, let alone implement and sustain it. This fact triggers enormous human and cultural impacts. Leaders and employees alike must transform their mindsets, behaviours and ways of working together. Subsequently, cultural norms must change to free up these new ways of being. People must certainly change what they do in transformation, but more importantly, they must change the way they think. The strat egy for the change must focus on how to accomplish this level of personal change across the organisation, leaders included. These two attributes of transformation make both the process and the human dynamics much more complex, unpredictable and uncontrollable than in either developmental or transitional change. Change leadership strategies that accommodate the realities of transformation are required. Change leadership demands new executive and consulting competence in three key areas: (1) creating enterprise-wide, integrated transformational change strategy that attends to all of the people and process dynamics of transformational change; (2) transforming the mindsets of leaders and employees as required by the new marketplace and the transformation itself, and (3) designing, implementing and course correcting the transformational change process. We will discuss each of these change leadership arenas. BUILDING AN INTEGRATED CHANGE STRATEGY Building an integrated change strategy fit for transformation is the first cornerstone of change leadership. Executives clearly understand their central role in creating new business strategy. However, announcing a new business strategy alone is not enough to accomplish it. It must be executed in a way that delivers the intended business results. This requires the creation of a fitting change strategy. When leaders don’t understand the type and scope of change their business strategy requires, they cannot create an appropriate change strategy and consistently fail to get their business results. Knowing which type of change is required is the first step in creating the right change strategy. In developmental and transitional change, executives typically engage in very little strategic thinking about how to handle the change. Instead, they delegate it to lower-level change managers. In transformation, however, leaders cannot hand off the creation of their transformational change strategy. Executive-level strategic thinking is a requirement. Due to the huge impacts on the business, the complex people issues, and the multitude of interdependent change initiatives, the executives themselves must be involved in putting it all together.
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