3 Signs Your Organization is Ready for Change Leadership
Thursday, February 18, 2016 - 01:00
As an organization navigates the waters of growth, it will hit periods where a transformational change is needed. These are beyond the range of your usual, everyday goal adjustments, and could reflect a complete makeover for your business. These are the moments of challenge and opportunity that can be high-stakes for your company.
For some, the image of William Wallace giving an inspirational speech to his fellow countrymen before they go to battle in the movie Bravehartcomes to mind. Others may think of Tom Hanks’ character Capt.
The skills and approaches that will guide leaders through a journey of expanded influence are known and learnable. These aspects can be found in the research on high-performing organizations and the research on neuroscience. This research is now becoming clear with regard to how a leader’s engagement style can be quantified through performance measures. While there are many correlations to success in emotional intelligence for leaders, we start with two fundamental differences in approach.
People who are placed in a position of authority over others, in organizations of any kind, have a moral mandate to lead. This is not an option, rather a deep responsibility. From the moment a person is placed in this position, people automatically begin looking to them for leadership.
There is no denying that we live in a world of constant change. Leaders within all organizations are tasked with helping their organizations deal with it. While many leaders first look outwards to see what changes are needed, the reality is that organization change starts with the leaders themselves.
This week has been a busy one. We have been in Calgary doing business development and really understanding what a boomtown is like. The stories of Fort McMurray left me wide-eyed. I managed to get back to Santa Barbara before the snows started. During our time there, I was asked some questions about our actual approach and what we believed about working with people.
Here is our short answer. The Envision Global Leadership works to develop leaders who create transformation in themselves and their organizations.
This issue takes another spin on the Organization Wheel, this time at how you work to integrate people across parts of a system. One thing leaders have to remember is that they are always dealing with multiple levels of systems and often with fractionalized pieces of that system. When people work within organizations, they rarely have a consciousness about the "whole system", and usually have a limited sense of how they fit into the whole. A leader's role is one of illuminating the system and integrating peoples thoughts and actions within it.
With this, the series on Understanding Organization through the Wheel will be compete. This has been a very brief overview of how you can use this powerful tool. At the Envision Global Leadership, we have used this, in far more depth, in many organization assessments and planning sessions for organization change. The most important lesson to take from this is to always remember that you are always working with a whole system.
Continuing on the subject of transformational leadership, this time I am giving you 5 competencies that transformational leaders exhibit. In past articles, we have been focused more on the systems thinking aspects through which leaders can engage groups of people - either small or large groups. The principles we put forth work for any size group or community of people. Now we are shifting focus to the relationship side of leadership.
