Leadership Skills for Organisational Change
Author: Eric Thompson
So it’s been agreed. There is no alternative to organisational change. The organisation has to become significantly more effective at what it does. What’s more the benefits that are achieved not only have to be sustained but they have to keep growing year on year.
The fact that change needs to happen is now clear, but how? You know that people are the key to making sustained improvements. You know that what is required is a culture of continuous improvement and staff engagement. Now it has to happen. Suddenly it’s down to you. You are the leader. You have to make it happen. Where do you start?
I’m going to introduce a self assessment questionnaire that will enable you to assess you own ability to lead this change, (Self Audit) but first lets consider the leadership that is required.
“What the team needs to …prosper in this sea of organisational change is you.”
If you are one of the many leaders who were appointed to their job because you were good at what you did, the chances are that your particular specialist skill is not managing change. It is much more likely that you were appointed because you displayed some leadership skills when you were a member of a team and were subsequently appointed to the role. Now these leadership skills are really going to be on the line. Have you got what it takes to engage the people in your team and develop the sort of organisational culture that leads to sustained improvement?
“At times like this there is no point in looking at your boss for the answer.” The boss is most probably asking the very same questions. In any case, what you need from your boss at a time of organisational change is a clear vision of what has to be achieved and personal support for you while you set about achieving it. You boss is too far away from the detail. It’s not your boss who receives the customer complaints or takes calls on the help desk. Your boss is hopefully engaged in matters that only the boss can deal with, outside of your team, which will make life better for you and the team.
Come to think of it, it’s not you that fields the customer complaints either. Even you are probably too remote from what happens on a day by day basis to really understand the issues in the level of detail that is required for real progress to be made. The leadership skills that are at a premium in this situation are not around telling people what to do or explaining how the system has been designed to work. The leadership skills that are required now, are those which allow you to delegate to your team the decisions about what and how, along with providing them with the support and encouragement that they need while they are doing it and the recognition that they deserve when an improvement has been made.
"Empowering your team is not the act of an afternoon"
Empowering your team is not the act of an afternoon, or even of several afternoons. It is a continuous process that does not begin and end with sending the team for a few days of training. Developing a high performance team, for that is indeed what you have to achieve, requires attention on many fronts. Organisational design, organisational culture, individual and team skills and communications are just a few of the aspects that need attention. It is a journey that will take time and as with any journey you need to monitor how far you have travelled so that you can decide what is appropriate for the next stage. The objective of this journey is, however, to create a team that continually seeks to improve its performance. The team can get better and the service that it provides to its customers can improve. The feedback may tell you that you are going in the right direction. However the journey never ends.
Following each cycle of improvement something else will reveal itself that requires attention. The factors, in the world external to the team, that cause change to be necessary are always present.
To examine just one such cause. Each year brings fresh legislation on a huge variety of topics driven by a myriad of bodies round the world each seeking to make their part of the world a better place. The impact of that falls on you, your team and its customers, and you need jointly to work out how to exist in the new environment.
What the team needs to enable it not only to survive but to prosper in this sea of organisational change is you. Or perhaps to be a little more truthful, they need your leadership. A high performance team can master many tasks. Individuals can learn new skills, the motivated team can work together to solve new and complex problems, but from time to time the leader will be required to take action that will enable the team to move to the next level of performance. Change may be required that is outside the remit of the team itself. The organisation may have to change to accommodate the changed team. A team member may need to be replaced. This is when the leader earns their corn.
“Once you have a clear picture in your mind of what you need to do to lead and develop the team, plan to develop yourself first.”
So if you are going to provide the leadership to set your team moving in the direction of becoming a high performance team, how do your leadership skills measure up to the task?
There is no definitive list of skills that will apply to every leader of every team involved in organisational change. But from the picture painted above, of the sort of change that the team will need to go through, you can begin to build an image of what the leader will have to do.
To help you to understand the sort of leadership skills that will be required and to assess whether or not you have them, we have developed a short self assessment questionnaire that you can download and fill in now. Completing the questionnaire will help you assess whether there any gaps in your leadership skills that are going to limit the development of your team. For each topic area we suggest some straightforward things that you can do now to develop your leadership skills in those key areas. Once you have a clear picture in your mind of what you need to do to lead and develop the team, plan to develop yourself first.
Click Here for your self assessment questionnaire