Are you struggling to get traction? Does it feel like you’re doing a lot of work but with little success? It may be because your organisation is suffering from weak change leadership.Here are three symptoms to look out for.
1. Resistance
While resistance is a normal human response to change, when entire teams are resisting it suggests their leaders aren’t leading.
You can support these leaders by identifying the resistant behaviour, understanding the reasons for it, and coaching or partnering with the leaders to build a plan to manage the resistance.
2. Change overload
Another sign to look for is change overload in teams.
Poor leaders fail to understand that they play a critical role in managing their team’s capacity to take on change. High-performing leaders, by contrast, influence others around the timing, prioritisation and phasing of changes to ensure that their teams can cope with change and manage business as usual.
A change capable organisation takes capacity management seriously. If this isn’t in place at your organisation, you can help managers by teasing out the pressures they’re under and identifying operational metrics that indicate if the team is at or over capacity. Present this to your Sponsor or Steering Committee for a discussion on prioritisation and resource allocation.
3. Compliance, not commitment
This is tricky. While it may appear that the team is on board, when the leader is not around or when the focus moves on to something else, old behaviours return because there is no real commitment to change by the team.
A compliance attitude is another symptom of a leader’s failure to engage the team. It could also indicate a command and control leadership style – an industrial age approach to leadership that isn’t well suited to today’s business environment.
To address this, you can coach managers to recognise and reward commitment to the new ways of working. A culture of recognition can powerfully influence behaviour.
You can make a difference
Because many organisations fail to understand that leadership development is not separate from change management, poor change leadership is all too common.
The good news is that by diagnosing it early, you can coach and support your leaders to more effectively lead change.
Change Synergy helps organisations deliver changes quickly, efficiently, effectively and with less disruption. This means a greater return on investment and more opportunities to get ahead of competitors.
