Change can be initiated by us and thrust upon us; it can be positive and negative, reaffirming and disorientating. It can be political, economic, social, regulatory/legal, organisational, technical and environmental. It can be at global, national, and local levels and it can also be deeply personal, such as parenthood, bereavement, marriage, divorce, redundancy, promotion, illness, or winning the lottery. Change is everywhere and always.

Despite our continuous exposure to change, it is often approached as an inconvenient, uncomfortable, even unnatural transition between steady states, something to get through in order to reach the other side.

Change Leadership

Change management is now found in most work programmes and consultants’ methodologies, a symbolic acknowledgement of the challenge inherent in dealing with the “soft” people-focused aspects of change initiatives.

Management however implies control, and change is rarely wholly controllable. Whether change is initiated or imposed, we need to acknowledge its messiness and ambiguity, to find ways of dealing with its intended and unintended consequences, and to provide a guiding hand through it.

One aspect of engaging positively with change is understanding paradox. Most of us have been trained to make either/or choices between X and Y but the most fitting solution can be both X and Y or some mixture of the two. For example, people often look to leaders for the reassurance of clear focus and direction, but the real world is ambiguous and demands the agility to exploit unforeseen opportunities rather than be wholly constrained by a pre-determined strategy; change leaders need to be able to work in such grey areas. Similarly, change leaders often need to make decisions with only partial knowledge, to be humble enough to know what they don’t know but confident enough to inspire confidence in others. This is just one example of how the change leadership skills needed today and into the future differ from those which may have served us so far.

Change leadership is a life skill, not a management initiative. It is the ability to lead oneself and others through change in many dimensions.

Authentic leadership cannot be detached from the values and behaviours of the person doing the leading. Organisations operate in a context that is often itself changing, and they are populated by living, breathing human beings. Any attempt to get to grips with organisational change must acknowledge these external and internal realities and may touch on areas such as personal, social and other aspects of change.