What we get wrong about leading through change
- Graham
- 8 minutes ago
- 4 min read
How to get your team pulling in the same direction
Perhaps the most popular metaphor for business leadership is the captain steering a ship. It evokes romantic notions of facing unpredictable and formidable forces with courage, fortitude and a level head. "The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails," is how leadership expert John Maxwell puts it.
Another popular metaphor is the general at war, bravely leading troops into battle against competitors, regulators and sometimes their own production bottlenecks. When his factories aren't working properly, Elon Musk relocates there: "I really believe that one should lead from the front lines, and that's why I'm here."
Yet these comparisons make a fundamental mistake that undermines the leader's ability to lead through change.
Before I explain the misunderstanding, let's first get a handle on what leadership is. To do this, I'd like to introduce one of the most beautifully simple definitions I've come across, which comes from the management guru Peter Drucker:
A leader is someone with followers.
It almost seems a throwaway line, but it hides an important truth. This definition implies movement in a direction, with the leader at the front. And we shouldn't take that element of movement for granted. Because there are plenty of teams out there, supposedly with leaders, who aren't going anywhere. They're milling about.
I'm not saying that loitering is necessarily bad – sometimes we need groups of people to stop the nuclear power station blowing up, process insurance claims correctly or keep airplanes from crashing into each other. These teams need a manager rather than a leader.
But in most situations, the movement is important. But to think of this movement in terms of location is simply wrong. No matter what your leader does, you almost certainly will be connecting with him on Teams from the same cubicle or kitchen table as you were before.
Hence the mistake in our thinking:
We don't lead people from one place to better place.
We lead them through time to a better future.
The challenge when we let go of location-based leadership thinking (and embrace time-based thinking instead) is that the future exists only in our imaginations. So while I can show you a photo of Detroit to encourage you to holiday there with me, I can't show you a picture of the future.
Instead, I have to get you to imagine it. This is the job of the leader during times of change.
Change Leadership Expert Graham Norris
Graham is a much sought-after international speaker who is often booked up months in advance due to his unique insights. Please get in touch with Graham as early as you can in your planning, so you can secure his presence at your event and get his input into your planning process.
For those of you wedded to the concrete and tangible, the thought of getting people to create alternate realities in their heads may be a dispiriting one. But the evidence is there. A McKinsey survey, for example, showed that organizational transformation was 5.8 times more likely to succeed when the CEO communicated a compelling story of change.
In other words, if the leader can get the followers to imagine the same future, they are almost 6 times more likely to make that future become reality.
Here's how you do it.
Make sure you're clear on what the vision is. If it's not clear to you, it probably isn't to anyone else. Asking the right questions might make people feel uncomfortable for a bit, but it will also make you seem like the smartest person in the room. If the senior leadership can't imagine what the future will look like, the organization will never get there.
Help others imagine the outcome. We spend most of our lives thinking about the next few seconds. We might consider what we're having for dinner, but not what filing expenses will be like when the latest software upgrade has been completed in six months' time. If we want people to push through the transition, we need to sell them on the future outcome. What will they be able to do? How much time could it save them? What will they be doing with that time? What boring/repetitive tasks will be eliminated? Don't sugarcoat it, but rather help them think through what their life will be like.
Listen. The vision might sound great to you, but it might not to them. They might be in a better position to avoid some disastrous mistakes. So no matter how crazy you think their concerns are, take them seriously.
Talk about what's been lost, then help them find the new opportunities. If you're low in the hierarchy, most organisational change happens for reasons that have nothing to do with you. You may lose authority, colleagues and prime cubicle space during the change, and these will be painfully obvious to you. Opportunities will also open up, but these won't be presented to you on a plate. The job of the leader is to help the team not only process what they have lost, but explore the new open spaces that they can take advantage of.
Take action. If you feel change is being done to you, it can be very disempowering. The role of the leader is to re-empower their teams by encouraging them to experiment and make decisions. By taking action, the team takes back control over what happens to it, maximizing its control over the future.
Change can be disconcerting, for leaders as well as followers, who weren't involved in the change planning. Yet leadership is all about helping the team set its direction.
By encouraging your team to bridge the gap between now and next, you can help ensure you're working toward a more ambitious and flourishing future.
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