Has Your Leadership Changed with Change?

Leadership and management have always been about change.  But has you leadership changed with change?  It has become a real-time unfolding flow of change as a dynamic journey on a shifting landscape in a constant state of flux.  Increasingly quickly!  We have evolved from a Change 1.0 to a Change 2.0 to a Change 3.0 world.

Each mode of change had its era.   The 1970s/80s were mostly about the management of performance assurance with a focus on efficiency.  Relatively speaking, it was a period of “status-quo” and reacting to change post-adaptively, when we really had to.  The 1990s/2000s were mostly about the leadership of continuous improvement, relatively slowly (unless you were at the center of the hi-tech boom which most businesses were not) – “status-slow” and success was about keeping up adaptively.  In the 2010s, we are all now experiencing the impacts of that technology boom, which facilitates a speed of business, pace of change and accelerating turbulence, uncertainty and volatility.

“Status-flow” and success are about staying ahead pre-adaptively with discontinuous improvement.  It’s about the timeliness of our offerings and remaining relevant to our customers latest needs and wants.  We can become obsolete really quickly these days.  Future-Proofing Your Business:  How Sustainable is your Sustainability?  It’s about our overall efficacy (power and effect), not just our efficiency and effectiveness.

We are now in a new era of what sorts the winners from the losers, the best from the rest and the victors from the victims. Sustained success requires an and-proposition of all three change modes.  Charles Darwin said it so well, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent.   It is the most adaptable to change.”  This correlates with the above spectrum of change modes:

• It is not just the strongest management in a change 1.0 mode which survives
• It is not just the most intelligent leadership  in a change 2.0 mode which survives
• It is also the most adaptable to change, in a change 3.0 mode of agile leadership which survives

We have to be wearing all three hats simultaneously – what can you do to wear each hat better?

Change 1.0

• There are so many excellent resources here at Executive Street.  Get stronger by harvesting these great management techniques.

Change 2.0

• One of the most intelligent models for leading change I have seen is John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change.  Get smarter by using it as a check list for assessing each of your change initiatives.

Change 3.0

• Become a student of agility:   agile-leadership, team-agility, organizational-agility, business-agility, and corporate-agility.
• Become an Agile Leader by changing your relationship with key attributes of agility:  Becoming an Agile Leader:  the 11 Attributes of Agility to Change Your Relationship with.
• Learn the secrets of Everyday Agile Leaders.

Have you been wondering why, despite all of your investments in Change Management 1.0 and Change Leadership 2.0 you’re not getting the traction you want on your desired trajectory of profitable growth?  This is because change has changed and your leadership has to change with it – the answer lies in Change 3.0 and the agile leadership required.  Business agility is a system and “every system is perfectly designed to give you the results you are getting”.

To change your results you need to change your system.  I invite you to design in more secrets of agility to become an Everyday Agile Leader.

2307 views