Mark McCatty, Leadership & Team Advisor

Leadership is influence.

Leadership Return on Investment reflects the amount of value that a leader generates through their leadership efforts. Leaders are judged by the results they obtain. Leaders are influencers and have the power to generate change. The hard truth is that a manager who is unable to effectively create desired change improvements through the people in their area is judged to be an ineffective leader. Remember: that leadership results come through people.

Creating change is always a challenge. People go through predictable stages when faced with the possibility of having to change. These cycles of change have been compared to the grieving cycles. When people are presented with the need to change, when the change is dictated to them, they will go through a stage of initially denying the need for the change. Then they may move to resisting the change.

Leadership is influence. Leaders influence others to work together to accomplish shared goals. Effective communication is an operational means of influence. By sharing ideas, discussing concepts, and seeking common values to align around, leaders are able to utilize their influence to obtain mutually beneficial results.

True leaders understand the value and influence that come from having strong connections to others through positive conversations. Good conversations lead to trusting relationships. Having a trusted relationship is critical to a leader’s ability to influence. Challenges that organizations face, and the obstacles to successful outcomes are frequently found – not in the technical environments – but in the social environments. The social environment is where the value of affirmative connections yields positive results.

Conversations Create Connections

I was speaking with a group of non-profit leaders recently and we had a very interesting conversation about organizational change. From our discussions I learned that non-profit organizations have the very same struggles that other organizations have. These leaders shared some frustration with the fact that there is some hesitation to accept and adopt to change, even among those we would call engaged employees. This is the same frustrations I’ve heard for years  from leaders in manufacturing, financial institutions, and higher education/university work environments.

There are two types of change that organizations deal with. The two types of change are planned change and emergent change. Planned change is top-down and mainly driven by management. While emergent change is bottom-up and comes mostly from employee levels.

Planned change is compelled by a business need that the management structure observes. The management group decides that a change is required to support business values. These business values may be related to safety, productivity, customer satisfaction, quality, or budget/profit. The expectation is that the decided change must be implemented in order to achieve the desired positive outcome goals for the organization. The desire of management is that those responsible for implementing the change will understand, accept, and be fully devoted to carry-out the change initiative.

A frequent conversation with managers recently is that of dealing with change. There is a great deal of frustration among organizational leaders, and money wasted by these organizations when implementing good, well-meaning change. Yet it seems that even when the change is clearly beneficial – like keeping employees safer – there is still a significant force of resistance to accepting and implementing the new changes.

Rhetorical question: Why would someone refuse to follow rules that will keep them safer?

What we know about change is that somebody will resist it.

~Mark McCatty