A Beginner’s Guide to Change Leadership

Lead your organization with confidence.

Change leadership requires confidence, transparency, and engagement.

Modern leadership requires a unique skillset to meet today’s demands. Executives are faced with rapid digital transformations, including Artificial Intelligence adoption; Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) rollouts; automating old ways of doing business; and workforce transformation pressures that include multiple generations of workers. Decision-making happens fast; and the demands are more complex. To navigate this sea of change, one key competency stands out: change leadership.

Change leadership is more than decision-making; it’s a human-centered style of leading that allows employees to feel supported, seen, and understood as they embark on individual change journeys.

Here are a few key aspects of effective change leadership:

Purpose and intention.

Employees are hungry for a well-crafted change story that explains WHY a change is happening and why they should take part in the change. Using a strong organizational compass, the change leader communicates a change story in a way that creates meaning for their organization and reduces resistance. When leading with purpose and intention, change leaders inspire creativity and commitment that builds the momentum needed to achieve the critical “tipping point” for change.

Transparency.

In order to generate trust across an organization during times of change, leaders should share their own journey with the change. When a leader admits that some parts of a change are hard, while also sharing how they are navigating the change personally, they give permission for employees to move through their own change journeys authentically. Trust goes hand-in-hand with empathy, and when a change leader shares their own challenges, they imply an understanding of the personal and collective challenges facing their employees and engender a culture of caring that is essential for employees during times of change.

Engagement.

When a change leader is engaged in the process of a change—showing up to project meetings, holding listening or Q&A sessions with employee groups, attending demos, and supporting the teams responsible for rolling out a change, they embody the change and employees understand its importance to their work and the organization, overall. In humanizing leadership, this is sometimes referred to as “the will to have an impact,” or the ability to “influence others toward a common goal.”

Coalition-building.

When an organization goes through change, employees need to see a united force for change from their leaders. Identifying the right leaders for the coalition is a key step early in the process. Change coalition leaders understand the unique needs of their lines of business and can cascade the central change story in ways that create meaning for the unique work of their teams—contextualizing the change and making it personal. A consistent approach to the change among leadership communicates confidence, transparency, and a shared vision for the future that employees understand and buy.

Fostering a culture of learning.

Change by its nature requires new processes, new skills, and often re-organization, which might mean new teams and new alignments or reporting chains. By fostering a culture of learning, leaders create a climate of continuous learning and improvement. Rather than framing change as a finite experience, they promote collaboration and ongoing learning opportunities, leading by example with their attendance at knowledge-building events and training sessions (or sharing their experience during town halls or email communication). Change leaders ensure feedback loops are in place for employees to share their experiences, while also giving leadership vital information on how to strengthen knowledge-building efforts and the opportunity to recognize and reward employee knowledge-sharing and accomplishments.

Velvære offers change leadership training that takes leaders through a learning experience that leaves them with the tools to hit the ground running. Building change agility and resilience is key to today’s business world. We also offer coaching and strategic planning services to support executives as they lead large—or small—transformations for their organizations.