Change is the key component of growth and in business change calls for vision, a driving team along with a tight context if it is to be delivered successfully and positively. This is why emphatic leadership is so vital in a business.
In this corporate coaching article from Stuart Hayes Leadership, we explore what it takes to cause lasting favourable changes in a company.
In an enterprise, most of us have been advised at some time that; “if you’re not pushing forwards you’re actually heading backwards.” Essentially, this goes straight to the heart of why change is important to a positive and robust business. Healthy businesses progress with the times and reinvent themselves. Below par businesses resist change, go stale and then fizzle out.
But while inquiring into change, it is very important to not chuck the baby out with the bath-water in that, on the flipside to change is the importance of consistency and consistency is also important, specifically in processes that have to do with products or services, quality control, profit and perhaps, to some extent, natural development.
So, these two contrary concepts need to coexist in a healthy business. Exactly how do we produce that? The answer is to realise that effective companies need both change and also consistency, change is the territory of business leaders while consistency the territory of supervisors. Considering these two side by side, it is not difficult to see why consistency as well as change (in fact business managers and business leaders) are often testing to bind together.
In this article, I’m going to flesh out the main aspects of excellent leadership including how these elements work together to create favourable and sustainable transformation. As a professional leader, the formula I make use of to produce this transformation involves an easy but powerful four step procedure which I strongly recommend, here it is below:
FIRST: Ask those confronting questions!
I occasionally wonder whether it’s tougher to recognize where you are really starting from or where you’re specifically striving to get to! As business people and entrepreneurs, we commonly succumb to the temptation of looking at our endeavours through coloured glasses and then neglect to truthfully acknowledge where we are starting from – our ‘point A’.
Acknowledging your actual Point A is not easy: it is best accomplished by having the guts to ascertain, ask, then honestly respond to all the confronting questions that apply to your company, your methodology and how you are progressing to it. You know the questions; they are the same ones you often stumble over when they hit you out of the blue at a dinner party!
My suggestion– pull on your thickest skin, find somebody else to distinguish and ask the questions that should be asked … and don’t enable your vanity to rob you of the genuine self-questioning that needs to come next. It may be the difference separating your success from your failure.
SECOND: Recognise and articulate your vision and your reason for it
Recognising both the specific details of your ‘change vision’ (your ‘point B’) and also the specifics of your true, core reason for change is likewise difficult. If there is an absolute number one key for attaining favourable and also sustainable change, however, this is it!
Without specifics, your vision is just a dream.
Without a deep and authentic grounds as to why you desire to chase after your vision, you will battle to inspire employees towards it. Most people need to share your enthusiasm. To move your team, you have to be able to move your team.
Fortunately, those associates who do share and welcome your vision will certainly stay with you and become the driving force for creating it. This is why great leaders appreciate the stick is not nearly as mighty as the carrot.
My suggestion– recognise the types of men and women you will need to propel your change vision. Spend enough time to establish precisely who they may be and then what it is about your vision that could move them.
THIRD: Draw up your ‘How-To’
From here on, the crucial elements of your success are keeping to what works, keeping it uncomplicated … and also continuing to feed the passion that ties your driving group to your vision.
Having clarified your ‘why’, allocating undisturbed thinking time to identifying the vital elements of your ‘how’ is essential.
My suggestion – try to incorporate your driving team in this activity:
– Identify the repeatable activities that will accomplish your aim (and keep them simple).
– Identify both the resources you have readily available as well as the resources you are going to require (actually require!).
– Figure out the finite list of things that might block your progress. Establish backup plans for those that are legitimately precarious.
FOURTH: Accomplish positive and sustainable change in your enterprise.
Staying on course and accomplishing positive and sustainable transformation is a 99% leadership and a 1% management mix of fuel, context and accountability.
The fuel aspect is PR in its purest form. Its intention is to build and then sustain momentum: communicate the vision, teach the simple, repeatable actions, celebrate successes … and inevitably teach your driving team to do the very same things. Each reinforces that the change vision is bona fide and that the group’s approach is the correct one.
Importantly, as leader, the code of conduct or ‘context’ you develop around your group as well as its behaviour is critical to their ability to stick together and then accomplish outcomes. Your group will look to you to live by this code at all times and when you do it will begin to take on a life of its own.
This is where keeping on track and also achieving positive and enduring change needs your personal dedication, courage and discipline: being consistent with the message you teach and then getting in touch with your team in an authentic way when delivering it is important.