The Learning Leader as Change Agent

Guest post contributed by
Holly Burkett

Managing change and cultural transformation is among the top challenges facing executives and the one area in which they’re most likely to partner with learning leaders and talent managers.

Today's Leadership Challenges

More than ever before, organizations need leaders who can anticipate and react to the nature and speed of change; act decisively without always having clear direction or certainty; navigate through complexity, chaos, and confusion; and maintain effectiveness despite constant surprises and a lack of predictability. Yet few business leaders rate themselves as "highly effective" at managing change, most work for an organization with no change strategy in place, and most have no designated person to lead change efforts.

Given these challenges, how can L&D help?

Leverage leadership development. Leadership development remains a key strategy for building change capability. Developing collective change capabilities across all levels has more impact than simply focusing upon mid or senior-level managers. Effective development methods include the combined use of self-reflection exercises, coaching, mentoring, stretch assignments, action learning, and simulations in which participants are placed in real-world scenarios and roles where they must lead change. Development approaches should be contextualized and customized to fit the capabilities required of specific change roles, including:

• changesponsors (those who lead change strategy)
• changemanagers (those who facilitate change in their operational areas)
• changeproject members (those who plan, design, and implement the change plan)
• changeagents (those who advocate for change efforts, make the changes relevant to theirneeds, and contribute to successful outcomes)

Developing collective change capabilities across all levels has
more impact than simply focusing upon mid or senior-level managers.

Keep in mind that change capability is about more than stand-alone, one-and-done leadership development programs, however. It is about nurturing change responsiveness and resiliency throughout an entire organization so that it is fully embedded within an organization’s culture and DNA.

Integrate change capabilities. Effectivedevelopment includes the integrated use of tools thatassess, develop, and reward change capabilities duringrecruiting, performance management, and career development, includingsuccession planning. Other enabling mechanisms like change networks,change academies, or communities of practice can help align change-readinessand responsiveness with employees’ daily work practices.

Manage change capacity. While change capability is a skill, ability, or mindset that can be developed or improved, change capacity relates to the ability of individuals and organizations to accommodate new change demands. Change fatigue is one of the biggest barriers to employees’ overall capacity to adopt or adapt to change. Change fatigue sets in when people feel pressured to make too many transitions at once or when change initiatives have been poorly thought through, rolled out too fast, or put in place without adequate preparation. An integrated, well-planned change strategy is meaningless if an organization lacks the capacity to execute it. In reality, capacity is finite; people can only do so much and there are only so many people to do the work.

As change agents, learning leaders must sensitize senior leaders to the risk of frenetic, disorganized change that goes beyond what individuals or teams can manage. Best practices include the use of a vetting process where proposed change projects are subjected to rigorous “war room” screenings by key stakeholders and then prioritized according to their importance to business strategy, financial impact, and the probability of success.  

As change agents, learning leaders must sensitize senior leaders to the risk of frenetic,
disorganized change that goes beyond what individuals or teams can manage.

Final Thoughts. The pressures for change are real, change is here to stay, and organizations are looking to L&D for help in gaining the confidence and skills needed to navigate in a business climate of constant disruption. While the effort may seem daunting, we have a responsibility to step up and embrace our role as change agents with the goal of helping an organization transform itself for the better. This means positioning learning and performance initiatives within the context of broader change. It also means integrating the discipline of change management into our own mindsets and skill-sets so that we can leverage learning as a catalyst for innovation, change, and high performance.

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About the Author

Holly Burkett, PhD, SPHR is principal of Evaluation Works, a performance consultancy in Davis, CA.  For over 20 years, she’s helped diverse public and private sector clients develop resilient learning and performance capabilities that create high engagement and operational excellence. Author of the award-winning book “Learning for the Long Run: 7 Practices for Sustaining a Resilient Learning Organization,” she is a sought-after speaker, coach, and workshop facilitator. Learn more at: http://hollyburkett.com/  

Future-Proofing just released!

We are happy to announce that Future-Proofing Your Organization by Teaching Thinking Skills has finally arrived! And.... it was just featured in the list of Top 21 Self-Published Business Books You Need to Read.  (Currently in 14th place, but you can help "up" that by up-voting the synopsis.)If you'd like to learn more about the book, download a free chapter, or purchase a copy. Click here. 

Developing the Solid 70

When your organization decides who gets training – who gets chosen? In terms of performance, employees can be classified as A players, B players and C players.

A players are your superstars – and make up only 20% of the typical staff. C players – those whose performance is passable but not great – make up another 10%.

The bulk of employees are B players – the solid 70. B players are the heart and soul of organizations. They do consistently good work. They represent your company – and your success. When a customer has an interaction with your company there is a 70% chance they are dealing with a B player. You want your B players to be the best they can be. Too often companies have such limited availability of training that it goes to the A players.

If you’d like to develop your solid 70, you can find a number of suggestions in this earlier posting. But it doesn’t have to be your responsibility to figure it out! During the next round of performance reviews (assuming your company still does them) ask individuals what they are interested in, what they would like to attempt or test, and what skills they would like to develop. 

No matter how good your A players are, they will never make up for the “solid citizen” B players. And the more you can incrementally increase the B player’s skills, the more your organization will benefit.  

The Dark Side of Leadership

lightening

Bold, innovative leader or r narcissistic, paranoid personality disorder? You decide.

A series of articles and research papers investigate the "dark personality traits" of leaders. While most of us are looking forward, toward ways to develop our future leaders (topics, training, experiences, etc.), some researchers are investigating the personality traits that bring our "rising stars" to us in the first place.

Leader Development and the Dark Side of Personality (Leadership Development Quarterly); The Dark Side of Trait Leadership (Penn State Psychology Blog); Dark Side Personality and Extreme Leader Behavior (slide show from Kaiser Leadership Solutions presented at the 28th Annual SIOP Conference) The "father" of the Dark Side (the Hogan Development Survey (HDS))

Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will find the top 3 personality predictors for leadership derailment, by industry (in general terms, of course).

Marketing Your Training Offerings Through an Internal Conference

If your organization has a “catalog” or prescribed curriculums, a wonderful way to engage with potential attendees is to hold a yearly “internal conference.”

Schedule a day which mirrors a professional development conference and invite all employees to avail themselves of the informative, free training sessions. Establish tracks, such as technology, leadership, service, etc., and within those tracks schedule one-hour previews of the various courses to give potential students a taste of what attending the full-blown offering might be like.

In order to determine what content to highlight, think about the “ah-ha” moments in each class. Impress your internal conference attendees with things they may not know (wow, I need to take this class in order to find out…), interactive and engaging topics (this seems like it will be a fun class to attend), and previews of how their on-the-job performance will be enhanced (I really should learn more about financial reports if I want to move in to management).

As participants leave the preview, ask them to complete an evaluation form, just like you would at a professional conference. On that form ask them if they would like more information about the topic, if they would refer a colleague to take the class (and that person’s contact info), and of course ask them for their own contact information. 

Now you have accumulated a “marketing list” of interested and engaged employees for future class offerings and you’ve also determined what topics are most in-demand in your organization, for the coming year.