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Fact Sheet on Leadership and Change Management
The rationale behind training. Traditional training on leadership and change management focuses on general topics of interest whose overall objective is to enhance the capacity of employees to effectively enact or improve business processes and related work roles within the organization.
Limitations of traditional training. The most frequent complaint about generic training on leadership and change management is its low transfer of instruction from classroom to workplace. Gains are often short-lived and skills learned in training have limited carry-over to solving actual work problems. Low generalization can derive from two sources. First, the particular skills focused upon in training may not be of critical importance to the day-to-day leadership demands of the organization. Accordingly, newly acquired insights quickly atrophy from disuse. Second, training may not have gone far enough to help participants to integrate information in a form that permits transfer from intellectual understanding of the proposed process to achieving behavioral change in concrete or measurable terms.
A new paradigm. Our training addresses these potential pitfalls by taking a different route. We do not use 'off the shelf' or pre-programmed content. As organizational psychologists with specialization in developmental, clinical and learning theory, our training programs are process based. They are designed to encourage participants to acquire knowledge in a way that transfers from classroom learning to actual workplace behavior.
The theory behind the paradigm. Two related avenues of change must be addressed simultaneously for the success of an organizational growth or reengineering initiative. First, the change objectives expressed in the mission statement must be clearly articulated by executive decision-makers in the form of directives and strategies; and second, the obstacles to enactment of change programs by the employee base must be anticipated and systematically addressed. While employees may embrace the concepts of proposed organizational change, it is most usual that there are underlying human resistances that can be detrimental to successful implementation. No business process can be altered without also addressing the human processes that underlie it. In the absence of explicit attention to the human factor, the best of organizational development plans can be compromised by even the well intentioned.
From theory to practice. The success of the organization's growth effort will be predicated on the concerted efforts of executive and management employees to spearhead the change movement. Implicit in this is gaining an understanding of the interaction of restructuring efforts on both the structural and interpersonal levels of the organization. Stress on one level of function will affect the other. For example, changes to the formal structure (e.g., through downsizing, merging, or expanding into new markets, as examples) reconfigure role expectancies within the informal structure. Similarly, changes to the informal structure (e.g., through the introduction of technology, new key personnel, as examples) reconfigure the formal structure. Re-engineering any part of the system - from the job descriptions at the bottom to the mission at the top - will require corresponding growth and change of the whole system. Customized leadership and change management training identifies the interactions and stress points in the organizational structure that create obstacles to growth. It then targets these human development issues as the domain of learning. Lessening human resistance by teaching management to anticipate common reactions to growth leads to improved capacity of employees to accept the new and transforms an atmosphere of panic into one of productivity.
Constructing customized training. A leadership and change management training program is designed that takes into account the unique composition, developmental stage and current struggles of the participating organization. Mergers, acquisitions, secessions or downsizing, as common examples, each enjoin the cooperation of employees who come from distinctly different work environments and have differing expectations of the change process to work together. Successful leaders must forge the integration of the newly defined entity. Accordingly, to them falls the task of implementing the restructuring of employee roles and expectancies within the company. Training entails skill development in techniques to build the trust and support of the employee base, and correspondingly to anticipate and minimize negative reactions to growth demands. Enhancing the ability of leadership to effect a smooth transition is a management priority for the growing organization.
To meet this objective, the content of training is molded to reflect the particular areas of concern identified by the individual participants. Our method of approach is developmental and process driven, built around the group's progressive responses to our instructional activities and self-assessments over the course of training. Managers are helped to connect the dots between their unique concerns as leaders in the growth effort and corresponding employee needs. Instructional content is presented in multiple formats, including:
- Pantomime and interpretation
- Written exercises and script analysis
- Videotape vignettes
- Enactment of critical incidents through role-playing
- Modeling new behaviors by sculpting of dramatizations
- Self-assessment and performance feedback
Goal of training. The goal of training is to enhance the capacity of managers to become leaders in implementing organizational change. The integration of factual content to leadership behavior deepens with each reiteration of the material using the proposed presentation vehicles. The participant managers first learn, then try out, and finally shape their responses to the leadership challenges they identify as important to their management practice.