Most successful leaders have a playbook. You’ve built it over years of
experience. You know how to make decisions, mobilize people, solve
problems, deliver results and navigate pressure. That playbook is part of
what got you here.
But transformation has a way of changing the game.
The environment becomes more complex. Decisions become more interconnected.
The number of stakeholders increases. Teams are expected to deliver today's
results while simultaneously building something that may look very
different tomorrow.
Resistance during transformation rarely announces itself with, “I don’t
support this.”
More often, it hides in plain sight.
People agree in the meeting, then continue operating exactly as they did
before. Decisions get revisited. New processes are adopted inconsistently.
Leaders say they support the transformation while continuing to reward old
behaviors. Teams ask for more clarity when what they may really need is
greater confidence, capability, or trust.
One of the great paradoxes of transformation is that leaders must create
urgency while also having the patience to build something that lasts.
Executives are rewarded for moving quickly. You make decisions, solve
problems, push through barriers and expect progress. During transformation,
those instincts are valuable, until speed becomes the measure of success.
One of the greatest risks in transformation is not that your organization
will resist change. It is that everyone will agree to change, and still
never transform.
We see this with senior leadership teams all the time. There is a bold
ambition at the beginning, a new strategy, operating model, organizational
structure, technology platform, customer experience or way of working.
Leaders talk about doing things differently.
Then the machinery of the organization kicks in.
When transformation gets difficult, even experienced leaders can fall back
on what made them successful in the first place: expertise. You see the
problem, you know what should happen, so you step in.
That can work beautifully in the short term. But if you become the person
everyone depends upon for direction, decisions and problem solving, you may
inadvertently create the very thing transformation cannot afford:
organizational dependency on you.
Most executives would describe themselves as transformational leaders.
After all, they've led reorganizations, implemented new systems, delivered
strategic initiatives and guided their organizations through significant
change. Those experiences naturally reinforce the belief that they know how
to lead transformation.
Yet leading change and generating transformation are not the same thing.
