Business

Defining leadership and exercising it: the key success factor missing in change management

How you define and exercise leadership in today’s climate will be a major determining factor in the fortunes of your organization, and especially in the context of managing change.

Let’s define leadership: leadership is the process by which one person influences others to achieve a goal. Leaders have a vision that they share with others. It is the leader who unites the organization with beliefs, values ​​and knowledge … and who makes it more cohesive and coherent.

Leadership is also defined as a process that … motivates people to excel in the field in which they are working.

This is you? Is this your direct upline report?

So can leadership be taught?

Many would say that leadership qualities are not innate, but can be developed gradually through education and self-study. Personally, I’m not so sure about that.

The current assumption is that leadership can be taught. There are many courses, seminars and books on leadership and a great demand for training to develop leadership skills.

Based on my life experience and how I define leadership, it is my point of view that you can only teach leadership skills to someone who has the [and maybe unrecognised and unacknowledged] potential to be a leader.

Management skills can be taught to almost anyone with at least average intelligence and education. [and in saying that I am not denigrating management]. However, a brief review of the differences between leadership and management suggests that leadership owes as much to “nature” as to “nurture.”

It might not be a popular thing to say, but in my experience, most people would rather be led than led. In my experience, the vast majority of people are followers and not leaders and they are very happy to continue being that. Leaders are a very small percentage of the population, maybe less than 1%, and really strong leaders with the potential to really change things. [for better or worse] probably less than 0.1%.

Leadership Versus Management: Some Useful Points of Comparison

– Leaders are obvious – Managers are appointed

– Leaders face change – Managers face complexity

– Leaders set direction – Managers plan

– Leaders push for change – Managers promote stability

– Leaders are visionary, inspiring and have an eye on the future – Managers are operational, practical and based on the ‘now’

– Leading cares about future direction – Management cares about uncertain conditions: implementation, order, efficiency and effectiveness

– Leadership is strategic – Management is operational

– Leaders set the direction – Managers develop the ability to achieve the plan

– Leaders motivate and inspire – Managers control and solve problems

– Leaders need to ‘step out onto the balcony’ to detect operational and strategic patterns within the organization – Managers get stuck in the field of action.

– Leadership defines the culture of the organization – Management instills the culture in the organization

Leadership in change management

Clearly, both skill sets are needed.

But very often in change management situations, the emphasis is on process and situation management and not leadership.

The leadership characteristics described above are crucial to fulfilling a change program director / leader role: leadership [and being seen to lead and own] the entire change initiative.

How we define leadership, how we understand it, and how we exercise it is of utmost importance in today’s business and economic climate, as the quality of your leadership could be an important factor in determining your company’s fortunes, and especially in a situation change management. . And this is where properly applied leadership skills are exercised to the best effect when the holistic and broad perspective of a program-based approach to change management is employed.

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