Topic 4: Provide strategic leadership during change process
© State of New South Wales, Department of Education and Training, 2008 Version 1
Objectives of strategic leadership
Strategic leadership provides the vision, direction, purpose for growth and context for the success of the corporation. It also initiates ‘outside-the-box’ thinking to generate future growth. Strategic leadership is not about micro-managing business strategies. Rather, it provides the umbrella under which businesses devise appropriate strategies and create value. In short, strategic leadership answers two questions:
· What?—by providing the vision and direction, creating the context for growth
· How?—by sketching out a road map that will allow you to unleash the business’ full potential.
The distinguishing characteristic of the strategic leadership level, compared with team-level and operational-level leadership, is that it implies responsibility for achieving the right balance between the whole (organisational needs) and the parts, be they large (functions) or small (teams or individuals).
Strategic thinking
In today's era of rapid change the profitable and sustainable growth will go to the companies whose leaders can see possibilities beyond their traditional markets. There are no generally applicable recipes for success in business as each business is unique. Effective strategic thinking can be stimulated, however, by adapting the framework for the process to your specific situation.
Strategic achievement
The two interwoven parts of strategic achievement are formulation and implementation. While both parts are essential to achieving superior organisational performance, the implementing strategy is where most companies succeed or fail.
Setting the right direction
Left-brain dominant organisations that are devoted to short-term, bottom-line, hard-data orientations usually neglect strategic leadership development and therefore breed left-brain dominant executives who seldom find time to communicate vision and direction, build teams, develop people, or plan meetings, except in a kind of crisis way. No wonder many individuals and institutions are caught going in the wrong direction, being in the wrong jungle, or leaning against the wrong wall. Strategic leadership can eliminate such misdirection and make things right again.
As a strategic leader, strategy development and implementation are your prime responsibility to ensure that your staff and business activities are going in the right direction. A strategic leader can provide vision and direction, motivate through love and passion, and build a complementary team based on mutual respect if they are more effectiveness-minded than efficiency-minded, and more concerned with direction and results than with methods, systems, and procedures.
Workplace learning
Reflect on your organisational strategic planning and priorities, and consider the direction you are heading.1. What are your organisation’s current strategic plans and values?
2. Are you able to share, direct and encourage people in the direction of these?
Journal
How should you convey direction and the values of your organisation? What directions and values should be conveyed to relevant individuals within your organisation or team? Record your ideas in your journal.
Professional collaboration
Set up a discussion area (face to face or online) to collect feedback and ideas on what broader planning inputs (eg state and DET plans) mean at your organisational level, and at your local team level. Ask your team and other stakeholders to contribute to ideas on:
· What are the directions in which we, as an organisation, are heading? How do the broader strategies and plans impact the demand and services of our organisation?
· How do changing business needs for VET impact our local business/client area, and our services, products and capability?
· What are services and products we could provide, or what could we do differently to respond to changes in the broader environment?
Portfolio
Collect information sources for keeping up to date with national, state and organisational strategic priorities which impact your local VET services.Keep a record the outcomes of team communications and discussions about your strategic directions and ideas for new services and products.
Resources
Academy of Management
‘The dynamics of collective leadership and strategic change in pluralistic organizations’ by Dennis J, Lamothe L & Langley A, 2000, Academy of Management Journal – In Press.
Australian Association for Research in Education
‘Continuity and change in educational workplaces’ by Terri Seddon
Australian Vocational Education and Training Research Association
Ann Rice, ‘Head Teachers and a Changing TAFE’. A research paper aimed at discovering how TAFE Head Teachers cope wit their change-focussed environment.
Department of Education and Training
Excellence and Innovation, an article discussing organisational culture.
TAFE NSW ICVET
Type ‘staron values’ into the search function for the site and select from the search results the article entitled ‘The importance of values in relation to capability development’ by Maret Staron, Manager TAFE NSW ICVET.
VOCED
VOCED is a research database for technical and vocational education and training. Some articles are available free online.
Analyse leadership during organisational change
Good teachers and leaders share a secret in their ability to communicate specific ideas or actions to students and employees. They know different people learn and respond in different and varied ways.
An exceptional leader can vary their management or leadership style to best suit an individual employee, work group or business situation. There are six leadership styles that can be employed in the workplace. These styles are coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pace-setting and coaching. Research conducted also shows that the more of these styles a leader exhibits, the better they perform as leaders in their organisation. The very best leaders can utilise four or more these styles.
Change generates conflict within an organisation. Successful leadership styles should vary with managerial implications of change and the amount of time needed to accomplish the needed revision.
Directive approach
Groups with few resources and limited time are likely to use a directive approach (coercive or authoritative styles) to accomplish the desired goals. This is a top down approach that would be familiar to those in the military or law enforcement fields.
Mixed directive approach
An organisation with a little more in the way of time and resources may use a mixed directive style that might include affiliative or democratic styles to accomplish their goals. This can be done when there is time for bargaining and negotiation among those involved in the required change.
Developmental directive approach
Finally, if change is planned and viewed in the long-term, a developmental directive type style can be used. Developmental directive leadership styles would include pace-setting and coaching. The developmental directive style offers the most opportunity for growth of a learning organisation and employee development. This type of planned change is for groups having substantial time and robust resources to facilitate the process.
Putting it together
An effective leader has a guiding vision or purpose for the organisation, passion or enthusiasm for the work being done, personal integrity, curiosity about the world and the daring to try something new. The skill of integrity is subdivided into self-knowledge, candour and maturity.
Workplace learning
Consider a recent organisational change which affected your work area or department. Which of the following variables were affected: task, technology, people, and/or structure? Diagnose the forces for and against change; the results of the change and how the resistance to change was managed.Portfolio
Identify, analyse and monitor the impact of organisational change within your department. Analyse your leadership role during the change process.Journal
Review your self-development goals in terms of developing leadership skills for responding to the impact of change on people and processes.
Resources
Australian Vocational Education and Training Research Association
Dr Stephen Black, ‘TAFE head teachers: Discourse brokers at the management/teaching interface’
Businessballs.com
Article on change management
www.business.com
This website has many articles related to business management, such as: strategic management and human resources.
Leadershipmastery.com
This website has information (and courses at an additional cost) on almost all aspects of leadership.
Analyse and confirm change processes and plans
Change management entails thoughtful planning and sensitive implementation and above all, consultation with, and involvement of, the people affected by the changes. If you force change on people normally problems arise. Change must be realistic, achievable and measurable. These aspects are especially relevant to managing personal change.
Before starting organisational change
Before starting organisational change, ask yourself: what do we want to achieve with this change, why, and how will we know that the change has been achieved? Who is affected by this change, and how will they react to it? How much of this change can we achieve ourselves, and what parts of the change do we need help with? These aspects also relate strongly to the management of personal as well as organisational change.
Check that people affected by the change agree
Check that people affected by the change agree with, or at least understand, the need for change, and have a chance to decide how the change will be managed, and to be involved in the planning and implementation of the change. Use face-to-face communications to handle sensitive aspects of organisational change management. Encourage your managers to communicate face-to-face with their people too if they are helping you manage an organisational change. Email and written notices are extremely weak at conveying and developing understanding.
If you think that you need to make a change quickly, probe the reasons—is the urgency real? Will the effects of agreeing on a more sensible time frame really be more disastrous than presiding over a disastrous change? Quick change prevents proper consultation and involvement, which can lead to difficulties that take time to resolve.
Actions, objectives and processes
For organisational change that entails new actions, objectives and processes for a group or team of people, use workshops to achieve understanding, involvement, plans, measurable aims, actions and commitment. Encourage your management team to use workshops with their people too if they are helping you to manage the change.
Consultation strengthens people
You should even apply these principles to very tough change like making people redundant, closures and integrating merged or acquired organisations. Bad news needs even more careful management than routine change. Hiding behind memos and middle managers will make matters worse. Consulting with people, and helping them to understand does not weaken your position, it strengthens it. Leaders who fail to consult and involve their people in managing bad news are perceived as weak and lacking in integrity. Treat people with humanity and respect and they will reciprocate.
The responsibility for managing change
The employee does not have a responsibility to manage change—the employee's responsibility is no other than to do their best, which is different for every person and depends on a wide variety of factors (health, maturity, stability, experience, personality, motivation, etc). Responsibility for managing change is with management and executives of the organisation. They must manage the change in a way that employees are able to cope with it.
Facilitate to enable change
The manager has a responsibility to facilitate and enable change and all that is implied within that statement, especially to understand the situation from an objective standpoint (to 'step back', and be non-judgemental). They need to help people understand reasons, aims, and ways of responding positively according to employees' individual situations and capabilities. Increasingly the manager's role is to interpret, communicate and enable, not to instruct and impose, which nobody really responds to well.
Change must involve the people
Change must involve the people—change must not be imposed upon the people. Be wary of expressions like 'mindset change', and 'changing people's mindsets' or 'changing attitudes', because this language often indicates a tendency towards imposed or enforced change. Re-locations, etc, all create new systems and environments, which need to be explained to people as early as possible so that people's involvement in validating and refining the changes themselves can be obtained.
Whenever an organisation imposes new things on people there will be difficulties. Participation, involvement and open, early, full communication are the important factors.
Workshops are very useful processes to develop collective understanding, approaches, policies, methods, systems, ideas, etc.
Staff surveys are a helpful way to repair damage and mistrust among staff provided you allow people to complete them anonymously, and provided you publish and act on the findings.
Empowerment
Management training, empathy and facilitative capability are priority areas; managers are crucial to the change process. They must enable and facilitate, not merely convey and implement policy from above, which does not work.
You cannot impose change; people and teams need to be empowered to find their own solutions and responses, with facilitation and support from managers, and tolerance and compassion from the leaders. Management, as well as leadership style and behaviour, are more important than clever process and policy.
The leader must agree and work with these ideas, or change is likely to be very painful, and the best people will be lost in the process.
Change management principles
At all times involve and agree to support people from within the system (system = environment, processes, culture, relationships, behaviours, etc, whether personal or organisational). Understand where you/the organisation is at the moment. Understand where you want to be, when, why and what the measures will be for having got there. Plan development towards appropriate achievable measurable stages. Communicate, involve, enable and facilitate involvement from people, as early, openly and as fully as possible.
John P Kotter's 'Eight steps to successful change'
John Kotter's highly regarded book Leading Change (1995) and the follow-up book The Heart of Change (2002) describe a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change. Kotter's eight step change model can be summarised as:
1. Increase urgency—inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
2. Build the guiding team—get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
3. Get the vision right—get the team to establish a simple vision and focus the strategy on the emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.