All Leadership is Change Leadership | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

GUEST POST from Randy Pennington

Taxi companies could have created a ride scheduling and payment app. They didn’t.

There are a number of reasons why it didn’t happen, but the biggest reason was reluctance to challenge the status quo.

The same goes for a host of other companies. Blockbuster’s failure to proactively innovate—or even take the opportunity to purchase Netflix—is one of the most notable. We can’t forget, however, Nokia, IBM, Kodak, BlackBerry, MySpace, and RadioShack.

We don’t know the exact conversations about change in any of these companies, but it is a very safe bet to assume that no one stood up and said, “Let’s do nothing because we want the company to fail.”

We all want our organizations to continually be better. If they are going to be better, we must do at least some things different. If things are going to be different, they have to change.

That makes all leadership, especially in today’s world, change leadership.

Change Leadership not Change Management

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper famously said: “You manage things. You lead people.”

Unfortunately, the remainder of her statement is often omitted: “We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership.”

That happened with our approach to change, too.

We have gone overboard managing the immense amount of data, projects, and things to be coordinated and corralled in our attempts to “manage” change. It stems from our desire to remove the messiness and bring order to the process of change.

It is a worthwhile objective, but as historian Henry Adams reminded us, “Chaos was the law of nature. Order was the dream of man.”

Change—especially the transformational growth we need today—is always messy. Most important, it is more likely to fail because of faulty leadership rather than faulty management.

Leadership is about influence. Nothing more and nothing less. For our organizations and institutions to flourish in the future, we need more leaders who can influence others to disrupt the status quo.

Disrupting the Status Quo

We come by our desire for order honestly. The human brain appears is hard-wired to value certainty and view uncertainty as a potential threat.

The human application of Newton’s First Law also has an impact. We learned in high school physics that objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion tend to remain in motion until they are acted upon by a greater force in the opposing direction.

That explains the why inertia of the status quo exists. It doesn’t actually help you overcome it. Here are four actions you can take right now.

1. Create Emotional Readiness to Counteract Fear

2. Provide Involvement and Support

3. Tell Positive Stories Early and Often

4. Go First

Change is  hard. Resistance, risk, and fear are real. The important decisions and strategies on which you need to execute can be scary. If, on the other hand, there is no resistance, there is no substantial change.

Change no longer influences the environment. It is the environment. Your job is to inspire and influence a culture that continuously challenges the status quo to remain relevant to your customers and stakeholders. That means all leadership is change leadership.

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