Leading And Managing Change

One of the top three critical skills for 21st century leaders is leading and managing change.

In 2009 researchers found that as high as 70 percent of all change initiatives fail or get derailed. "It has never been more important to ensure changes intended to maintain growth and expansion are properly managed," say the researchers.  "If change is mis-handled, the outcomes can be disruptive at best, and disastrous at worst. In some cases, failed change efforts will lead to even more serious trouble, as productivity, morale, and money are wasted on lost causes."

Change is the one constant in organizations today. Change is no longer an event, but a way of life. Change is driven by numerous factors – sophisticated customers demanding more, better, faster, cheaper; rapidly developing technology; challenging economic environment; the global competitive marketplace; and increased demands from knowledge workers for opportunity, career development, and work/life balance.

Leaders are responsible for facilitating change – initiating (leading) change, managing it, responding to it, helping others learn to adapt, and dealing with its effect on people and their performance.  John Kotter maintains that many transformation efforts fail because leaders typically fail to acknowledge to their groups that large-scale change takes a lot of time, effort, and patience.

It also takes skills. When leaders learn to improve their own flexibility, and then to anticipate, plan, engage others, and manage the impact of change, they will seek out opportunities to bring about positive change. Skilled change leaders bring the following benefits to your organization:

• Greater flexibility and adaptability to deal with a dynamic business environment
• Increased nimbleness to innovate in response to a rapidly changing marketplace
• Greater support for change initiatives, producing enduring results
• Quicker implementation of change initiatives
• A changed culture that embraces change

Leading And Managing Change Training Highlights:

• why traditional change efforts in organizations typically do not achieve successful lasting results
• why change is hard and painful, why people resist; Why change is harder for employees than for managers
• fatal pitfalls that managers encounter while leading a change effort – and how to avoid them
• using the AHA change model to plan, design, and implement successful organizational change
• the skills involved in leading and managing change
• how to manage the emotions associated with change
• how to get buy-in by engaging stakeholders in planning and executing change initiatives
• how to deal with resistors and get them to embrace change

Leading And Managing Change Methodology

Participants in Leading And Managing Change spend most of their workshop time in exercises, case studies, and simulations allowing hands-on practice. They bring their own real situations to use in the practice sessions.

Leading And Managing Change Customized Solutions

To ensure that training is not just an “event,” but instead produces enduring results, we customize Leading And Managing Change to fit your unique situation, business strategy, culture, and people.  After discussion with you and other experts within your organization, we select the emphasis, specific skills to be developed, key learning points, exercises, and case studies for practice to create a solution tailored just for you.

Leading And Managing Change Applications

The following are some of the ways our clients have used custom versions of Leading And Managing Change:

• To equip leaders with skills and tools for deploying critical new business strategies
• To prepare leaders to design and implement significant organizational changes
• To prepare high potential mid-level managers to take on the complex responsibilities of more senior roles
• To support major new business strategies and innovation efforts
• To bring merged companies into alignment

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