If I sucked you in with that title – if your eyebrows rose, if your internal voice scoffed, “Yeah, right!” – then I did exactly what I meant to do. If, on the other hand, you read that and felt a sinking feeling in your stomach, a knot in your shoulders, if your head drooped a bit – then you’re caught …
And then there’s Power
So, what about leadership and power? I was thinking about this question after last week’s article “Why lead?” Some people confuse leading with having power. And yes, leaders have power, but that’s not what’s important for true leadership. Those who go into leadership for the power it confers upon them aren’t leaders, in my view; instead, they’re likely to be toxic petty …
Why lead?
To lead or not to lead – is that the question? (With apologies to the Bard, Will Shakespeare.) And, yes, that is, or should be, the question. Because too many people accept a promotion to leadership who don’t really want it. Too many people accept that promotion not really wanting the responsibility and, yes, burden, of true leadership. They take …
The foundation for successful change
If you’re planning a change initiative, take a long hard look first at your company culture, because that’s the foundation from which you’re starting. If your culture isn’t strong and stable, your change leaders will have an uphill battle. Trust is a key factor – maybe the key factor – in company culture and readiness for change. As someone commented …
Leadership in these times
The vast majority of change management and change leadership thinking and teaching are about internal change. Planned change, strategic change, culture change, and so on. But what we’re experiencing more and more often these days is unexpected external change, the pandemic being just one example. Technology change, political change, economic change – it all blindsides us from outside, and is distressing and …
Workaround Superheroes part II
I wrote last week about Workaround Superheroes, and the resistance they can feel to any change that threatens that identity. Technology is an obvious example: you’ve got a tech system that’s been in place for a while, it’s got glitches, and there are one or two people who are uncannily brilliant at figuring out how to make things work despite …
Gotta love a workaround!
People love their workarounds. They put time and effort into figuring out how to “work around” a system glitch, a policy problem, a road block. And they’re proud of having figured it out. Now leadership has arrived with a change initiative: a brand new system, a revised policy, a road-block-removal team. And they – leadership – are wondering why people are …
Change is a choice
We often feel like change is inflicted upon us. To some extent, that’s true. We certainly didn’t choose the pandemic – but we all chose how we responded to it, how we led ourselves and others through it. We don’t choose the weather – but we choose how we adapt to it, changing plans as needed. We don’t choose to get laid off – but …
Let’s do something different
You know what? I’m tired of all the reports about the magnitude of change, the rate of change, the unreadiness for change, all of it. We know change is happening faster and faster. We don’t need another survey or C-suite research report to tell us this, or to tell us that leaders are worried about it. One of my core …
Whether the weather…
There’s an old tongue-twister that goes like this: I can’t imagine what the people in the path of Hurricane Helene are experiencing or, as I write this, what havoc the rapidly-spinning-up Hurricane Milton will wreak. This is change on a monumental scale. Sadly, it demonstrates all too clearly how people on the outskirts of the change, people observing the change, …