The other day, a client asked how much AI impacts my work as a leadership consultant and trainer. I rather flippantly answered, “Well, no one leads the AI bot!” And that’s true. Leaders don’t lead bots as if they were humans. But they do need to understand how AI is impacting the humans they lead. They need to recognize that …
Is AI “killing” change management?
That’s a question asked in a recent Fast Company article. The article suggests, with some validity, that change comes too fast these days for traditional change management to keep up, especially now that change has been accelerated by AI. No question there. The article starts out by claiming that: I don’t disagree that change leadership is about managing resistance, at least …
Lights! Camera! Action!
When I teach workshops on the tools of change leadership, I always end by jumping up and down on one essential final point. Which is that these tools are less than useless – they are actually damaging – if you do not take action on what you’ve learned by using them. Wait, what? Damaging? Yes. If you go through the …
Thermostat – or thermometer?
Have you noticed there are some people that just seem to exude calm? And there are other people who seem to exude chaos? There’s an old, intended-to-be-amusing rhyme that goes: “When in danger or in doubt, Run in circles! Scream and shout!” Not very funny, really, because that’s obviously the epitome of unhelpful – and the epitome of what leaders …
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 …
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, …
Got change? Conversate!
I talk a lot about the importance of one-on-one conversations when change is underway. These one-on-one conversations are essential – people won’t always tell you what you need to know if they have to say it in front of a group. And these conversations are entirely different from the regular one-on-one meetings leaders should be (ahem!) having with their people. …
Plans, change, and reality (oh my!)
No plan, no matter how beautiful, thorough, sensible, and practical, survives contact with reality. No blueprint, template, model, road map, or script will survive contact with your change initiative. Let me be clear: there’s a place for a solid model of any process. And let me be even more clear: I am 100% a systems-and-process person, and I’m 100% in …
“Want to” or “have to”?
Want to change – or have to change? Which one is it? Which one is driving your change? People love making blanket statements. One I saw recently was that we only change when we think something is – or soon could be – wrong. Is that actually true? I suppose one could say that I started doing certain types of …