Willingness to change plays an important role for nextleader
Changes accompany our entire life, privately and professionally, and shape our actions. Companies and the people who work in them are also in a constant state of change. We are familiar with such phrases and deduce from them that a manager should, among other things, possess change competence.
We maintain that leadership gets its justification from change in the first place and that it is therefore the core task of the nextleader.
If everything stayed the same or the status quo fit, the executives would be superfluous. Change always takes place through a movement from an actual state to a desired target state. The manager is responsible for steering them in the right direction. And it will become their day-to-day business. The nextleader has to deal with three things:
- Successful change is always a joint effort of many people and factors. Yet leadership is at the core of successful change. Because as a rule it depends on the nextleader whether a change process is started at all, whether it goes in the right direction and whether it achieves a good result over all obstacles. The nextleader therefore needs a clear focus in order to maintain an overview.
- As heterogeneous as life is, so are the goals and aspirations of employees. A joint commitment with many individualists is becoming increasingly difficult and complex. Therefore, the nextleader must have a high level of awareness and sharpened sensitivity – even to weak signals. But perception alone is not enough. The ability to interpret the impulses for change, to interpret them and then to make the right decisions is just as important.
Jim Collins writes in his best-selling book, The Way to the Best, that breakthrough performance consists of continuous improvement (change) plus presentable results. So change alone is never enough.
According to a study by the Technical University of Munich, only about one fifth of all change projects are really successful (TU Munich). That is little. What is the reason?
The main causes range from insufficient commitment on the part of upper management (58%) [nbsp]to unclear target images and visions of the change processes (57%) to a lack of experience on the part of managers in dealing with uncertainties among the affected employees (55%). All of this makes success more difficult. As a result, 45% of those affected act as “brakemen” and only 19% drive change[nbsp]. This leads on to the third point:
- Leaders should be and give orientation. But is that true in every case? The next employee would rather not be given a rigid direction, along the lines of “This way and now run.” It is conceivable that he would much rather think and be involved. In our view, the nextleader should therefore show the employee perspectives, communicate innovative solutions and rather supportively steer the orientation movement in a common direction.
You can see: Leading change successfully requires a special competence that can be summarized in the term “leadership wisdom”. This wisdom is a composition of farsightedness, interpretive competence, a feeling for people and their needs, inspirational power and sovereignty.
The old management skills of planning, steering and controlling could soon be better taken over by machines. For example, the IT market research firm Gartner estimates that by 2018, more than three million employees worldwide will already have a computer or robot as their boss.
The nextleader will therefore derive its legitimacy from change movements with a meaningful orientation. In the future, even more so than before, so that he can keep the wheel in his hand in an ever faster changing time and his team together on course. Full speed ahead!
