Want an Effective Change Leader?

Want an effective change leader in your organization? First, what does effective change leadership look like? How do you identify the skills of an effective change leader in your organization? Explore how to have an effective change leader in your organization.

Written by Catherine Adenle

If you want an effective change leader, do you have a clear definition of who a true change leader is in your business?

Change leadership is the ability to influence and enthuse others through personal advocacy, vision and drive, and to access resources to build a solid platform for change (Higgs and Rowland, 2000).

Leadership is often viewed as key to successful change (American Management Association, 1994).

How do you decide who should lead to a major change in your organization? Although there are many cases of successful change management initiatives in organizations, the skills or attributes of the individuals leading these change initiatives are less often the point of focus. Organizations don’t change, people do. It is important that change leaders are identified in organizations. Then, these leaders must be trained to become effective leaders of change.

See Change Management: Critical Skill for Leaders

Apart from the vision of what needs to change, why, how and what the benefits of change will be, have you got the resources – technical and leadership capacity in place to carry through and lead a change? Effective change leadership happens when owners of change provide direction, guidance and support to the people who are implementing the change as well as those having to adapt to change.

Change is everywhere you turn in organizations. At the core of every change initiative is a leader to manage it. There’s always the necessity to breathe the desire new life into any organization that has gone through change to revitalize its values, ways of working, thinking, behaving and providing service. In organizations, one change often leads to another and many, and before long employees can become weary. A change-ready organization is one with an effective change leader who can always energise and empower people during and after the change.

These days, digital transformation means advanced technology is at the core of virtually every company’s business model. End to end workflows is being digitized. A leader in charge of transformation will know how to reconcile the increasing need for the digitization of their business models while trying to ensure that they carry people along and create organizational climates that have an overarching sense of purpose and collective ambition.

An effective change leader will know how to initiate, execute, monitor and manage enterprise-wide transformation using a collective effort, with accountability distributed throughout the organization.

See Successful Change Implementation in Organizations: 4 Components

The quick guide below illustrates the skills and attributes of an effective change leader.

An effective change leader has 3 key skills:

1. People skills
2. Excellent communication skills
3. Problem-solving skills

In addition to these 3 core skills, they also have a personality profile of being tenacious, affable and confident.

See Implement Sustainable Change: 5 Key Elements (Infographic)

Infographic: The Attributes of an Effective Change Leader

See 10 Principles of Leading Change Management

What do you think are the other attributes of a good change leader? Let’s hear from you.

Feel free to add more skills by leaving your comment below. You may also share this post.

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