Month: March 2019

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Final Reflections

Reflecting over the past nine weeks in Leading Change in Digital Learning this course continuously challenged the status quo of what I came to expect or knew from past and present experiences.  It has served me with greater content, resources and learnings only to provide me a with more meaningful and greater depth and breadth of knowledge within topics of leadership, change management and project management, ones that I encounter daily in my workplace.

With the attitude of a growth mindset and continuous learning I felt I have gained new perspectives and appreciation of my own leadership behaviors and tendencies, enabling to further elevate and apply new found skills and knowledge.

I look back to my initial post after reading The Leadership Challenge and what most people look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly and easily follow (Kouzes, J. & Posner, B., 2012) and validated if I still believe my top attributes of inspiring, honesty, intelligence, supportive and competent hold true for me nine weeks later.  With careful consideration I see making a shift to add the attribute of forward looking in to the fold of my top leadership competencies and attributes. Knowing how much change is intertwined into everything I do, and leadership playing such a critical role in successful change, having the ability to look forward allows for more preparedness, proactiveness, and the ease in to welcoming the change, considering we are constantly facing change as part of the norm.

This speaks to adaptive leadership where “adaptive leaders do not just make changes, they carefully recognize potential changes in the external environment and consider the best path that will positively affect the organization” (Khan, 2017, p.178).  I translate this to suggest, why wait for it to change to happen, recognize it and be the change.

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” ― Barack Obama

Another opportunity that awaits my leadership repertoire is reflective leadership.  Being a reflective leader provides me with the chance to consciously and consistently make time to practice reflection with the intentions of improving organizational performance.  So many times, I find myself constantly just running and not taking the necessary moments to be more self-aware, mindful, and tap in to my personal intuitions and wisdom (Castelli, 2015).  By doing this it allows for greater accuracy in assessing strengths and weaknesses with the intentions of making positive improvements, enables a greater sense of awareness, and good judgement.

The other aspect of leadership I see myself learning to master is resilience.  Change is tenaciousness and aggressive yet part of organizational normalcy where I currently work.  With a pragmatic and optimistic perspective, I view change as invigorating, inspiring and equally exhausting and sometimes frustrating all bound together.  Resilience allows the measurement of the persistence of things coming at us and the ability to absorb change and disturbance, while still maintaining the same equilibrium (Weller, 2013).

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Managing Change for Learning in Digital Environments

“We are living today in a constantly growing global business environment, where change has become the norm for organizations to sustain their success and existence” (Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015, p.234).

Even with it being mainstream and the norm within an organizations DNA it is still suggested the success rate of change initiatives is less than 30 percent  (Balogun et al., 2004; Beer et al. 2000; Grover, 1999 as cited in Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015).  As suggested by Dunphy and Stace (1993) organizations, project teams, managers, consultants need to look at change as situational and need to vary change strategies to achieve “optimum fit” with the changing environment (p.235).  “Change methods need to be continuously evolving to align with the environmental factors” (Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015, p.235).  What this has provided is further clarity and an enhanced spotlight that the interconnectedness and multifacetedness of all the moving parts and people within an organization are all intertwined to how successful the change will be.  For instance, this has me thinking about a recent change that didn’t go as well as hoped in our organization and there was the lack of consideration of the changing workforce demographics over the past couple of years, to the recency of many more virtual teams and leaders, as well as many remote employees, cultures and subcultures within the organization just to name a few, which all had some role to play in the degree of successful change.

Some of the ways adoption and evolution have occurred with the changing landscape of change management are other disciplines addressing it within their own context through challenging, asking, research & study, and expert discussions, where they are looking at change within their own respective disciplines such as Psychology and Sociology, Management and Leadership and Organizational Development practices.  An example of this is the evolution of Management and Leadership where it was suggested that the five main leadership practices are “modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart” (Kouzes & Posner, 1995 as cited in Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015, p.239).  These are all very important characteristics of leaders to manage, support and lead change. If we can now evolve the way we see Management and Leadership we can then give the education, tools and resources to our leaders to be equipped to lead change.

My personal leadership style as it relates to Change Management would be aligned and described very closely to a Facilitative Approach where I firmly believe it is a team effort and we all succeed together.  There is a co-dependency, shared ownership and responsibility and involvement by stakeholders to support change.  Everyone from those on the project team, to super users, change champions, and end users are involved and contribute to the success.  It would also resemble closely to Adaptive Leadership where I find myself being part of the solution and identifying barriers and opportunities for success (Khan, 2017).  Finding myself constantly and consistently communicating in support of change is another key and essential attribute (Weiner, 2009).   I also seem my level of resilience as a leader demonstrated as a key behavior to others.  Showing persistence and the ability to absorb, embrace, adopt the change, along with my ability to support staff through it by developing engagement, excitement, empowerment and encouragement (Weller, 2013).  I find my organization is not aligned with my leadership values to change, as they are in quite an immature organization, exponentially growing and have not taken the time to slow down to consider the importance of having the organization and leaders prepared to support, manage, and lead change.  I am optimistic and do believe it will get there one day, however do know during the ‘growing pains’ change will not come easy and may be at the expense of others.

The role of leadership is key to change management.  “Leadership is about the innovation of new ideas and new concepts that brings new desirable outcomes.  The entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation embedded in leadership are very important to successfully managing change” (Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015, p.239).  As leaders we must help the organization move towards our vision and help those around us see how this change will get us there.  Leaders help make and support the right decisions at the right time to help steer and guide with changing environments.  Its leaders who motivate and empower people at work during uncertain times and times of change, when there is ambiguity and uncertainty.

As one of my own personal leadership attributes, resilience enables to move along with change at a must faster pace.  Resilience helps develop, engage, educate, empower, and encourage those that demonstrate that behavior.  Resilience requires adaptation and evolution to new environmental conditions, utilizing technology to change practices where it is desirable, however representing practices if they are deemed to be necessary (Weller, 2013).

 

References

Al Haddad, S., & Kotnour, T. (2015). Integrating the organizational change literature: a model for successful change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(2), 234-262.

Biech, E. (2007). Models for Change. In Thriving through change: A leader’s practical guide to change mastery. Alexandria, VA: ASTD [Books24x7 database]

Khan, N. (2017). Adaptive or Transactional Leadership in Current Higher Education: A Brief Comparison. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(3), 178-183.

Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(67).

Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital Resilience in Higher Education. European Journal of Open Distance and E-Learning, 16(1), 53-66.