Leading Change in a Changing World
For over twenty years, our Growth and Leadership Forum’s HR Leaders Roundtable has met regularly to learn and share on topics of shared interest. The Roundtable includes many industries, including companies such as BHP, Google, Meta, Coca-Cola, Marriott, Johnson & Johnson, and Chevron. Coping with and leading change have been constant themes for this community!
Our most recent gathering explored the growing challenges, and drivers of change. Common themes were the increasing pace and frequency of change, change driven by technology, and the impact of change across all levels of the organization. Now, more than ever, employees are under immense pressure to perform and adapt. This situation requires all leaders to effectively lead others through complex and continuous change.
Let me share some of the key takeaways from this dialogue and suggest some alternative approaches to change based on a quarter century of experience at Organisation Solutions enabling leaders to drive growth and transformation.
Change is Driving More Change
Our dialogue centered around three mega changes at play today that are shaping how businesses and individuals approach work.
Societal Shifts: One of the most prominent trends in our Roundtable is the growing focus on mental health and the desire for meaning in our professional lives. Today's employees ask themselves more profound questions about purpose, identity, and impact. They want more from their work than security. At the same time, we’re bombarded with information—often from social media—that demands quick responses and adds to our mental load. Organizations must address the changing demands and needs of employees.
Technological Change: The rise in AI and new technologies are reshaping industries at an extraordinary rate. As new technologies like AI evolve, it’s clear that change is no longer an occasional event but a constant presence. Leaders and organizations must help their teams embrace technology and its uncertainty. Employees who are satisfied with how they work today may find their skills obsolete in twelve months.
Shifting Leadership Expectations: Our organizational structures are flattening, and managers today must do more with fewer resources. Leaders lower in the organization used to provide expertise and decisiveness, but now need a broader set of skills to address increasingly complex and ambiguous problems. The challenge for leaders is managing these changes and ensuring their teams thrive through them.
As these mega changes evolve, every business needs to grow while technology and competitors push them to innovate, adapt more quickly to change, and do more with less. Cost-cutting initiatives, structural adjustments, and supply chain changes further increase the pace and volume of change employees face.
As part of the drive to improve performance and efficiency, many large corporations are shifting to global decision-making models, standardizing processes across borders, and consolidating governance. These changes have been underway for years and are accelerating faster than ever.
Change is Challenging all of Us
Taken together, all these changes have a profound impact on people. The increased pressure demands more from leaders at every level of the organization. HR leaders are expected to help their companies cope with endless change. They play an essential role in enabling performance and adaptation, yet for many, HR resources are often decreasing, hampering the support HR can provide to managers.
Shifting the Approach
We asked our Roundtable members to share how they have shifted their approach to change. Their solutions were not always simple and often meant managing multiple goals at the same time. I have added to their answers here to reflect these competing goals.
Improve Information Flow and Human Touch: The shifting speed of information makes traditional communication methods insufficient. Change today requires a combination of tech-enabled modalities (e.g. virtual meetings, video recordings, asynchronous chat) with human touch. Companies like Dell have included more human touch by cascading key messages through layers of leaders within 24 hours. Create more effective change to give employees access to rapidly changing information and involve employees in discussing the implications of this information with others.
Encourage Commitment and Employability: The traditional contract between employer and employee has changed over the past few decades. Many technology companies encouraged commitment and loyalty by providing meals and other office perks. This changed as growth in these firms stalled after the pandemic. Companies today must create an environment that encourages commitment and helps employees master new skills to prepare for opportunities inside and outside their companies.
Communicate the Knowns and Unknowns: When it comes to change, providing clarity is difficult as plans are rolled out in phases and must be adapted as external dynamics change. Although companies need employees that can tolerate this ambiguity, they also need to communicate in a way that helps employees know what to expect in the future. This means being transparent about what's happening today (decisions made, actions) and communicating how long the change journey may take and decisions or changes that may be addressed in the future.
Focus on the Ideal Future and How to Manage the Painful Present: Companies often define and communicate a vision for the future when embarking on a change journey. But too frequently the communication stops at this. Effective change requires a picture of the future and a way to address key pain points in the transition.
Provide Leaders with Insight and Build Their Skills: Organizational change requires the support of leaders, who often must go through their own change journey. Some companies use personality assessments (e.g. Hogan HPI and Deraiers, Korn Ferry) to catalyze personal change. The Growth Leader Assessment and Growth Leader 360 go beyond personality to create insights into developable skills to motivate individuals and teams, collaborate with others, and lead organizational change and innovation. Companies must help leaders gain insights and build new skills to prepare and lead others through change.
Existing Models Aren’t Sufficient
While the members of our HR Roundtable agreed that many of the core principles of change leadership are sound (e.g. communicate more, understand employee concerns, provide effective project leadership for programmatic change), their experiences show that this is not enough. We discussed three important shifts to make in leading change:
From Resistance to Readiness: Traditionally, leaders focused on addressing resistance to change. But in today’s world of constant change, we must focus on building readiness. Our teams should be prepared for ongoing shifts and see change as a natural part of the business environment. This has implications for hiring employees that can tolerate ambiguity and building the skills of current employees to adapt when under stress.
From ‘A Change’ to Continuous Change: Change used to be something we planned for—an isolated event. But today, it’s continuous. Companies that thrive will be those that embed adaptability into their culture. Change should no longer be viewed as disruptive but as a journey we’re all on together. This has implications for equipping leaders and teams with the ability to understand and quickly realign as the expectations of their stakeholders change.
From ‘Being Impacted by Change’ to ‘Shaping Change’: Many changes are still planned behind closed doors. Instead, employees should be actively involved in shaping the change process. Greater involvement leads to greater acceptance and enthusiasm for change. Although this is an old principle of change, technology such as short video formats and messaging platforms offer new mechanisms to engage employees and gather and share information quickly.
Consider these Actions
While the term “VUCA” was first used in 1987, the decades since then have seen change become the norm. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are now standard. What is changing is the ability of employees to perform effectively as they continuously adapt and the urgency for managers to enable faster and more effective change.
To create more effective change, adapt and adopt these practices:
Align forward. Invest time on a regular cadence in defining the ideal future and inviting key stakeholder groups to explore the benefits they see for themselves and the actions needed to achieve that future successfully.
Empower to succeed. To build readiness for continuous change, enable employees to help shape the change journey. This requires more than just improving communications. It requires giving employees more power to craft their roles and develop the skills they need to perform today and tomorrow.
Job adaptation as core. Make adaptation a core element of most, if not all, roles. Examples include using technology, simplifying or automating processes, engaging differently with customers, etc. The key is communicating the requirement for continuous adaptation as a core job responsibility, not an add-on or initiative.
Adaptive Managers. Build capabilities in all people managers to foster and support employee adaptation. Use leader assessments, such as the Growth Leader Assessments, to promote adaptation and the adoption of new skills for successful change.
Everyone a technologist. Technology is not only a core resource for IT and engineers! Create team norms to experiment with low and no-code technologies for improved performance and adaptation. Require senior leaders to learn new tools, ask others to use them, and role model learning and adaptation.
About the Auther
Dr. James Eyring is CEO of Organisation Solutions and Lead Science Advisor for Produgie. James has over 30 years of experience assessing, coaching, and developing executives and their teams. With a PhD in Industrial / Organizational Psychology, James is actively involved in research on leadership, growth capabilities, and potential. He has taught Undergraduate and Graduate level courses and published in academic and practitioner publications. Most recently, he authored book chapters on Strategic Workforce Planning and Innovations in Assessment in SIOP’s Professional Practice Series.
Reach Out!
These ideas can help you consider new approaches to implementing effective change in your changing organization. Reach out to me to share how you are changing the way you change! Ask me how your organization can leverage the Growth Leader Assessments to create more effective change and change leadership.
