Human Resource Executive Online, August 1, 2007, Wednesday
Human Resource Executive Online
August 1, 2007
http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=22219623
By
Everyone wants his or her organization to be innovative and professes the importance of being a change leader and bringing cutting-edge ideas to the surface. Being innovative has become a core managerial competency. In pursuit of that, you want your organization to be adaptive, flexible, and agile. You want to make sure that uncertainties provide opportunities rather than hazards. In competitive markets, you aspire to act reflectively, not reflexively.
We all want an innovative culture and a change-driven organization. But how do you achieve it? By making sure you have true change leadership. Innovation and change will come about not because you put in new processes and structures, but because you have individuals who do not just recite the innovation mantra, but are willing to risk and take ideas from vision to implementation. To ensure that your organization is innovative, you want leaders who can lead for change.
Unfortunately, there is no consensus as to what that means. Some organizations are in perpetual pursuit of a visionary leader with charisma, and others debate whether they need a transactional or transformative leader. Change leadership is so hidden in the fog of rhetoric that, sometimes, we can¿t even recognize it when we stumble on it.
If HR wants to contribute to the bottom line, it must go beyond simply being the guardians of administrative efficiency and regulatory compliance. Instead, it must take the lead in creating innovative cultures by developing and training leaders with the concrete skills and competencies to get things done.
When you remove the rhetoric, get rid of the clichés and look beneath the academic jargon, there is very little mystery as to what leadership is all about. If you want your organization to be innovative, train your leaders, from first-line supervisors to CEOs, to be proactive!
Being proactive means reinvigorating the micro-skills of leadership necessary to maneuver ideas through the traps, hesitations and turf battles of organizational life. Whether on the shop floor or in the boardroom, in order to foster an innovative culture, HR needs to take responsibility for developing leaders who have the political skills to mobilize others around good ideas and the managerial skills to sustain momentum to put the ideas in place.
To sustain innovation and change, we need change leaders who have developed the proactive leadership skills of political and managerial competence. Change leaders who are politically competent understand that few people are going to rally around their ideas -- no matter how wonderful -- without a coalition of support.
These change leaders do their political homework. They know how to assess allies and resistors, identify the key stakeholders and gain initial support. Politically competent leaders are campaigners skilled at rallying people around their ideas and creating coalitions. They have the capacity to get others to believe in their agendas.
Political competence allows for the establishment of a beachhead, but that¿s only a start. ChangPolitical competence allows for the establishment of a beachhead, but that¿s only a start. Change leaders who are truly proactive understand that in order to create action, they have to implement their ideas, sustain momentum and keep people on their side. They need to develop their managerial competence.
The keys to successfully sustaining momentum for the managerial-competent change leader include:
* Maintain resources and capacity. They understand that good intentions, without resources, remain simply good intentions. They appreciate the need to structure jobs, teams and the organization in such a way that innovation can move ahead with minimal bureaucratic bottlenecks.
* Monitor and make adjustments. They understand that while evaluations and adjustments are necessary, they must be made in such a way that does not smother creativity. They are well versed in the techniques of feedback, dialogue and goal-setting.
* Motivate to sustain focus. They appreciate the need to motivate, focus and socialize individuals to feel like they are part of a group. They know that commitment from the group is important to sustain their agendas.
* Mobilize support and anticipate opposition. They know how to deal with conflict and effectively challenge or incorporate opposition. They know that, along the road toward change, counter-coalitions emerge. They know which ones should be challenged, which ones should be ignored and which ones should be in incorporated.
I¿ve found that when the rubber hits the road, proactive change leaders have developed these micro-skills of political mobilization, and building and sustaining momentum.
Change leadership is not about dramatic charisma. It¿s about the nuts and bolts of taking charge and getting things done. It is about having the learned skills of moving ideas from vision to implementation. HR plays a critical role in training and legitimizing corporate notions of leadership.
If HR wants to use its leadership to effect innovation and change, and thereby enhance the bottom line, its focus should be on providing managers with the micro-skills of proactive leadership. After years of teaching and training, I¿ve learned one thing: Proactive change leaders aren¿t born -- they emerge through experience and learning.
Samuel B. Bacharach is the McKelvey-Grant professor in the Department of Organizational Behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University and director at the New Institute for Workplace Studies in New York. He is the author of Keep Them on Your Side: Leading and Managing for Momentum and Get Them on Your Side: Win Support, Convert Skeptics, Get Results.
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