How to help leaders navigate fast paced change and growth

Two types of change

For those in leadership roles in an organisation, there are currently two types of change: 1/ the change done to the organisation; 2/ the change done by the organisation.

The change done to the organisation

For many leaders, the past few years have been a reality check, a wake up call to the reality that many of us have been sharing for years: that the world is changing faster than ever, that the pace of change itself is speeding up and that this isn’t a blip, this is a new normal in a hyper connected world. There’s no more avoiding change, that’s just not possible. Change is a constant as the old cliché goes.

The change done by the organisation

And yet there is a type of change that is triggered by the organisation itself, sometimes this is a reaction to external forces, sometimes it comes let’s say intrinsically, from a desire to grow or scale for example.

But how do leaders help navigate change?

Here are a few tools we have at our disposal.

Tools for leading through change

Imagining the future

Well the traditional method was more or less to scenario plan. To cognitively forecast our way into the future. But who reviewed their year’s plan at the end of 2020 and said “Well this year went just as expected didn’t it.” This kind of planning has incredible uses for sure, but that use is mainly an act of imagination it allows us to imagine different potential eventualities. Not to guess which one will come to but to sense them, kind of like a walking around blindfolded with your hands out looking for the walls. So perhaps the idea of cognitively planning for change is only part of that particular puzzle. Integrating that thought power with our ability to imagine and sense the temperature is really what the role of a leader is.

Exercise

There are two specific exercise one can do to help nurture this:

Journal: Write to yourself, write down these future eventualities, or draw them in charts if that helps you, but map them out, audit the possibilities so that you can then do exercise number 2

Implications maps: I sometimes write an implications map; in the centre circle, I write the future I imagine, then in an outer circle I map out all the potential implications of that future, and then in a further wider circle, I write the implications of those. You get me. What you’ll have is no doubt a mess, but that’s change for you. It’s not tidy. But it might help you open your mind to complexity which for good or bad, we need to get a better sense of.

Visualize: With the cognitive part done and those potential futures visible (well, the ones you’ve thought of at least), now sense what they feel like. Imagine them as real. How would you react? How would you hope to react? What are the consequences? Who around you is affected? How do you imagine them behaving? You can do this sitting down with your eyes closed, or gazing out of the window on your commute, or on a walk, or in the shower. The goal here is to take it from something theoretical and intellectual in your head, to something you feel experientially. Importantly, so that you don’t leave with more worries, imagine a future where you deal with this skillfully, where you take certain actions and write those actions down and go take them. Make them tiny steps.

Managing emotions

Change itself can be very hard to navigate because it brings up our oldest fears. Will I be safe? Am I secure? As a leader we are not only dealing with these ourselves, but we’re also dealing with our team’s fears. Learning to navigate the messiness of our inner worlds is perhaps the real job. This is what change is really about. So how can we work with this?

Exercises for yourself:

Become emotionally literate: Normally when you ask somebody how they feel they will tend to say “Good” or “Fine”. These are actually judgements or evaluations. We tend to have a very limited vocabulary where it comes to our emotions when really there are dozens of them. Here’s a list. Get familiar with them. One simple exercise is every morning is to pick the top three from the list that stand out to you. - link

Own and observe your emotions objectively: We often confuse our feelings for reality. For example we might say that “Things are stressful at work”. This isn’t entirely true. More accurate would be: “I feel stressed when I go to work at the moment”. It’s entirely possible that others are reacting differently to the stress. Holding our subjective emotions to objective scrutiny whilst still acknowledging them is a skill that gives us some purchase over our inner worlds. We’re able to see that there are other options. That we have a say in it.

Helping your team:

Make emotions a part of the conversation: Helping your team to share their feelings has many benefits and navigating change is one of them. One simple tool can be to start every meeting by asking each person to speak, simply ask everybody to answer the question: “How do you feel?” You can even give them the list from above. This creates openness and shows that all feelings are welcome. So many benefits follow from increased trust, to stress relief.

Listen! This one perhaps deserves a few more explanation marks. Navigating change is hard emotionally (e.g. burnout) and cognitively (e.g. planning ahead) which is why we find speaking to somebody so helpful. The old leadership paradigm was to have all the answers, but nobody is omniscient particularly in the changing world we live in. The leadership of tomorrow is one whereby a leader is a listener. Able to help another person to acknowledge their feelings and imagine their potential routes forward. By listening we help the other person to grow because they tend to leave having solved all their problems despite having received little advice. They do it themselves.

Everybody needs a coach

I think it was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who says “Everybody needs a coach” and that has never been more true than in a world where organisations are both opting to change and to grow whilst also having change done to them by a volatile external world.

In the words above, we’ve outlined that navigating change is both a cognitive task and an emotional one. It requires intellectual horsepower as well as imagination. We both suffer as the victims of it, and are inspired as the creators of it. A spreadsheet won’t do and no matter how good our planning, we won’t have calculated the unpredictability of our own emotional reactions, our tanks emptying and the teams we work with. This is why working with a coach who is a trained psychotherapist is incredibly valuable. It helps us be us. To integrate the head and heart. To sense into the future using our brains, our feelings. To stay healthy in order to perform to the highest level.

In the end, the biggest help we can get as leaders is the ear of a qualified professional.