Leadership Styles - 3 Powerful Lessons in Strategies For Managing Change

From my experience, in my own work with helping companies with strategies for managing change I have found time and time again that the answers to the most challenging business issues, project and programme failures and performance problems always - without exception lies with the front line staff - those directly involved in "doing it".

Also, the creative solutions and innovations are to be found there as well.

All it takes, in my experience is the time, courtesy and empathic listening to the people at the "coal face" to find out what the issues are and also to discover what motivates them individually and from that to derive and provide the inspirational motivation they need.

(1) Recognising different definitions about success - people are motivated by different things

It is important to recognise that every person has a different definition of success - and that's not necessarily about climbing the greasy pole or about money. For a lot of people success and inspirational motivation is tied more to their family or their community or something else in their personal lives. Everyone has a different definition of success.

(2) Finding what has meaning for the individual and linking that to the task in hand

It's all about finding something that is local and meaningful to an employee emotionally and connecting them to that and the task in hand - that is the true source of inspirational motivation.

(3) Work through the "master motivators" in your organisation

Find those people in your organisation whose whole focus is on keeping those who work for them feeling good about their work and what they do.

Understanding what these people do and how they do it is incredibly helpful when you're trying to provide inspirational motivation to your people and extend the emotional connections that can mobilise critical behaviours during difficult times.

In my experience, your front line staff have the answers and the solutions - (a) spend time with them, find out what really matters to them personally and find ways of linking that to the tasks in hand; and (b) find the "informal leaders" - those who intuitively provide inspirational motivation to their people and who connect with their people and work through them.

Properly applied in a change management context, this emphasis on spending time at the front line of the business is exactly what a people-oriented leadership style will deliver when employing the holistic and wide view perspective of a programme based approach to change management.

And, to ensure that you are employing successful strategies for managing change, you need to know how to apply (a) the inspirational motivation and leadership insights, and (b) the supporting programme management based processes - that will ensure that you avoid the catastrophic failure rate of ALL business change initiatives.