Strategic Evolution: A Personal Development Plan for Change Leadership

Happy New Year!! For 2024, I’ve decided to change the focus of my blog posts. In my last post, I talked about how I tend to direct my own professional development. What I didn’t emphasize is that, from the outside, the process could be viewed as a bit chaotic.

I’m always in the middle of 6-10 books at a time...

I focus on one topic for a while only to abandon it and switch gears entirely...

Basically, I just seek out whatever information that I think will best help me to move towards my goal and overcome whatever obstacle I’m facing at the time.

It works for me 🙂

This year, however, I’ve decided to make a more formal plan for myself. I’m inviting you to join me on this journey!

Over the course of the last 4 years, I’ve found myself repeatedly revisiting areas of organizational change leadership. I was first exposed to the term when a PhD candidate interviewed me about my experience transitioning from a small company to a private-equity backed platform company and then to a large company.

Prior to hearing the term, when I had to describe the value I brought to my team or organization, I would say I can observe and understand an organization, identify gaps or areas that need improvement and then offer steps towards addressing them towards the leaders’ expressed desired future. Organizational change leadership is a much more succinct term ha ha.

Over the course of those 4 years, the most impactful article that I read was A Survival Guide for Leaders by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky. I’ve read it in its entirety at least 3 times and I keep it close and reference parts of it often.

There were three key takeaways for me.

Encountering resistance is normal and likely signals you are on the right track.

That’s the first sentence of the article.

The authors, successful enough to write an article for the Harvard Business Review, go on to talk about their own experiences being removed from or pushed aside in a position where they were attempting to make necessary change. This helped me change my mindset and shift my expectations around being an agent of change. I have been frustrated when trying to make change - encountering resistance, hitting what felt like steel reinforced concrete walls, or being pushed aside.

My intention was to bring about a better future that I could clearly see. I assumed everyone else would be able to see it as well and therefore appreciate my efforts and be supportive. How naive I was!

Attacks to your change effort are not personal.

The first sentence of the second paragraph….

As a team lead, I supported a customer who said he wanted to change the way we delivered our tools to the broader mission. I quickly went to work understanding what that new vision would look like and creating new workflows and processes to help pivot the team in that direction. I was very confident that it would be successful. I suffered weeks of sleepless nights when it became obvious that the biggest obstacle to our progress was the same customer who gave the initial directive. I just couldn’t understand it. It was so illogical to me.

This article highlights how averse we are to change, even subconsciously. Sometimes, those unconscious feelings give way to dysfunctional behavior that can push a change effort off course and severely damage the psyche of the change agent. The article groups four such behaviors:

• You may be attacked directly in an attempt to shift the debate to your character and style and avoid discussion of your initiative.
• You may be marginalized, forced into the position of becoming so identified with one issue that your broad authority is undermined.
• You may be seduced by your supporters and, fearful of losing their approval and affection, fail to demand they make the sacrifices needed for the initiative to succeed.
• You may be diverted from your goal by people overwhelming you with the day-to-day details of carrying it out, keeping you busy and preoccupied.

Given I have observed or experienced all of these reactions, I was intrigued as to their suggestions on how to be successful in a change effort.

Successful organizational change is survivable.

Finally, the article lays out several suggestions for surviving your change effort and being successful in it. These are categorized as Managing Your Environment and Managing Yourself.

Managing Your Environment is further broken down into four areas:

• Operate in and above the fray - observe what’s happening to your initiative, as it’s happening
• Court the uncommitted - emphasize the need for change and the seriousness of your efforts to those who may be on the fence
• Cook the conflict - learn how to convey the urgency of the need to change and also lower the heat to mitigate turmoil
• Place the work where it belongs - mobilize others to solve problems

Managing Yourself involves:

• Restraining your desire for control and need for importance.
• Understanding how to repair the psychological damage that can be done to you on a daily basis.
• Acquiring a confidant who supports you - not necessarily your initiative.
• Reading attacks as reactions to your professional role, not to you personally.

To be fully transparent, I will confess that when I first read this article, I completely dismissed the Managing Yourself recommendations. I didn’t think I was perfect but I felt like I was pretty self-aware and that I was not the problem. Experience (ahem…wisdom) has shown me just how wrong I was 🙂

So, this year I have decided to create a 52-week professional development plan for myself that is more prescriptive and focused than ever before. The plan will focus on the areas that this article suggests improving.

I’m excited about this plan and I’m inviting you to come along on the journey with me. Each week, I’ll post my plan as I work through it as well as my thoughts on each resource and some personal anecdotes about how I think it would be helpful.

If you choose to join me on this journey, here’s what you can expect:

• tangible resources with actionable recommendations
• alignment to leading in a technical organization
• alignment to a strengths-based development approach
• anecdotes from my career and stories that other technical leaders have shared with me

I'm excited! I hope 2024 is as productive for you as I plan for it to be for me!