Is your organization developing change managers or change leaders?

It’s hard to effectively drive transformation if you’re not sure what kind of drivers your organization is fostering. To help you define whether your company is creating a team of change leaders or change managers, a topic we recently addressed in this short video, we invite you to “check” all the boxes that apply to your business below. By doing so, you and your colleagues will be one step closer to understanding what it takes to create – and influence – real change:

Option A

• The change process stays under control
• We keep all projects on budget
• Our change goals are on a small scale
• We make sure stakeholders buy into the change
• We have a change management group within our organization
• Our vision for change is planned and deliberate

Option B

• We can successfully articulate our organization’s vision of the future
• We’re actively mobilizing resources
• Our change goals are on a large scale
• The organization’s leaders inspire stakeholders to believe in the change
• Leaders within our organization are guiding the change
• Our vision for change is urgent and inspires speculative action

Mostly As: You’re developing change managers.

Your organization is attempting to affect change in the organization by managing it – at every single step. Everyone has set tactics that they value. Working with a change management group might be your team’s forte, but consider the impact everyone can create by mobilizing resources across the entire organization – starting with leaders, downward. Your company may be managing what it knows, but it also needs to collectively lead where it wants the change to go.

Mostly Bs: You’re developing change leaders.

Your organization is full of visionaries, dreamers and doers. Everyone has a deep sense of urgency to affect large-scale change. They’re guiding the change, but more importantly, they’re inspiring those they work with to believe in the change and take the necessary actions to make it happen across the entire organization. It’s important to strive for a balance between managing change and inspiring it through leadership.

 It’s not semantics: the difference between a change manager and a change leader – as noted in the definitions above – is significant. Change managers typically drive incremental change, ensuring work is done on time and within budget. Change leaders, on the other hand, are less adverse to getting “messy” and taking risks, influencing and inspiring behaviors that lead to large-scale transformation. As the world continues to move faster, become more complex and create greater challenges, the need for more change leaders will not just be advantageous – it will be critical.

SOURCE: KotterInternational