Learning Leadership

A vast number of leadership books occupies shelves in stores, so a need clearly exists. But what's driving that need? Here are just a few realities facing organizations today:

• The complexity of work has increased due to rising time and cost constraints, ever-changing technological options, and a highly competitive business climate.

• Leaders are juggling multiple projects, while acting as leader, developer, and implementer.

• Situations are demanding more resources, but organizations are shrinking to cut costs.

• Many employees cannot prove their people investments provide a positive return.

• Many people, rewarded for being gifted, find themselves in management positions without any training or resources. Nor have many been exposed to good leadership examples.

• Workers are stressed and tired. Extended work hours and virtual home offices have become the status quo.

To manage these situations and more, organizations need leaders who believe that the most important thing is growing the people they lead and who maintain focus on those people. Successful leadership involves managing yourself and your relationships to move toward a specific goal. This Infoline will show you the most effective ways to lead while allowing the people you lead to master their own skills and continue to grow.

The sidebar 10 Competencies for Effective Leadership enables you to assess yourself against a list of competencies organized into three categories: knowing yourself, working with others, and integrating it all. You must grow leadership competencies in this order. You can't work with others until you know yourself. You can't integrate the right person with the right job at the right time unless you work well with others. More information about each competency follows.

Knowing Yourself

The first category of knowledge that a leader must have is self-knowledge. Read on to learn about the competencies of self-awareness and resiliency.

1. Self-Awareness

Leadership grows from what already exists within you. As you look inward, you slowly accumulate “material” that develops into self-awareness and provides the base from which you'll create and grow the leader within you. Leaders are branded by the stories and legends others tell of their leadership style. Authentic leaders ensure that their leadership legend is close to their true character.

How do you get inside yourself and explore whether the right stuff is there and can be expressed through your actions? It requires the commitment to venture into the uncharted territory of self and create a map that will guide you toward authentic leadership. To create this map, reflect on your:

• values, purpose, and vision

• strengths and weaknesses

• behaviors as they reflect your values

• sense of accountability for your actions

• desire to learn.

2. Resiliency

You live in a world of change, experiencing frightening conditions nearly every day. Some examples:

After a great lunch, you've gained the trust of a client. Returning to your desk, you find an email from a colleague to this client, blasting him for something you know was a miscommunication. There goes that relationship!

One of your project managers confessed that his project is running six months behind. He's afraid to challenge the added customer requirements. He's hoping you will inform the customer.

Successfully navigating changing terrain demands a certain mindset. Those who thrive have a capacity for dealing with challenges. Their capacity stems from a blending of perspective and skill.

Resiliency is all in your head—literally. Think of it as a puzzle for which you hold all of the pieces. The behaviors you characterize as resiliency stem from the way you view the world. Resiliency is about more than recovering from setbacks—it is also about discovering the hidden opportunities.

Resiliency skills—attitude, vision, creativity, crisis decision making, and proactive behavior—blend together to form a critical leadership competency. Reflect on your abilities in each of these areas, maximize those in which you're strong and seek enhancement for the less-developed abilities. Each element is beneficial individually, but when bonded together, they are truly powerful.

Think of a change that surprised you. Then think about how you approached it. The following tips can help you improve your resiliency in any setting.

■ Remember to Pack Your Attitude

The power of attitude is evident when you consider your past experiences. At times, you were convinced you couldn't get the job done, and the end result reflected your diminished approach. You may also have experienced times when you approached a difficult task positively, and, once again, the results were evident.

Considering the world's complexity and your struggle for accomplishment, it may be disheartening to realize that you actually control very little. All you can truly master is yourself—your thoughts, feelings, and viewpoint of the world and its challenges.

When you react to adversity, you are reacting to your feelings about that event, rather than the event itself. And while you may not be able to control what happens, you do have some control over your emotions.

The key lies in the interpretation of the issue that is obstructing your path to success. Choosing to see such issues as challenges triggers a different response than seeing them as problems. Problems weigh you down and cause stress. Challenges energize you, because a challenge can be a test of your abilities—one for which you crave a victory.

■ Don't Look Where You Don't Want to Go

Creating and holding a clear vision of your hopeful outcome in a challenging situation is key to personal resiliency. When trying to avoid disaster, remaining focused on the disaster is a surefire way to become embroiled in it. Focus instead on where you do want to go. An inspiring vision elicits strong connection and commitment from believers. In uncertain times, vision provides a hopeful direction, positive sense, and dedication to persevere through the challenges.

■ Flex With the Flow

While attitude helps to continue striving, and vision provides a sense of direction and hope, your ability to flex your problem-solving muscles is one of your most powerful navigational tools.

Creative thinking is a process that involves thinking differently. The creative process begins with a question, and the trick to seeing different possibilities is to ask the right question. The questions you ask often limit your thinking. Consider the team of engineers with the problem of a truck lodged in an underpass. True to their profession, they began taking measurements and figuring extensive calculations. They debated about how to best apply the exact amount of force at the correct angle to free the truck. A small boy turned to one of the engineers and asked, “Why don't you just let the air out of the tires?”

■ Learn to Manage the Mess

As you think about resiliency in response to adversity, ask yourself:

• “How do I choose the most appropriate action?”

• “How do I establish clear priorities in chaos?”

In a high-pressure, chaotic situation requiring quick decision making, where does “What do I do?” mentally place you? It plants you right in the middle of the chaos. Being mentally in the middle means that it's all swirling around you, making it easy to be influenced by the emotion of it all—and that's exactly where you don't want to be, at least until you have clarified your priority actions.

Recent studies on decision-making processes among emergency personnel suggest a different approach to choosing priority actions. Instead of “What do I do?” they ask, “What's going on?” This shift of focus from self to scene makes a tremendous difference on the responder's mental capacity for clear, prioritized decision making. Being on the outside of the scene allows you to assess the situation, stay connected to top-level priorities, and choose the most appropriate course of action.

■ Eddy Out

The attention of performers in an organization is usually divided among three modes: operational, strategic, and reflective. Most of you spend your time in operational mode, which is where you do what needs to be done. Strategic mode is where you divert attention to looking ahead. You spend time planning, playing out possible operational scenarios, anticipating problems, being proactive in creating potential solutions, practicing continuous learning, and building your team's organizational communities. Many of you ignore strategic mode until the neglect creates an operational issue. Reflective mode involves looking back and considering the lessons you've learned. Reflective mode typically gets little time and attention, though it holds tremendous value.

Eddying out is about creating space for strategy and reflection and recognizing the value of each. Certainly you need to focus your energies on operational mode, which serves your customers and organizations. Yet you know that failure to plan and learn dooms you to repeat the same mistakes.

Working With Others

After you have mastered the skills, knowledge, and attitudes of knowing yourself, you are prepared to move on to working with others. The skills involved in this category are interpersonal skills, communication skills, employee development, and vision creation and actualization.

3. Interpersonal Skills

You are defined by your connections with others. You are leaders, friends, colleagues, strangers, or even hermits due to your relationships. Leadership is relationship. Leadership is influence; it is directing the energies of others and supporting their growth toward personal and organizational goals.

Interpersonal relationships are the vehicles through which you inspire performance toward your organizations' goals. While there are other ways to induce performance—like coercion, intimidation, and manipulation—they carry costs.

Healthy relationships have certain ingredients:

• a foundation of trust

• a sense of caring or concern for each other's well-being and success

• some common values and shared goals

• respect and acceptance of others, even during disagreement

• the ability to manage conflicts (see the sidebar Managing Conflict at right for tips).

Trust is the foundation upon which interpersonal relationships are built and is essential for forming and maintaining effective relationships. Trust is based upon your opinion about a person and may be shaped by several factors:

• credibility—the degree of skill, knowledge, and experience you believe the individual has

• consistency—the degree to which you believe you can anticipate the individual's performance based upon past experiences

• communication—the degree to which ongoing information provides the reassurance you need to accept that your trust is deserved.

Lack of trust can undermine interactions, making those relationships little more than transactions. Everyone believes he or she is trustworthy, but if that were true, trust would be a non-issue.

However, trust is an issue that often undermines effective leadership. It is a fragile dynamic that exists between individuals and entities. Difficult to establish, easily shaken, and extraordinarily hard to repair once violated, it requires care. As leaders seeking to leverage your employee and customer relationships to maximize performance and create new opportunities, you need to nurture trust.

4. Communication Skills

Interpersonal communication needs to be an intentional act. Think about how unintentional communication creates trouble. You communicate to accomplish a specific purpose, and that purpose must be clear for communication to be effective.

Think of intention as the heart of the interaction. Ask what you intend to achieve through the exchange. As communication occurs, there may be multiple intentions at play. The sidebar Communicating Effectively describes the five basic intentions of communication.

■ Content and Feeling

Every message you send, whether verbal or written, has two components: the content and the feeling. Content is the “what,” the core or intention of the message you're sending. Feeling is the “how,” referring to the way the message is packaged. The packaging of the message affects the interpretation of its content. For example, consider the question: Why did you do it that way?

Read the question as if you were asking it with curiosity. Now read it aloud again as if you were asking someone who has taken a stupid approach to a simple task. Notice the difference? It's the same content packaged in a different context.

The words you choose have the smallest influence upon the message. Tone of voice influences the message significantly more. And, depending on the context of the exchange, body language, such as facial expression and body posture, weighs in as the greatest influence.

■ Communications Media

You can send messages through a variety of communication media or channels, including face-to-face, written, and telephone. Any of these methods of communication can range from formal to informal. The context and the audience determine the level of formality you should adopt.

Written communication also has degrees of formality. Email tends to be the current preferred communication channel. However, the convenience of email as a written form of communication makes it dangerous. Many people are careless with email communications, overlooking the intentions of their messages and sending thoughts that can be misinterpreted. Unless carefully crafted, email lacks a clear feeling, so the reader must apply her own tone of voice interpretation to the words. Problems occur when the receiver's tone doesn't match the sender's.

■ Interference

Interference takes many forms and can originate from the sender, the receiver, or within the environment of the exchange. Sources include:

• assumptions—beliefs you hold about others or those held about you

• time pressures—taking the time to express your message clearly and correctly and allowing the receiver the time to receive and process the message

• mental models—the unconscious interpretations held about the situation under discussion; your mental map of the situation

• differences of style—misalignment between the communication needs of the receiver and the approach of the sender

• noise and distraction—environmental and psychological factors that distract and inhibit the message from accurate delivery or reception.

■ Ability to Listen

As a leader, you have an additional responsibility for clear, intentional communication. Leadership communication relies upon a style that's the fundamental opposite of the bullhorn approach. It's grounded in the leader's ability to listen.

Quality listening begins with the receiver recognizing intention around the interaction—why the message carries significance—and connecting with the intention of the sender.

The first rule of listening is Stop Talking. This is not as obvious as it seems. Even though your mouth may be shut, you may continue to talk to yourself inside your head and merely go through the motions of listening. How do you know when you're being listened to? Effective listeners

• provide eye contact

• maintain an interested and open body posture

• encourage the speaker with both verbal and nonverbal support

• use “door opening” questions to reveal a safe environment and sincere interest

• ask genuine questions to gain deeper understanding of the message sender's perspective

• reflect back their understanding through summary and empathy.

5. Employee Development

The challenge of a leader as a coach is to uncover what the starting place is for each person and then move each from where he is to where he can go. The coaching you do with your staff should focus on present challenges and future opportunities.

Avoid bringing up problems from the past that were not addressed. Focus on the present—or at least the very recent past—and future.

As a leader of the person being coached, you care about behavioral goals and are not neutral about the behavior you expect from your staff. You can help an employee set appropriate goals, but if she makes choices that are not consistent with corporate strategy, you're responsible for encouraging her to rethink her behavior. If she fails to reach behavioral alignment, you must take action.

Creating goals takes practice. Coach people to think of goals as fluid. Though some goals may stay quite stable, others may become inappropriate. This is completely normal and necessary and does not indicate faulty planning. The ability to build new goals quickly is a characteristic of resiliency. Goals are an essential aspect of coaching because they allow you to

• determine the right first step

• measure progress to encourage momentum

• identify when a goal is met

• know when a goal has changed or is irrelevant.

Coaching is like a mirror, and it's generally wise to reflect back what you think the employee has said. Encourage exploration through active listening with carefully designed, probing questions. If asked what you think about something, always turn the discussion back to the person: “I'm not sure. What do you think?” If you're talking more than 30 seconds, you're no longer coaching; you're telling. The language you use as a coach communicates your true feeling about the person. Remember to serve as a mirror using these guidelines:

• Avoid directing the discussion. Symptom: “No, that's the wrong goal.”

• Avoid analysis and interpretation. Symptom: “Yes, I know which part bothers you the most!”

• Describe the future in the present. Symptom: “What will your relationship be like?”

• Push to the end result. Symptom: “Is promotion what you want in the end?”

If you're also the supervisor of the person you're coaching, you'll have to give and receive feedback in ways that maintain the integrity of the relationship, but fully address the issues. Think of feedback as navigational information designed to help people navigate performance situations. Believing that feedback is bad news prevents it from being useful, but letting someone know about behavior that interferes with productivity is imperative for improvement. Think of giving feedback as something you do to help.

Many people often find it difficult to give others positive feedback. Make a habit of catching people being good, because as much learning occurs by reinforcing good behavior as it does from constructive feedback.

Feedback should be given as soon after the occurrence as possible. Keep the focus on how you perceive the situation, using I instead of you, which keeps the conversation from coming across as judgmental. Seek to understand. Your interpretation of the situation may not be complete, so allow the person the opportunity to share his side of the story before you share your own.

Coaching effectiveness can be measured by looking at the 4Ss:

1. Speak the truth.

Coaches must speak the truth to the best of their knowledge. Opinions are not effective.

2. Suspend judgment.

It's almost impossible to avoid interpretation, and two people can interpret the same conversation differently. “Did you get the report done?” spoken out of concern for the other's stress level, can be interpreted as “What is taking you so long?” Always look for multiple interpretations. Teach the person you're coaching how to notice his own interpretations by modeling this behavior.

3. Stick to facts.

Restrict the discussion to facts, and avoid sharing feelings or hearsay. Although you will discuss facts and feelings of the person being coached, you must suspend judgment to listen effectively.

4. Self-respect.

A coach needs self-respect to have the strength to suspend judgments and feelings. Coaching is about her, not you, and successful focus on the person being coached requires you to be secure.

As you coach your staff, finding your own coach may be helpful. Working with a coach not only allows you to learn more about coaching, but also helps you model the type of growth you'd like to see in your staff.

6. Vision Creation and Actualization

Value, purpose, and vision are the essential building blocks of your character and the source of your being. Authentic leadership grows from a clear sense of these elements and carefully aligning your actions with what they represent.

Your values provide the support for your purpose and vision. An example of how values can affect your work is presented in the sidebar Working With Values at right. Purpose answers why (Why am I a leader? What is the purpose behind my energies and focus?), while vision focuses on how (How do I focus my energies in ways that fulfill my purpose?). With a clear purpose, you can define the path you'll follow. Your actions must align with your values—you must “walk your talk.”

Purpose may be grand and nearly untouchable, but vision should be more concrete with solid, attainable steps. It makes you define how you'll choose to use your role to fulfill your purpose. Outlining vision in limited timeframes helps you keep it real. However, given the rapidly changing world, your vision must be dynamic and flexible.

Integrating It All

Integration represents the most advanced level of leadership and comes only after you have mastered knowing yourself and working with others. The competencies in this category include:

• customer orientation

• strategic business acumen

• project leadership

• change management.

7. Customer Orientation

Customer service is not a new field; in fact, companies spend a great deal of money on customer service workshops. Still, many professionals do not see customer service as their job. They don't think they have problems with their customer service (although they can clearly explain how others do). They cannot relate to most customer service training materials, which are typically written for call centers or geared to external customers.

Customer orientation is imperative because the ability of an organization to adapt to a customer-centric philosophy will determine its ability to help the overall business compete. Honoring the customer is also the best defense against the threat of outsourcing. Take valuable staff with less natural communication competency and partner them with people who have more customer orientation.

Leaders must deal with the whole problem of customer orientation, not just the easy fixes. The first step is to get the team to challenge their flawed beliefs through workshops or facilitation. The sidebar Meeting the Customer describes how to challenge some historical assumptions about customer service.

While workshops or facilitation create awareness, incentives must also be changed. The compensation of all employees should be tied to customer survey results, and feedback should include key customers. Leaders must be the first to attend the workshops, include customer feedback in their performance reviews, and be held financially accountable for the survey results. When organizations fail to create customer orientation in their ranks, it's usually because they have chosen to exclude the leadership from the efforts, signaling to the staff that the initiative is a facade.

Customers judge their relationships with providers through their interpretation of critical moments of truth—small contacts like emails or voicemails. Most of you don't think about these moments nor invest a lot of time in doing them well. Different communication styles and needs can drive this type of disconnect. Consider auditing the critical moments of truth, and ask the following questions:

• Do you have a set of guidelines for proper email use and voicemail responses?

• Have you checked the voicemail of your direct reports to see how a customer would feel leaving a message?

• Have you called your own?

• Do your staff members make eye contact?

• Do they speak to the business people?

• Do they ever invite them to lunch?

• How can you get your people closer to their customers?

Consider the following checklist for leaders and staff for creating a customer partnership:

□ Model good customer orientation behavior.

□ Do not accept anything less from your team.

□ When there is a problem, spend more time, not less, communicating with the customer.

□ Use jargon minimally or not at all.

□ Adapt your style to each unique customer when communicating.

□ Listen actively.

□ Ask lots of questions and help the customer explain his need.

□ Do not jump to a solution in the middle of the customer's sentence. Delay new judgment, interpretation, and technology conclusions.

□ Understand the customer's world and context.

□ Clarify the customer's expectations whenever decisions are made.

□ Set mutual milestones and measurements.

□ Say no when you need to.

□ Don't use but; substitute and. Example: “…but that solution isn't stable” becomes “…and because that solution may not be stable enough….”

□ Use I, not you. Example: “I need help understanding that” versus “You need to tell me more about that.”

□ Customize delivery of the communication and the frequency to the needs of each customer.

8. Strategic Business Acumen

The work done by teams is important only when it helps the larger organization. A leader can only contribute when he understands the business. Business acumen demands the ability to

• build and sell a vision

• plan strategically

• grow and nurture a network of advocates

• decode complex business problems.

The most productive approach is to manage the scope of the information you need by filtering it through your organization's vision. This defines the criteria for the type of business and technology knowledge you need to acquire and to what degree. It should drive your hiring and staff development activities. It helps you develop a strategy to find the resources you need.

Living the vision requires an understanding of the value proposition. Who is the customer? What price (time, money, and other resources) is the customer willing to pay? Learning about the business through networking (and politics) requires a mindset change for most leaders. Building strategic business acumen is real, credible work. It is not brown nosing, selling out, or wasting time.

Plan to devote time to building a set of future states (scenarios) with your team. By telling the story of these future states, teams begin to see how the day-to-day actions can cause any one of the scenarios to happen. The benefits of scenario planning include the following:

• As project teams discuss future states, they create a shared vision.

• Planning forces teams to consider what they hope will never happen.

• Each individual on a project team influences the future of the project with his beliefs and assumptions. Discussing future states unveils inconsistent mental models within the team.

• Forcing teams to face the possibility of trouble in the beginning makes it more likely they will plan for it and recognize it early should it occur. Brainstorming glitches before the project influences the way teams build their project estimates. Instead of estimating best-case completion, they estimate more realistically.

• Project glitches trigger emotions, sending project members into fight-or-flight mode. Physiologically, the blood flow to the brain is rerouted to the heart and appendages so people don't think well. Many bad project decisions have been made because of emotional reactions. By working through some of the emotion in the scenario planning sessions, individuals are more likely to respond rationally when surprises occur. They've had some time to think about it, accelerating their reaction to the problems and saving valuable time.

After possible futures are considered, the team can choose a strategy that steers toward the desirable scenario. They may initiate activities to guard against the negative scenarios. Where that's not possible, the best strategy is to create high-level contingency actions. Normally, this type of session occurs when an organization needs to review its beliefs and examine where it wants to be. It is great for team building and clarifying vision.

Note the importance of maintaining flexibility. Effective leaders have flexible plans—and today's business world demands both flexibility and a plan.

Effective leaders do not tie their egos to the plan; they know that the plan is temporary and are prepared to abandon the current plan and adopt a new one when needed. To novices, this may appear to be chaos, but a flexible structure is a key attribute of an effective leader.

9. Project Leadership

Leaders need to apply strong project management techniques to their own work, because the nature of their work is project oriented. Leaders also need to grow the project-management abilities of those to whom they delegate. This provides a systematic way to translate a business need into manageable, well-planned actions.

Four things characterize a project:

1. A beginning and an end.

2. One or more deliverables, with criteria that determine whether the deliverables are acceptable.

3. Temporary resources, including resources that may not be fully available to the project team and some that may be on a part-time basis. For more on managing resources, see the job aid at the end of this Infoline.

4. Constraints, which are time, budget, and people, but may be other dimensions as well.

All these represent challenges. For example, the actual beginning of a project may be unclear. Tasks that begin as quick fixes often evolve into projects (sometimes on their own). Companies are notorious for projects that never end, and the difference between development, production, and maintenance is often just a matter of semantics. These types of challenges demand strong leadership, from the project manager who owns the planning, organizing, and control of the project, and from the executives who prioritize and fund project work.

Prioritizing work is critical; saying no to work is as critical as saying yes. Filtering through a shared vision can accomplish this. If you do not believe the plan is possible, you're probably right. Be honest with yourself and anyone trying to coerce you into a schedule that you do not think is possible.

Projects seem to work best when there is a single project manager. However, this is not always feasible, and many companies use multiple project managers. This does add the risk of different visions and strategies, so roles must be designed clearly to keep the project managers aligned. Often, subdividing the role of the real project manager into categories like technical project manager, training project management, and customer area project manager can help a business map the right competencies to the right role. Constant communication between these project managers is critical. It works best when there is a hierarchy with a single real project manager at the top.

If you are playing the role of a project manager on a large, mission-critical project, you will find it difficult to also play the role of a supervisor or leader. Both of these roles demand a lot of attention. When this is reality, and there is nowhere to delegate either of the roles, plan to dedicate time chunks to ensure that both get proper attention.

To enhance the chances of project success, build a project charter (see the sidebar Planning the Project at right). Then the project team can build the project plan by

• creating the schedule

• creating the work breakdown structure

• assigning resources

• exploring environmental factors

• organizing Gantt charts

• compiling project management software

• creating the budget.

A project never goes exactly as planned. Most projects will require a shift in strategy. Think of the plan as the strategy—when you notice the project charter is changing, your strategy will change as well. You will have a new project plan, but you will still have a project plan.

Anticipating all the events that will occur in a project is impossible. It is also impossible to freeze the customers' needs because business and technology changes are ongoing. Don't get too attached to the project plan. This is not to say that you will make every change requested. Your focus needs to remain squarely on the project stakeholders who have requested that you meet the project objectives to meet the business objectives. This is a critical concept—it is not your project, it is their project. They make the decision as to when to change the plan to reflect a new need, and you implement the changes. Project managers trying to fight the needs of the business as it changes will expend a great deal of energy on futility. Managing well requires that the project manager implement her communications plan and share information about the trade-offs.

10. Change Management

Leadership is a process of transformation, taking what is and making it what it can be. Change is hard. The challenge of change stems from its uncertainty. What will it be like on the other side of this change? How will this change affect you? Will you find a comfortable place in the changed world? You can't know the answers to these questions until you complete your journey through the change and see firsthand how the new way works and whether you're comfortable there.

To fully understand the challenges of this journey, you must make a careful distinction between two terms: change and transition. People often say that change is difficult, but that's not actually true. Change is change—it is not good, bad, difficult, or easy. Transition, the human process of adapting to change, is where the difficulty comes in.

Change is an external event, a shifting of circumstances in the world. How change affects you depends upon the transitional process and the insights, beliefs, and attitudes you bring to it.

Well-known transitional process authority William Bridges describes transition as unfolding over three distinct stages: endings, neutral zone, and new beginnings.

■ Endings

According to Bridges, before something new can begin, the old must end. Even in situations where you are discontented and where the new beginning is alluring, you can still be reluctant to let go. The knowledge or expectation of what comes after the ending—the neutral zone—brings about this struggle. You don't like endings because they inevitably launch you into limbo, a place in between the way you know and are leaving behind and the way you are coming to know but have not yet arrived at. This explains much of the change-averse behavior you see in yourself and those around you.

■ Neutral Zone

At this stage of transition, you have managed to tear yourselves loose from what you were used to and are now lost. You may ask defining questions:

• Who am I? (Who are we?)

• Where am I (are we) going?

• Why am I (are we) on this road?

• How do I (we) fit in the new way?

The neutral zone seems like a fine place to avoid if at all possible, but the reality is that you need this time. This in-between state pushes you to ask important but rarely considered questions, to explore, to learn, to create vision, to rekindle energy, and ultimately to emerge somewhat transformed. The neutral zone is a time of reflection and introspection, of learning about your world, and of defining your place within it. Without this stage of the process, you may not be able to change with the changes around you.

■ New Beginnings

New beginnings is the stage of the journey where you “find your feet” again and begin moving forward. It is still a time of learning, fueled by hopeful optimism and a sense of direction. There may still be some grieving for the old way, especially in times of challenge, but this mostly takes the form of memories rather than a longing to return. New beginnings can be exciting times, filled with energy, discovery, innovation, and a sense of creating the future.

With this basic understanding of the individual journey through change, you now have an idea of what it means to implement organizational change. Organizations are communities of people, and organizational change is all about supporting your people through the transitional process. The challenge is that each member of your organization will respond differently.

As organizations struggle to adapt and recreate themselves, forgetting about the people element involved in creating change is easy. The organization cannot successfully institute change without bringing its people along. Management can make all the decrees that it pleases, but people ultimately bring about the change. And they do so only when they are ready, having moved through transition at their own pace.

How do you support and facilitate the transitional journey? Consider these key elements:

• Vision—People need to know where they are going, even if the broader vision remains cloudy and is clarified only a step at a time. Vision helps manage the uncertainty and adds confidence for navigating the vast unknown.

• Skills—People need a skill base compatible with the challenge of moving through change and skill development in the areas necessary for success upon arrival at the new beginning.

• Incentives—People need to understand the need for change and what is in it for them.

• Resources—People need physical, human, informational, and psychological-emotional resources to support their journey.

• Action plan—People need a clear sense of day-to-day action with measurable milestones worthy of celebrating upon accomplishment.

These elements work together to support the organization and its people in creating lasting change. In addition, to navigate change successfully, you also will need to carry out some general support activities to facilitate people's journey through change:

• Create ownership. When people understand the driving force and have some say in how the change will unfold, the impact of the change is minimized and accepted more readily.

• Communicate. Leaders often think they have adequately communicated the vision and the change strategy. In reality, they need to send the message continually through different channels to help people stay connected with it.

• Manage the ending. Letting go of the old way is similar to the classic grieving process: shock, anger, and denial. Create opportunities for people to express their grief and recognize that grieving is a step along the road to acceptance.

• Respect diversity. Recognize and allow for differences among people that will cause them to move through the transition in a different fashion, at a different pace, and with different needs. This reality requires some balance, as there may be people already at the doorstep to the new beginning while others are only just letting go of the old way. Be clear, but realistic, as to your performance expectations and provide the appropriate support to each person.

• Coach. Accept that in times of change, leaders need to become coaches, providing support. Clarify the vision for each performer, help her see her connection to it, and provide navigational feedback.

• Foster a learning environment. Change often forces people to try new things, and a learning curve must be expected. Create an atmosphere for learning: Make it safe for people to try and fail, facilitate a positive learning attitude, and model learning behaviors.

This combination of competencies, which proceeds from a basis of understanding yourself to learning to work with other people to integrating all the pieces, will help you in your leadership journey through chaos and change. Good luck!