Back to School: Timely Lessons for Change Leaders
It’s Back-to-School time! Whether you have school-age kids, are a continuing student yourself, or anywhere but under a rock, you’re probably experiencing some aspect of the annual ritual: watching the TV ads to gear up the kids, ordering books and supplies, or even getting stuck behind school busses! No matter your role, it’s always […]
Winning the Race for Change: Lessons from the Iditarod – July 2015
During our family vacation to Alaska last month, we got the chance to meet the fabulous and frisky decedents of the Alaskan huskies who led Susan Butcher to victory in the Iditarod (the 1,049 mile dog sled race between Anchorage and Nome, through Alaska’s treacherous sub-Artic terrain). The story of Susan and her favorite dog, […]
What Can Winston Churchill Teach Us about Leading Change? – June 2015
First off, here’s a shout out to new readers of this newsletter who I met for the first time at the PMI EMEA Congress in London last month! It was thrilling to meet so many change leaders from around the world! While in London I had the pleasure of visiting the Churchill Museum, an extremely […]
Top Ten List! Is Your Change Leadership Missing One of These? – May 2015
In honor of David Letterman’s retirement and his love of “Top Ten Lists”, I took some time this month to reflect on my work with change leaders and on the qualities, behaviors, and mindsets that allow “Change Intelligent“ leaders to get results, build relationships, and be effective in their demanding roles. Here’s my version of […]
Beyond Agility: Are YOU an Antifragile Change Leader? (March 2015)
Ask yourself: Do you thrive in this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, or merely survive? Do you have the change leadership, and not merely the change management, to “get to the next level”? Do you want (need!) to foster greater employee creativity & engagement and market innovation & disruption in your team and organization? These were questions the executives I […]
Let Go to Go Forward, February 2015
I was thrilled to be invited back to partner once again with a US/Japanese joint venture steel mill that I helped start-up in the early 1990s. As their union-management leadership team informed me, many of the “old timers” who started up the place with me are retiring, and they want to ensure that the very […]
Does Leading Change Differ Across Cultures? – January 2015
Although change is a universal challenge that we face as leaders, do styles of leading change show up differently across cultures? What have we learned about leading change around the world – and what does it mean for you? When I started researching Change Leadership Styles from around the world as part of developing the […]
What’s YOUR Style of Leading Change (& TWO Special Announcements), November 2014
What’s YOUR style of leading change? Knowing your CQ (Change Intelligence) style can make all the difference for your ability to influence others and overcome resistance to change! Just as each of us communicates, collaborates and handles conflict in our own unique ways, so do we each have our own style of leading change. And, […]
Reactions to Change
When people encounter any kind of change, they typically progress through a series of phases. There are several frameworks that help clarify human reaction to change, but the one I use in this post—and in chapter 15 of Change Intelligence—is adapted to CQ and based on the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who studied human reactions […]
Deploying the Right Change Management Tools
Is there a difference between change leadership and change management? My answer is a resounding “Yes!” Change intelligence (CQ) is about diagnosing and developing your capacity to lead change—in other words, it’s about change leadership. Change management, on the other hand, is a set of techniques that you, the change leader, can apply to a […]