Alignment in Leadership for Successful Change Management

Yesterday I was waiting at the traffic signal where I saw a mother, her son and daughter next to me on a two wheeler.

Red light turned into yellow and mother started driving. Immediately the son said “No mom, you cannot start driving until you see the yellow light turned into green. The small daughter who was standing in front laughed at her brother and said “Bhaiya doesn’t know. Mumma always starts driving when there is yellow light.” “But dad always tells me that you should not do that untill it is green!” Son sounded little confused about what is right and what is not right.

This small conversation between children made me think that how will these children be able to cultivate correct and homogeneous attitude towards any aspect of life when their parents are not aligned and they train children differently!

Today organizations are also facing a similar situation.

Change management is a continual swing movement currently across the industries. The question which is critical for all the organizations is, “ Are our leaders prepared to collaborate to act and operationalize the requirements for change to avoid business disruption and make the change process successful?

For many organizations, preparedness begins at the top which means that the leadership across all levels must have an absolute clarity of purpose and focus; and should include alignment of strategic philosophy in line with resolution goals.

Many organizations unknowingly fail to build this momentum for change management as they fail to adapt, manage and drive the change fast and allow the marketplace and competitors to walk past them. Success of change management is dependent on how leaders who drive the change are aligned with each other during the process from start till end.

If any organization fails in successfully driving change, one of the main reasons is lack of alignment in leadership which leads to failure in institutionalizing change across the organization.

Following parameters would help determine the alignment amongst leaders who are change drivers:

• Clear Vision : Leaders must develop common understanding about the picture of outcome of change process. They must begin driving the change with the end result in mind and the clarity about result should be the same for everyone at leadership level.
• Formulations of Success Criteria : Leaders must have common understanding about what will determine the success of change management in our organization. These criterias should be aligned with the organizational goal.
• Strategy alignment : The strategy to drive change should be designed by inviting everyone’s views but at the same time should be finalized with consensus.
• Clear Roles : Leaders must have clarity about their roles in driving change. The same clarity of their roles should be known by all the employees across organization.
• Systematic and regular Monitoring: A monitoring system must be in place which would help all leaders to understand impact of the strategy implementation by all leaders. Any gap should be considered as an alert and the strategy should be revisited.

-Nikita Shah