The Art of Leading Transformational Change

By Patti J. Ayars

The market dynamics are changing in many industries. Businesses that were powerhouses in their industry have lost their position as market leaders.

Are you equipped to drive the changes it will take to be competitive in an industry where the rules are being re-written?

Leaders that continuously achieve extraordinary results understand that many of the changes they need to drive are transformational.

Highly effective leaders know the difference between incremental and transformational change, they know how to lead both kinds of change and they know what it takes to be a transformational change leader.

When embarking on a change initiative leaders are often told that they need to go look in the mirror, that the change begins with them. This is true, but it is not very helpful advice because many people do not know what to look for in the mirror.

This book teaches you what to look for in yourself and how to dramatically increase your effectiveness in leading transformational change. The concepts are practical, easy to implement and yet profound.

Once you understand the dynamics of transformational change and your role in leading it, the possibilities of what you can

create are limited only by your imagination and your energy for driving them forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 18, 2009
• ISBN: 9781449026073

Patti J. Ayars

Patti J. Ayars, a former Fortune 500 executive with more than 25 years experience, is an executive coach, consultant and speaker. As President of Turning Point Consulting Patti coaches CEO's, vice presidents and other executives as they drive growth in their business, lead change, develop their leadership, acquire and divest companies and transform the culture of their organization. Prior to founding Turning Point Consulting Patti was the Senior Vice President, Human Resources and Corporate Communications for Roche Diagnostics Corporation. She also spent 21 years with Monsanto Company in global and domestic strategic human resource, organization development and mergers & acquisitions positions. Patti has been leading and coaching others on how to lead transformational change since the late 1980's. She is widely respected for her ability to coach leaders to think differently about the challenges they face. The Art of Leading Transformational Change is Patti's second book on leading change. She is also the co-author of Mastering Momentum: A Practical and Powerful Approach for Successful Change. A complete biography and contact information for Patti can be found at: www.turningpoint-consulting.com.

Book preview

© 2009 Patti J. Ayars. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published by AuthorHouse 12/4/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4490-2607-3 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-2606-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-2605-9 (hc)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

RESOURCES

Visit the Turning Point Consulting, Inc. website

www.turningpoint-consulting.com

• For more information about the executive coaching and consulting work of Patti J. Ayars

• To order additional copies of The Art of Leading Transformational Change

• To order copies of Mastering Momentum: A Practical and Powerful Approach to Leading Change by Michael H. Vinitsky and Patti J. Ayars

• To access electronic copies of some of the models included in this book

Contents

RESOURCES

PART I:

The Transformational Change Leader

CHAPTER 1

The Importance of Leading Change

CHAPTER 2

Incremental and Transformational Change

CHAPTER 3

Being a Transformational Change Leader

CHAPTER 4

Learning to Listen Differently

CHAPTER 5

Implementing The Theory

CHAPTER 6

The Role of Traditional Change Management

PART II:

Seven Common Mistakes Change Leaders Make..….

and How to Avoid Them

CHAPTER 7

Driving Action without Dialogue about Thinking

CHAPTER 8

Being the Lid

CHAPTER 9

Failure to Help

People Transition

CHAPTER 10

Failure to Connect

With People

CHAPTER 11

Unclear Decision-

Making Processes

CHAPTER 12

Failure to Manage Momentum

CHAPTER 13

Moving too Quickly

to the Next Change

PART III:

Final Thoughts

CHAPTER 14

The Look in the Mirror

Acknowledgements

Recommended Reading

Bibliography

PART I: 

The Transformational Change Leader 

CHAPTER 1

The Importance of Leading Change

Many artistic painters have innate talent. They see beauty in the ordinary world. They see the subtly and brilliance of color that many of us miss. Whatever innate artistic genius they possess, most artists find it useful to formally study artistic techniques and theory and the work of other artists. They learn how to blend colors on their palette, how to create depth and breadth in their work and how to work with acrylics, oil and watercolors. It is the artist that employs their imagination in combination with the techniques they have learned that creates timeless paintings.

Leading transformational change is also an art. An art that is pursued by highly effective leaders that want to continuously achieve extraordinary results for the organizations they lead. There is no formula for driving transformational change. What successful transformational change leaders know is that at the core of their success is being an effective leader. It is the transformational change leaders that understand the theory, principles and practices of transformational change and who then engage in a creative, dynamic process with their people that drive successful, sustainable change.

To equip you to successfully engage in the art of transformational change, this book is fundamentally about two topics: change and leadership. It is designed to increase your understanding of the dynamics of transformational change and to enhance your effectiveness as a change leader, skills essential in a rapidly changing world.

The market dynamics in many industries are changing. The explosion of the internet has dramatically changed how people access and share information and consume entertainment. For example, the video sharing website YouTube was founded in February 2005. On YouTube you can find training videos, videos of international rock bands and videos of just about everything else in-between. In 2009 it was estimated that twenty hours of video are added to YouTube every minute.1 The DVD rental company Netflix Inc. added more subscribers than ever during the first three months of 2009; however, in June 2009 its Chief Executive Officer predicted that as soon as 2013 the DVD rental business will begin to decline as internet delivery of movies increases.2

According to Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s chief research executive, More and more people are changing the way they consume television. In the next few years, we will rewrite all the rules. According to David Poltrack, chief researcher at CBS, the biggest competitor to network programming is recorded network programming. Not too long ago network executives slept with laptops or fax machines by their beds so they could rise before dawn to check the previous night’s ratings. This system is no longer relevant. The most time-shifted show as of November 2008 is NBC’s The Office. Twenty-eight percent of its audience watched the show at a time other than its regularly scheduled time.3

Companies are engaging with their customers and suppliers in whole new ways. In the October 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, there was an article about how companies are utilizing volunteers to build their business. While volunteers were once thought to be a resource only for charitable organizations, technology is enabling companies to tap the contribution of people that do not work for the company.

eBay, a company that was founded in 1995, is a store that sells no products of its own. It is simply a conduit for others to market their products. While eBay began as a place to sell used items, many companies now utilize eBay as a primary mechanism to market their new products. In essence, volunteers stock eBay’s shelves. Volunteers have contributed the content to create Wikipedia, an on-line encyclopedia that has been found to be about as accurate as expert-written articles in other on-line encyclopedias.

Without even knowing that they are contributing, consumers on Amazon.com enable Amazon to make product recommendations to future customers. Amazon tracks consumers’ shopping behavior and then feeds that information anonymously to future customers in the form of product recommendations. Consumers of Honda’s InterNavi navigation system enable Honda to provide real-time traffic information to its customers based on the current traffic conditions encountered by other users of InterNavi.4

In some cases the participation of the volunteers is active; they consciously participate in the activity. In other situations, the volunteer makes no conscious effort to contribute. However, in either case, they are serving as a very valuable contributor to the company’s performance. Have you ever thought about how you could utilize people who do not work for you, volunteers, to help you grow your business?

How companies market their products is changing in many industries. For example, legislation has driven changes in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. In 1997 the Food and Drug Administration allowed direct-to-consumer drug advertising. IMS Health, a firm that provides information and strategies to the drug and health care industries, estimates that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical spending was $1.07 billion in 1997. In 2006 the industry spent $4.8 billion on consumer ads.5 Relaxing the direct-to-consumer advertising regulations opened a whole new avenue for the pharmaceutical companies to communicate with the consumers of their products. No longer was the physician their only medium to influence consumer preferences. To take advantage of this new avenue, pharmaceutical companies had to think very differently about their product marketing. They also had to think differently about their relationship with physicians as patients had more information. Patients began requesting specific products and asking questions of their physicians that they never thought to ask in the past.

Dramatic changes have become commonplace in the past few decades, and it is having a disruptive impact on America’s largest corporations. A comparison of the top 50 of the largest corporations in America, as measured by revenue and reported by FORTUNE, reveals that seventeen of the companies in the top 50 in 1998 were not in the top 100 in 2008. From 1988 to 1998 and from 1998 to 2008, roughly 35% of the 50 largest companies did not make the list of the top 100 largest companies ten years later. General Motors was the number one company on the FORTUNE 500 list from 1955-1974 and from 1986-2000. General Motors was at one time the largest automobile company in the world and from 1955-2008 never ranked lower than number four on the FORTUNE 500 largest company list. General Motors filed for bankruptcy in 2009.

From 1978 to 1988 only 16% of the companies in the top 50 failed to make the FORTUNE 100 largest companies list in 1988. From 1968 to 1978 only