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LEADERSHIP TUESDAY ... Light news day in the NFL.  Make sure you watch my appearances on the NFL Network tonight: “Path to Draft” at 6:30 p.m. ET and “Total Access” at 7. 

This comes from AHEAD SPACE an executive book site.  Michael Fullan wrote a compelling book about leading in a time of change, and this seems very appropriate for today. 

Leading in a Culture of Change

By:  Michael Fullan

Introduction

Change is a double-edged sword. These days its relentless pace runs us off our feet. Yet when things are unsettled, we can find new ways to move ahead and create breakthroughs not possible in stagnant societies.

If you ask people to brainstorm words to describe change, they come up with a mixture of negative and positive terms, from fear and anxiety to excitement and improvement. Change arouses emotions, and when emotions intensify, leadership is key.

But charismatic leaders often do more harm than good because, at best, they provide episodic improvement followed by frustrated or despondent dependency. Superhuman leaders also do us another disservice: they're role models who can never be emulated by large numbers. Deep and sustained reform depends on many of us, not just on the very few who are destined to be extraordinary.

Each and every leader, however, can improve his or her leadership by focusing on five components of leadership that are independent but mutually reinforcing:

1.    Moral purpose. Leaders must be guided by the intention to make a positive difference in the lives of employees, customers and society as a whole.

2.    Understanding the change process. Leaders must understand the complexities of the change process; otherwise their moral purpose will simply lead to martyrdom as they meet roadblocks.

3.    Becoming a consummate relationship builder. The single factor common to every successful change process is that relationships improve, leading things to get better. Thus leaders must be consummate relationship builders with diverse people and groups.

4.    Knowledge creation and sharing. Leaders must commit themselves to generating and increasing knowledge constantly, inside and outside the organization.

5.    Coherence making. Effective leaders tolerate enough ambiguity to keep the creative juices flowing but along the way -- once they and the group know enough -- they seek coherence.

Moral Purpose

You don't have to be Mother Teresa to have moral purpose. Some people are deeply passionate about improving life while others have a more cognitive approach, displaying less emotion but still being intensely committed to betterment. Whatever their styles, all leaders, to be effective, must have and work on improving their moral purpose.

Moral purpose is about both means and ends. The means to getting to the end are crucial. If, for example, you don't treat other people well, you'll be a leader without followers. T. J. Sergiovanni, in “The Lifeworld of Leadership,” says "authentic leaders anchor their practices in ideas, values and commitments, exhibit distinctive qualities of style and substance, and can be trusted to be morally diligent in advancing the enterprises they lead. Authentic leaders, in other words, display character, and character is the defining characteristic of authentic leadership."

All effective leaders, it's important to understand, are driven by both egotistic and altruistic motivations -- self-centered and unselfish motivations bundled together. That's why everyday leaders shouldn't expect to be like Mother Teresa. Most of us have mixed motivations, and that's fine.

But whatever your leadership role, you can't be effective today without behaving in a morally purposeful way. Of course, moral purpose cannot just be stated; it must be accompanied by strategies for realizing it, and those strategies are the leadership actions that energize people to pursue a desired goal.

Interestingly, when you work on the five leadership qualities outlined here, you'll find yourself steeped in moral purpose, since it's built into those components of leadership as they're carried out in practice.

Understanding Change

A culture of change consists of great speed and non-linearity on the one hand, and great potential for creative breakthroughs on the other. The paradox of that transformation would not be possible without accompanying messiness.

Understanding change is rocket science, not the least because we're inundated with complex, unclear and often contradictory advice. For example, should we emphasize top-down or bottom-up strategies?  Much advice about change is what organizational behavior expert Chris Argyris has called "non actionable advice."

Here are six insights to help you understand the process better:

1.    The goal is not to innovate the most. Organizations or leaders that take on the greatest number of innovations aren't the winners. In education, those are called "Christmas-tree schools" -- they glitter at a distance because of their many innovations, but they end up superficially adorned, lacking depth and coherence.

2.    It's not enough to have the best ideas. You must get people to buy into them.

3.    Appreciate the Implementation Dip -- the drop in performance and confidence that occurs as new skills and new understanding are required. All innovations worth their salt call upon people to question and in some respects change their behavior and beliefs -- even when the innovations are being pursued voluntarily. Effective leaders are sensitive to this issue, and don't panic when things don't go smoothly during the first year of undertaking a major innovation or new direction. They're empathetic to the lot of people immersed in the unnerving and anxiety-ridden work of trying to bring about a new order.

4.    Redefine resistance. Successful change leaders are appreciative of resistance, realizing we may learn more from people who disagree with us than those who agree.

5.    Reculturing -- transforming the culture -- is the key to progress. Effective leaders strive for a particular form of reculturing -- one that activates and deepens moral purpose through collaborative work cultures that respect differences and constantly build and test knowledge against measurable results. That's a culture in which everyone realizes that sometimes being off balance is a learning moment. Leading in a culture of change means creating a culture -- not just a structure -- of change.

6.    Effective leaders realize that there can never be a step-by-step recipe for change. There's no checklist; it's too complex for that.

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

If moral purpose is job one, relationships are job two, because you can't get anywhere without them. In the past, if you asked someone in a successful enterprise what caused the success, the answer would have been, "The people." But that's only partially true -- it's actually the relationships that make the difference.

Effective leaders connect people and bring them into change. They do that in part by making the purpose known. In “Encouraging the Heart,” James Kouzes and Barry Posner argue that what separates effective from ineffective leaders is how much they really care about the people they lead.

Knowledge Building

Most organizations have invested heavily in technology and possibly training, but hardly any in knowledge sharing and creation. And when they do attempt to share and use new knowledge, they find it very difficult -- even the seemingly obvious notion of sharing best practices within an organization. Lew Platt, chairman of Hewlett Packard, once observed, "If only we knew what we know at HP."

Most people automatically assume that if you build relationships, information will flow. But Thomas Homer-Dixon notes that it's a myth that knowledge exchange only occurs if you have a noncompetitive or collaborative culture -- and that you have to fix the culture to get people to share.

"If people begin sharing ideas about issues they see as really important, the sharing itself creates a learning culture," Homer-Dixon says. "It is a kind of chicken-or-egg issue: which comes first, the learning culture or the exchange? Given many organizations' rather abysmal success rate at changing their culture, I would put my money on having the exchange impact the culture rather than waiting for the culture to change."

Effective leaders understand the value and role of knowledge creation. They make it a priority and set about establishing and reinforcing habits of knowledge exchange among organizational members.

Coherence Making

 Change is a leader's friend, but it has a split personality: its nonlinear messiness gets us in trouble. But the experience of this messiness is necessary in order to discover the hidden benefits -- creative ideas and novel solutions are often generated when the status quo is disrupted.

We operate in a dynamic, complex world where overload and fragmentation are common. Leaders need to accept that condition as a given, recognize its potential value and go about coherence making while also retaining the awareness that persistent coherence is a dangerous thing.

Disturbance can be a good thing. Unsettling processes provide the best route to greater all-round coherence. The leader's coherence-making capacity, then, is a matter of timing. There's a time to disturb and a time to cohere. Good leaders, for example, attack incoherence when it's a function of random innovativeness or prolonged confusion.

Moral purpose sets the context, since it calls upon people to aspire to greater accomplishments. It also helps to build in cohesion.

Conclusion

Leaders will increase their effectiveness if they continually work on the five components of leadership -- if they pursue moral purpose, understand the change process, develop relationships, foster knowledge building and strive for coherence. If they do that with energy, enthusiasm and hopefulness, the rewards and benefits will be enormous.