Approximately 31% of CEOs are fired due to poor change management, according to a study conducted by LeadershipIQ. To make matters worse, Gallup reports that leaders are 56% more likely to experience disruptive change in their organization than individual contributors.
So much change can be overwhelming for leaders and make it challenging for them to lead efficiently. But with the right mindset, change can move from being a daunting barrier to success to an integral part of an effective leadership approach.
How Change Affects Your Ability to Lead
It’s not just change that leaders have to face—it’s everything that comes along with it. Some of the more specific aspects of change that make it difficult to lead include:
- Uncertainty: As a leader, maintaining control is crucial, but that’s tough to do when you lack a solid understanding of what’s happening and what the future will look like. Your team likely feels the same uncertainty you do, but if you’re unable to lead them through it, productivity and engagement will suffer
- Hinderance to Decision-Making: In times of change, leaders are often expected to make incredibly important decisions on the fly. However, it’s much more challenging to act decisively or make informed decisions when you’re unsure of what’s exactly needed
- Disruptions: Day-to-day work can easily be interrupted by change. Teams may be forced to shift their focus quickly from one of their existing projects to another, entirely new, change-related project. To ease the overwhelm, teams look to their leaders to lighten or rearrange workloads and schedules to better accommodate them. But if leaders are overwhelmed, too, that’s not such an easy task
- Rearranged Priorities: Change, oftentimes, requires current projects to be put on hold to allow bandwidth to address more urgent change-related tasks. With immediate new goals and challenges, leaders may find it difficult to alter and manage a list of new priorities, not only for themselves but for their team as well
- Pressure to Maintain Morale: During change, it’s natural for teams to feel anxious, confused and unsettled. It’s often left up to the leader to address their team’s concerns, soothe their anxieties and spark motivation to keep their team engaged and performing throughout the change
- Increased Stress: Leaders trying to manage and lead through change oftentimes experience heightened levels of stress. With so much added responsibility on their plate, it’s not hard to see why. However, that stress may cause leaders to under-or-over lead, which can leave teams even more overwhelmed
Mitigate the Impact of Change by Embracing It
There are so many ways change can impact your ability to lead, but it doesn’t have to. To lessen the effect change has on your leadership, all you have to do is embrace it.
Embracing change simply means accepting change as an inevitable part of life and work and remaining open to the idea of change taking place in your organization or team. When you embrace change, you can:
- Become a more adaptable leader
- Build resiliency in yourself and your team
- Improve your ability to solve problems under pressure
- Reduce resistance and inspire confidence in uncertain times
- Smoothly navigate disruptions to remain productive
- Drive and shape the change in your favor
All in all, embracing change allows you to develop the ability to weather the ups and downs, ensuring you remain a solid and steady leader, come what may.
How to Embrace Change for More Effective Leadership
Some of the steps that leaders like you can take to starting embrace change include:
1. Develop a Growth Mindset
Start viewing change not as a threat or an obstacle that needs to be maneuvered but as an opportunity to grow. Get curious about how change initiatives can allow you to develop new skills, gain more resilience and drive improvements in your team, in your organization and in yourself.
2. Get Comfortable With Unknowns
Change often comes with plenty of unknowns. As humans, it’s natural to fear these, but as uncomfortable as it may be, sitting with uncertainty is the key to successfully navigating it. The unknowns are simply a part of the process. Learn to trust in your ability to handle them as they come.
3. Use Self-Reflection
Take some time to assess how you’ve handled change in the past. Maybe you’ve often resisted change, for instance. Explore the reasons why. A deeper awareness of your habitual reactions to change can help you understand what you might need to work on, if you want to embrace change more in the future.
4. Strengthen Your Adaptability
If change is an opportunity for new growth, as mentioned above, then you must be open to evolving. Find ways to be more flexible. Don’t be afraid to explore outside of your comfort zone. Be willing to change your perspective and your strategy. Remember, if your situation is changing, so should your leadership approach.
Learn to Embrace Change With CLS
Looking for a more in-depth tutorial on how to embrace change? Our course, Situational Change Leadership™, has you covered. It provides a full rundown of how to fully embrace change so you can become a better change leader.