Change Management TOP 5 leadership competency of tomorrow

The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) just published the outcome of a survey conducted among Fortune 1000 companies to identify the Top 5 leadership competencies of tomorrow. Respondents were asked to write in the top five words or phrases that came to mind to describe the leadership competencies they perceive will be critical in the future. This is what came out (for some strange reason, only 4 headings are listed, 5 though if you count leadership agility and flexibility as separate items). 


Leadership agility and flexibility

"Tomorrow's leaders will need to be able to manage on the fly," says Kevin Oakes, CEO of i4cp. "Not only will they need to be mentally agile and flexible, they'll need to instill those qualities in others, even while keeping things from becoming chaotic. I picture them as excellent business athletes."

Innovation

Another of the top five competencies is innovation. "Innovation is, in fact, one way to stay agile," notes Oakes. "You react to changes in the business environment by doing things differently and by quickly inventing new products and services that help you gain a competitive advantage."

Communication

In an environment where the world is awash in social media and instant messaging, leaders will need to be exceptional communicators, able to cut through the morass of information overload with well-honed messaging.

Change management

The critical nature of change management is highlighted not only in the write-ins but in other parts of the i4cp study as well. When i4cp asked about the degree to which organizations emphasize certain management competencies, it found that the more that organizations stress change management skills, the higher they score on i4cp's Leadership Success Index.

"From this perspective, the future is already here," notes Oakes. "Change management skills will not only be needed for the future, they're paying dividends now."
Read other surveys about change here

Change Management Top “HR Skill for Survival”

The well known UK based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) conducted an online poll among its HR community to determine the most important “HR skills for survival”. More precisely, the respondents were asked to chose three competencies they believed were most important to establish the function's effectiveness and credibility in the organisation. The following results came out:
1. Effective management of change (46%)
2. Strategic thinking (44%)
3. Business knowledge (36%)

I am not surprised to see those 3 items on top of the list but, I have to say, am a little surprised to see change management coming out as number 1. This does however fit quite well with IBM’s Enterprise of the Future survey which key finding shows that businesses are being “bombarded by change”. HR managers will typically find themselves in the middle of the battlefield, trying to keep the link between ground troops and generals, sometimes a very difficult challenge during significant change initiatives.
More details about the survey here on the CIPD website.

The Enterprise of the Future

IBM has just published a new global survey among more than 1000 CEO’s to find out what the company of the future would look like. The findings highlight the growing importance of successful change management:

• Organisations are bombarded by change and many are struggling to keep up
• CEO’s view more demanding customers not as a threat but as an opportunity to differentiate
• Nearly all CEO’s are adapting their business models, two-thirds are implementing extensive innovations
• CEO’s are moving aggressively toward global business designs, deeply changing capabilities and partnering more extensively
• Financial outperformers are making bolder plays

Before reading those findings, I would certainly have expected something about the intensity of change, but not to a point where CEO’s claim to be bombarded by it. This is really striking.
From these findings, the study defines what the enterprise of the future will look like:

• Hungry for change
• Innovative beyond customer imagination
• Globally integrated
• Disruptive by nature
• Genuine, not just generous

In other words, businesses need to adopt a very proactive stance towards change and as IBM puts it in the study, the question leaders must ask themselves is: “Does your organisation have a healthy appetite for change?”

Change management needed to greening corporate travel

Changing our behaviours to reduce our carbon footprint is a key and sometimes difficult challenge for us individuals and businesses. Air travel represents 2% of the world's total CO2 emissions, which may seem insignificant at first but is in fact a lot if you compare it with cleaner means of travelling. As an indication The Impact of Tourism on Climate Change (Peeters, 2007) reveals that European tourists use air travel for 20% of their trips, which yet accounts for 75% of the total tourism transport CO2 emissions (interesting to note the Pareto principles applies here).

The Green Travel Summit held on 23-24 March in California, came out with the top 10 challenges to greening corporate travel, of which 6 are directly related to change management issues, as highlighted below:

1. Where to begin

2. Perception vs reality regarding costs

3. Overcoming resistance to change

4. Buy in from senior management

5. ROI*

6. Securing budget

7. Reporting standards and metrics*

8. Green washing: truth vs fiction

9. Buy in from both the planner and the supplier

10. Communicating and educating all relative stakeholders

* to me directly related to change management as measuring and communicating successes and benefits is a key component

More details here

Logica Study Shows Consequences of Lack of Change Management

A new study commissioned by Logica Management Consulting identifies winners and losers in business process change and outlines best practice guide

• Companies surveyed in the UK losing £1.7 billion a year
• One third of business process changes fall short of expected benefits
• One fifth of businesses do not measure change management performance

A key finding from the report is that winners tend to be more ambitious when planning change projects. Winners are much more likely to run cross-regional, cross-departmental projects than losers. They are also more proactive when planning change projects, don’t wait for problems to arise such as customer complaints or lost market share before implementing change reactively, but plan for change in order to improve business performance and involve customers and partners in that planning.

High performers also put more emphasis on treating change as a distinct project with its own budget, instead of attempting to manage change as part of day to day business. Such a simple step serves to counterbalance the key obstacles to successful change, namely pressure from everyday business (42%) and lack of resources (41%).

Editor P.S: The report also highlights the main barriers to effective business improvement. The majority of these barriers are directly or indirectly related to change management issues, such as lack of dedicated resources, lack of alignment between functions, relevant indicators and level of employee buy-in. Interesting also, are the country analysis charts highlighting substantial cultural differences in the way executives perceive barriers and critical success factors for change. For example, Belgium and Sweden mention lack of senior management support in their top 3 barriers while Germany and Spain feture lack of acceptance and buy-in of employees in their top 5.

More here