Leading Successful Change

The digital age is characterised by the rapid pace and volume of change along with uncertainty, fragility, and complexity. Most people now operate with wider roles (which may include functional, operational, innovation and project work) that require them to communicate and collaborate effectively with individuals, teams, and stakeholders, across ever growing networks. Meanwhile, against this background of relentless change, time, focus, and attention, are all precious resources in a busy and distracted world.

Our QA point of view is that whilst many organisations have their own change methodologies (and some of the core ones are covered in this learning), it is leadership behaviours that make most difference in the digital age. This programme cuts through the noise in this busy landscape by focussing on the behaviours that make the difference when leading change reducing the time to achieving business value.It addresses the challenges of change, whilst looking at the positive contribution adopting certain behaviours have on the impact of change. The programme neither presents change as too painful and too difficult, nor assumes is made successful by following a single method, or simplistic step wise approach to change management, as much as these can be useful.

The sort of challenges the programme leans into include emotional reactions to change, seeing clarity in what can feel like a busy change agenda, looking at time scales and speed of time to value, the need to communicate and communicate again a vision/purpose to the change, use of modern sources of data to help direct change, digital tools, experimentation and much more that is modern and relevant.

Despite, or maybe because of these challenges, leading change in the digital age can be a rewarding experience. Leaders can become empowered by change as they overcome these challenges by focusing on developing their leadership behaviours to ensure that their decision making is data driven, they are agile, collaborative, and inclusive when interacting with their change stakeholders and they are courageous in taking risks and standing up for what they believe in and challenging the status quo. Leaders confident in their own approach to change model the behaviours they expect of others, are patient with the people and the process, and optimistic and realistic about the journey and outcomes.

What can Leading Successful Change do for you and your organisation?

Change can feel overwhelming and too often framed as too difficult or just a choice of getting on the bus by following some method. Our distinctive QA behavioural view breaks through this stale mate. It creates a cascade of productive behaviours from leaders to followers.

It provides a structured plan to help transfer their learning to their workplace and their team. For some people, the learning can serve to refresh the fundamental skills required to win in a digital age, for others leading change can be new. It provides a break from overly optimistic or overly pessimistic views of change to lead change in a realistic and well-paced manner with people’s behaviours at its centre.

Our approach to your spending time learning

We do not overload learners with too many ways of thinking about change or some single method that promises to deliver without fail. We use our QA eight change behaviours to make change challenging and rewarding within a system that helps create a change culture. Change can feel an overwhelming subject, with as many methods and frameworks as leadership has, which can be equally confusing for those learners wanting to make a difference.

Breakouts, where the likely first steps of managing well are related to in-depth, in relationship to context serve a way of learning from peers. Learners think deeply about their transition, what it means to them and their organisation that has chosen them as ready to step up.

We clearly direct the learner to ways of behaving that set them up for success through confidence and reflection in and on action. We provide a safe place to explore the emotions around change. Returning to work energised with practical and considered ways of leading change is our aim um manging the transition and performing are central to aim. Throughout the course, we pause to allow learners to think and record what it all means. Learners walk away, not with a hurried plan they are not committed to, written at the end of the course. Instead, they own well-thought through approaches to translating the learning into their workplace, because they are built upon throughout the course, with professional facilitated help.

What’s included?

Included are sessions that clearly articulate how the learning can be translated into different change contexts and different roles. Leading change is positioned and explored to extract the role of the context, which allows learners to gain insight into what can make a difference in their context. As change is such an overarching concept, we include connections to other relevant concepts, as and when relevant to the group being taught. Facilitation skills are used to contextualise the behaviours to different types of change.

• Apply QA’s eight leadership behaviours for leadingsuccessful change to your chosen change methodology
• Mitigate the challenges of leading successful change in thedigital age for your own context
• Create an action plan to advance your change projects andagenda and leverage your learning

Our learning is geared towards people wishing to link lead different types of change invariably linked to technology in some way. Learners are those fed up with some single method that is supposed to be all encompassing or who are moving into roles where leading change is linked to performance.

There are no pre learning or pre-requisites. Learners are purely asked to come with their limited experience, and their understanding of their unique context.

Throughout learners are asked to complete a QA Leveraging Learning Log (LLL) so that learning is translated into relevant opportunities for growth – personal and organisational. Unique to QA, the LLL is a key part of our teaching and learning strategy that ensures learning flows back into the workplace with effort of course, but without wasted or un-co-ordinated effort.

The course takes a behavioural stance on change to allow it to be integrated with any particular methodology used by organisations and to emphasise the importance of behaviour when leading change. It includes:

• QA’s Winning in the Digital Age Framework
• Leading Successful Change – 8 leadership behaviours
• Change Stakeholders

Each of the 8 leadership behaviours is looked at from different angles creating a takeaway model that can be used alongside any change framework.

We look forward to running these events to make a difference to the learner and their organisation.