Leading Change: Moving Your Team in the Right Direction

Leading change is a vital aspect of leadership, requiring dynamic, focused action. Without these skills, proactive change will fail – or fail even to get started.

The first step to managing change is to be open and to base decisions on reliable information. Even if the change is unwelcome, people at least feel confident that the leader knows what they are doing and have some faith in their professionalism and expertise. This is a basic level of trust – trusting the competence and capability of those in charge. The second essential is for people to truly believe that you – the leader – have their interests at heart and that they can trust you to do the best you can to take care of them during the change. Too many executives treat changes – such as redundancy – as a process. Also, the aspects of the process are often led by legal requirements instead of any human considerations.