8 Critical Stages for Anyone Creating Change

It’s been said that the term “change management” is a misnomer because if you are trying to “manage” change, you’re already too far behind! Change must be led from the front. Because of that, when I first discovered John Kotter’s eight stage process for creating major change in a university textbook (and published in his international bestseller Leading Change), I knew I had stumbled onto something incredibly valuable.

Change

So how do you go about creating change in your organization? Change seems like it should be simple enough – until we experience resistance from people who want things to stay the same. What’s the solution?

Use Strengths to Understand Your Leadership Style

Recently I wrote about the benefits of taking Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 strengths assessment. Nearly 9 million individuals have used the assessment to identify their Top 5 signature strength themes. That means there are many leaders out there who have yet to discover the incredible benefit of clarifying and leveraging their strengths.

Professional PeopleWhat I’d like to do in this post is show how the 34 StrengthsFinder themes neatly divide into four specific leadership styles – and I’ll explain what difference this makes for you and your team. In the next post, I’ll share some ideas for building a strengths-based leadership development program for your organization.

The Problem with Good Ideas

Light BulbAre good ideas ruining the effectiveness of your team or organization? Yes, you read that correctly. Are good ideas keeping you from winning? At a time when creativity and innovation are at a premium, good ideas are actually more threatening than ever.

As organizational leaders, we tend to worship good ideas. We don’t want followers who simply show up to do their work and leave, we want ones who generate ideas on their own and possess the motivation to see them through. So what makes good ideas so dangerous? The answer lies in the substantial difference between a good idea and a right idea (tweet).