How do you lead change?

As he walked back into the kitchen, a maths book flew across the room, straight out of the open window, landing with a thwack on the patio outside, startling the blissfully stretched out dog, enjoying the evening sunshine

His 12 year-old son blinked at him through tears, “I don’t want to grow up, I don’t want all this rubbish adults have, I just want to keep being a kid!”. The Communications Director leaned against the side board and took a deep breath

The thing is, that day at work, he had been leading a team of 27 managers through a new systems change – one where they would need to collaborate much more with the technical team, rather than continue with their silo’d ways of working – which were frankly costing them millions, if not the actual future of the company itself. Whilst no books had been thrown, they might as well have been

His own boss had briefed him on the Friday, so his Sunday had been spent swapping a trip with his son to the skate park with preparing for the meeting. Choosing the sharpest data, the slickest visuals, the punchiest examples, soundbites from the CEO – about why the change needed to happen. Yet he honestly couldn’t tell you how much the team took in. He would say a third of them looked directly at him, alert and interested, a third of them looked distractedly out of the window, slumped in their chairs and the rest just looked at their phones. He wanted to scream at them, “if we don’t do this – you won’t have a job you idiots”, but that’s not what he gets paid for as a leader, so he kept his energy as high as he could and flicked to the next slide

Relate much?

The truth is, frankly I am not that keen on change myself either, I felt exactly the same as I headed into my teenage years and probably like a lot of you, I feel very lucky that I got to do it then, rather than today. The transition from kid to adult now is brutal, with most kids becoming aware of things that even our adult brains struggle to cope with, at the exact same time as they see changes in their bodies which they simply can’t control. For most of us as humans, puberty itself can be tough, let alone having all your childhood naivety stripped away with the tap of a few buttons on a friends phone in the same week that you realise that the results of the stupid maths test do actually matter. Like the guy in the example above he didn’t love the fact that the book nearly hit the dog, but he did understand why his son threw it. The same with his team – he wasn’t keen on changing the way they worked either, he loved the fact they had smashed their targets last year, they had a good atmosphere in the team, and were recruiting new talent in regularly because they had a reputation for being the best

But in today’s world, change is inevitable, it’s everywhere and as a leader whilst it is actually pretty exciting a lot of the time, it can be overwhelming to be leading it. The thing that we often don't twig, is that we are not just leading change at work, we are also leading change at home – so maybe it's time to decide we want to get really, really good at leading change. And guess what is the first thing to realise? It starts with us. If as a leader, in our hearts, we aren’t truly comfortable with leading change, our team and our family can tell – they see through us

So, start with yourself, start building your ability to enjoy the ride of change and that way you can give everyone around you who so desperately needs it, the leadership you know in your heart you are capable of

If you would like to discover more about how you can build your leading change muscles we have an Upskill (our name for a course/masterclass) to help you do just that – you can learn more about it here