Leadership and Change
As change phenomena alter personal, organizational and global paradigms, they concurrently provide opportunities for advancement. In order to better understand and manage change-related problems, the need for leadership becomes crucial.
The changes necessary for the advancement of the human race deserve the collective contribution of people at various levels of society. Leadership skills provide the insight needed to recognize and eliminate obsolete systems and identify opportunities that will facilitate the emancipation and empowerment of people.
Traditional management practices have introduced complacency in the organizations. This development is largely responsible for the disturbing failure rate in change management practices. Consequently, properly conceptualized and articulated strategies falter at the stage of implementation; quality programs and reengineering efforts fall short of anticipated gains in process efficiency; acquisitions and mergers do not create the expected synergies, and scaling under-delivers the prospects of cost reduction.
Meanwhile human nature is designed with a capacity for denial especially when people are comfortable with their current circumstances. This position is reinforced by leadership reluctance to destabilize the status quo and create disruptions that will call for the application of innovative and concurrent leadership skills. Complacency is so pervasive in the organizations that it constitutes a major threat to innovation and change.
Unfortunately, organizations thrive in the misplaced perception that the policies and procedures that shepherded them through the difficulties of past eras are still relevant in today’s turbulent and changing environment.
Consequently, they adopt an inward-looking focus, concentrating and attempting aggressively to continuously extract breakthrough results from resources that have become obsolete and irrelevant by contemporary standards. One of the roles of good leadership is therefore to create that level of crisis that engenders the need to question complacency and challenge the status quo.