Change Agents Still Have To Deliver Results
I’m not overly fond of the term change agent, but there is something to be said for people who are good at adapting to and embracing organizational change as an opportunity for growth.
Once you’ve become adept at adjusting to change you may find yourself actually enjoying it. You may actually find it kind of addicting. You may suddenly find yourself drawn to positions where there is a lot of change happening. If you’re seen as someone with this particular skill, this can be a very good thing, because most people don’t. You’ll suddenly find management asking you to be on, or lead, projects with vague sounding descriptions. Your job title will become less and less meaningful and you’ll have a harder time explaining to people what you actually do.
Often times you won’t know what the end state of the project will be. When you’re good at adapting to change you’ll typically be part of “emerging” teams. Teams where you’re making it up as you go. Projects where your primary role is to learn, where you have to be nimble and your team is often made up of people with very diverse backgrounds.
These emerging teams are the company’s reaction to change, to the unknown. When they know they need to do something but they don’t know what that is, that’s your new job. There can be a lot of long-term job security in these kind of roles, but not always in the short-term. You will change roles in your company a lot. You may even find the group you were apart of on the pruning end of a portfolio management approach to new projects (a.k.a. it gets cut) but from my experience these people never have a hard time finding other roles in the company or other jobs elsewhere. The willingness and ability to attack the nebulous unknown is a highly valued skill set.
But there is one downside for the risk-tolerant (or risk seeking), and that’s a kind of addiction to constant change. Change is a rush. Adrenaline junkies feed off these fast paced environments. “Change agents” typically prefer change because that uncertainty gives them a competitive advantage inside the company. Not being able to define your role or your job title makes it harder for people to measure your effectiveness. In mature parts of the business this is a very bad thing. In “emerging” businesses this gives you a lot of flexibility and lets you fly under the radar for a while. I’ve even seen some managers only able to manage by change, to the point where they start creating change where none is needed. Everything becomes a crisis, everything is broken and everything needs constant change.
Eventually though, if you’re not able to deliver something tangible from all of this change, people will start to realize that you don’t actually do anything. Talk of change, and plans for change, don’t mean anything unless something new and stable emerges from the chaos, you will have only managed to waste a lot of time, resources, and energy.
If you find yourself someone who’s really good at driving change, make sure you work on being able to deliver something from that. Get good at building teams and setting and meeting milestones.
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Originally published at tacanderson.com.
