Your Transformation will Fail if you don’t Match your Leadership and Management Style to the Change
Managing change is never easy and one of the things I find when helping people with this is ensuring that they understand that leadership and management styles might need to change depending on the nature of the change. This might mean people having to change how they behave or perhaps being more careful about who you choose to lead and manage the change.
Contingency Model
A useful model in this area goes back a while but remains entirely relevant. Created by Dunphy and Stace, it is a situational or contingency model of change, which suggests that there is no single, best way to manage or lead a change, but rather that the effectiveness of a leadership or management style depends on various internal and external factors. It discusses how organisations differ in terms of structure, processes and key values which they espouse, and these differences mean that different approaches could fail for various reasons.
With this knowledge, it is recommended that leaders, managers and change agents choose the right change strategies. You need to consider the environmental factors as well as the forces of leadership which play a crucial role in any change process.
4 Possible Leadership Styles
They identified 4 possible styles of leadership and management.
· Collaborative Style: The collaborative leadership style involves involving employees in making important decisions about the organisation’s future and how it will implement changes.
· Consultative Style: Leaders with a consultative style consult with employees before making organisational changes, though they still retain control over goal setting within their expertise.
· Directive Style: The directive leadership style entails minimal employee involvement in decision-making regarding the organisation’s future. Instead, this leadership style relies on authority to make critical decisions related to organisational change.
· Coercive Style: This leadership approach employs coercion or force, either through outside parties or managers/executives, to push through organisational changes on employees.
In addition, they argue that:
• Incremental changes are appropriate when an organisation is already performing well and only needs minor adjustments. In such cases, there’s no need for rapid or abrupt changes to ensure a smooth transition.
• Transformational changes become necessary when an organisation is in a state of imbalance or is not functioning optimally, requiring quick action to ensure its survival.
• Collaborative change methods work well when employees and interest groups are supportive and cooperative throughout the change process, encountering minimal resistance.
• Coercive change methods are useful when significant opposition is encountered from the target interest groups during the change process.
Dunphy and Stace developed a model featuring five different types of change based on the interaction between the scale of change and management/leadership style. Here are the key characteristics of these five change types:
· Taylorism: This change type typically involves avoiding substantial changes and instead making minor adjustments, often resulting in lower organisational performance.
· Developmental Transition: This change type focuses on facilitating employee development, implementing quality improvement initiatives, enhancing communication, expanding services, achieving continuous improvement in service quality, and fostering team building.
· Task-Focused Transition: This change type emphasizes new techniques, procedures, products, and services, often accompanied by frequent reorganisations.
· Charismatic Transitions: Charismatic leaders use effective communication and trust-building to implement change with the willing support of their followers.
· Turnarounds: This change type is characterized by significant, sometimes radical, changes that may involve the use of authority or coercion and can be accompanied by considerable discomfort or hardship.
Do it with Data
There are several practical considerations when applying this model to your change. The first of these is to ensure you carry out a careful diagnosis of the current situation and the desired future state of the organization, as well as the environmental factors that influence the change process. The diagnosis should be based on reliable data and evidence, not just assumptions or opinions.
This doesn’t have to take too long, but it does require some time and some rigour. The larger and more diverse (culturally, geographically etc.) the organisation the more care is needed.
Direction and Coercion Frequently Fail
All too often I see people overestimate their power. “They will do it because we tell them to” is rarely the right answer. There are some slightly less aggressive, but equally dangerous versions “They will do it because they’re expected to”, and “They will do it because it’s better”. The latter isn’t inherently bad, but all too often it is a statement based on assumption and opinion, not real data. If the recipients of change genuinely believe the future is better than the past, and have been empowered to help define the future state, then it probably holds true. But all too often they will be approaching the future with a mix of fear, uncertainty, and doubt and feeling that the change is being “done to them”.
The Biggest Risk
This is a great model, but if I were to pick one risk it would be to consider this a one-sided change. A sudden change in leadership or management style can do more damage than it does good. It can breach the “psychological contract” between employer and employee. That is a huge topic for future blogs — psychology and informal contracting (the stuff that defines unwritten expectations between different parties — formal contracting is the stuff that is written down and usually has signatures attached) are fundamental in my experience.
About the Author
Peter Stansbury is a Principal Consultant with Version 1 focused on business transformation.
If you have any questions about managing change, then do get in contact — peter.stansbury@version1.com.
