Change Agents are not all from the Same Mold

A absence of quality leaders is making the global pace of change a challenge for many organizations. Minority professionals can fill the gap, but organizations need to be willing to lay the groundwork to allow their staffers to be successful change agents across global organizational spaces. This involves looking at the competencies that make good change leaders, aligning those naturally suited leaders to the global cultural and strategic needs of the organization, and building a culture of accountability and responsibility around change.

,b>Identifying Potential Change Leaders

Discovering top change leaders within your organization is not a magic act. Instead, to find good leaders in diverse employee pools, you simply have to consider what makes a good leader in a change-oriented environment. With these competencies defined, it is easier to objectively evaluate your talent pool to pull out key future leaders.

Pinpointing these competencies is as easy as turning to the decades of research on change leadership. According to researcher Dagmar Recklies, there are 15 key competencies needed by change agents, divided into core categories of action management:

Objectives

Roles

• Team-building abilities to bring together key stakeholders and establish effective working groups, and to define and delegate respective responsibilities clearly.
• Networking skills in establishing and maintaining appropriate contacts within and outside the organization.
• Tolerance of ambiguity, having the ability to function comfortably, patiently and effectively in an uncertain environment.

Communication

• Communication skills to transmit effectively to colleagues and subordinates the need for changes in the project goals and in individual tasks and responsibilities.
• Interpersonal skills across the spectrum, including selection, listening, collecting appropriate information, identifying the concerns of others, and managing meetings.
• Personal enthusiasm in expressing plans and ideas.
• Stimulating motivation and commitment in others involved.

Negotiation

• Selling plans and ideas to others by creating a desirable and challenging vision of the future.
• Negotiating with key players for resources, changes in procedures, and conflict resolution.

Managing up

• Political awareness in identifying potential coalitions, and in balancing conflicting goals and perceptions.
• Influencing skills to gain commitment to project plans and ideas form potential skeptics and resisters.
• “Helicopter” perspectives, standing back from the immediate project and taking a broader view of priorities.

These competencies are needed independently of cultural or ethnic background. By leveraging these established points of ability in your selection and training, your organization can nurture the seeds of future great leaders and harness the power of growing change agents with diverse employee groups.

Aligning Leaders to Cultural and Strategic Needs

Once you have identified your key leaders, the next step is to align these change agents with your global cultural and strategic needs. It is not enough to just take a U.S. model for diversity management or change execution and expect it to work in a different international environment. Differing global understandings of diversity and different cultural perspectives on inclusion and change make it imperative to define the local space before putting change agents to work.

To define the local space, ask a series of questions about the environment you are targeting for change. Begin with the basics, defining what diversity and inclusion means in each space and the issues or concerns associated with changing diversity frameworks. Next, approach your desired outcomes. Do you want specific programs or measures from the U.S. to be included in local program designs? How are you planning to move the bar? Finally, determine the scope of your new initiative, pinpointing whether it will be a locally driven or internationally linked initiative.

Once the local space has been explored and defined, it is time to align your selected change agents with the challenge. From your earlier selection pool, you know which minority leaders have the competencies to lead a change initiative. Brief them on the needs of the local space, and then let them navigate the environment using their change skills to lead a shift in attitudes and behaviors on a more integrative level than a top-down mandate of change.

This approach is especially useful when preparing for organizational change with a leader who may be perceived as thinking “outside the box”. By taking care in learning about the situation on the ground before beginning a change mandate, it will be easier for your chosen change agent to navigate the landscape and move forward with organizational goals without causing irreparable rifts in local space culture.

Building a Culture of Accountability and Responsibility

To support the localized change being sought and enable change agent success regardless of the background of the change leader, your organization needs to build a functional culture of accountability and responsibility. This is not something that can be mandated into place – it has to be cultivated at all levels through the use of:

• Prioritization: Build an authentic mission statement or strategic position to delineate what is or isn’t important
• Forward-pulling goals: Use targets, firm parameters, and ambition-oriented metrics to eliminate performance ambiguity and advance key causes
• Systems alignment: Streamline your processes and resources so that all elements of your group are working in tandem
• FOCUS: Following One Course Until Successful – abandonment of your earlier planning shows there are no consequences for failure. With strategic must-meet objectives, there is no question of what is to be done or who isn’t doing the work.
• Regular evaluation: Assess strengths, weaknesses/limitations, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) and group performance regularly to show that standards are expected to be met and where there is need for adjustment.

In a culture that operates on these frameworks, change agents of all backgrounds can get the job done since metrics and objectives are well-defined. It supports leaders in place and helps fill gaps in organizational performance effectively. In a world that isn’t slowing down, using these tools and leveraging internally suited change agents will help your firm show a leadership advantage that will be hard for competitors to beat.