There is an old saying: “You can give a person a fish and feed him or her for a day, or you can teach the person to fish and feed him or her for a lifetime.”
This saying reveals a lot about the virtues of building your organization’s change capability and skill.
In the past, executives had little interest in learning to fish. They just wanted the fish, the result they needed from their current change effort. Learning how to fish, or how to lead ongoing change, was of little importance. This made sense because executives saw little benefit from the massive undertaking of building their organization’s change skills. In many cases, executives secretly hoped that once the current change was over, that would be it. They could go back to business as usual and not have to deal with the challenges of leading change again. Oh, have the times ever changed!
Now, most leaders realize that change is not going away, that it is speeding up and becoming more and more complex. Many executives see very clearly that their organization’s future is in jeopardy unless they and their people “learn to fish.” Developing change leadership skills and building organizational capability for change has become one of the top endeavors of most visionary companies.
In this blog, we will identify seven key practices for building your organization’s capability for successful change.
