Page 235 - 4- Leading_from_Within

change happens through good communication and collaboration, not by
actions of the top leadership.
230

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from

old ones. John Maynard Keynes.

It is also the responsibility of effective leaders to help people understand
how this change will benefit each individual in the organization.
Increasingly the leadership’s role is to interpret, communicate, and enable
rather to instruct and impose, which nobody really responds to well.
Leaders can become cheerleaders, encouraging people to “stay the course”

and continue to meet the challenges.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change
that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another,
either by argument or by emotional appeal. Marilyn Ferguson.

The responsibility for leading change is with management and executives of
the organization; they must direct the change in a way that employees can
cope with it. The leadership of the organization has a responsibility to
facilitate and enable change, and all that is implied within that statement,
especially to understand the situation from an objective standpoint (to
“step back”, and be non-judgmental). Leaders also “direct” the change by

committing resources to it, by setting up the structure and systems for its
implementation, and by putting in place a means for measuring progress to
meet the need for accountability.

American John P. Kotter is a Harvard Business School professor and

leading thinker and author on organizational change management.
Kotter's highly regarded books Leading Change (1995) and the follow-up The
Heart of Change (2002) describe a helpful model for understanding and
leading change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by
Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which
people see, feel and then change. His eight step change model can be

summarized as:

230 Ken Blanchard, Leading at a Higher Level, Upper Saddle River NJ: FT Press, 2010, pp. 225.

David Kolzow 235