What happens when the change does not start with the leaders

This cartoon is well known and I thought of it as a cliche for quite a while until i came across this article by Ron Carucci on hbr.org. The cartoon implies that those who need to change are the employees, not the leader. What resonated strongly with me is that one of the key reasons why organisations fail to change is that the leaders who initiate the change or those who need to implement and champion it rarely question the need for them personally to change.

This made me think about the change programs I have been part of or on their receiving end. In most of the cases the big change initiatives came from the same leaders who led the previous change initiative which was now being discarded. It is strange that these people never talked about what they are personally changing in themselves to ensure that the old patterns will not appear. There was always an expectation that the people on the receiving end need to change but never have I heard how the leadership is changing. Interesting.

A great example of this was the dismantling of a particularly ineffective above-country committee in my organisation many years ago. The leaders who were in charge of it spoke so badly about how ineffective that committee was and how good it was to dismantle it and create a new, leaner version of it. I remember then, as a junior employee, I wondered why were they expecting a different outcome of the new committee when pretty much the same people were members of it. Of course, the result was the same and in the next reorganisation the committee was dismantled.

The change starts with each and every one of us and this is particularly true when we are the one who lead the change initiative. Ron Carucci does a brilliant job in his article to illustrate why and share his examples.