Page 166 - Managing Change in Organizations

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All things to all men!
4 Management of self: the ability to know oneself and to work with strengths and
weaknesses.
Leaders empower their organizations to create an environment where people feel
significant, where learning and competence matter, where there is team spirit,
flexibility and excitement. Also where quality and excellence matter and are
something to strive for.

All things to all men!

Kotter (1996) notes ‘management is about coping with complexity. Leadership . . .
is about coping with change’. Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee (2001) describe
‘primal leadership’, noting the role of emotional intelligence in leadership.
In a period of great uncertainty and change, and amid the outward evidence
of the rewards available to both the individuals and organizations who seize
‘opportunities’, it is not surprising that there has been a resurgence of interest in
leadership. The study of ‘great leaders’ seems to provide little evidence on how to
select, develop or encourage potential leaders. Self-evidently, perhaps, ‘leaders’
need not be ‘selected’ or ‘trained’. Nevertheless, if we are to understand the role
of leadership then we must understand why only some succeed and how they
emerge as successful.
The notion of ‘transformational leadership’ is both appealing and uninspiring.
If ‘managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the
right thing’ (Bennis and Nanus, 1985, page 21), it hardly helps us to understand
what corporate leaders do to achieve these transformations. That said, it is clear
that individual corporate leaders can and do play roles in periods of change
which enable dramatic transformations to take place.
It is commonplace to mention outstanding corporate leaders such as John
Egan of Jaguar, Richard Branson at Virgin or Sir John Harvey-Jones of ICI (see
Pettigrew, 1985) as examples. But any careful study sees the corporate leader
firmly in context. This is described plainly in Stewart and Chadwick (1987), an
excellent study of change in the Scottish railway network. For these authors, large

organizations experience ‘systems crisis’ through overspecialization, bureaucracy
and low risk taking. Organizations capable of overcoming this crisis seem to share
the following characteristics:
■ Decentralization.
■ Combined with decentralization, evolution of roles for head office as consult-
ant, power-broker and financier rather than direct controller.
■ Positive attempts to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking.
■ Breaking down of interfunctional barriers.
■ More emphasis on leadership, and on people.
■ An evolving client or customer focus.
■ Established informal links at all levels.
■ A move from controlling to enabling approaches. Systems control the mini-
mum necessary, rather than controlling each and every activity.
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