Leadership is About Leading Change

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Integrator Leaders Lead Change

Integrator Leaders© possess the unique ability to see what isn’t there, channeling the collective energy of others to make their vision a reality. Simply stated, leadership is about leading change. Rather than engaging in futile attempts to manage, adapt to, or resist change, Integrator Leaders help their teams to build a future yet to be born.

Change has become so pervasive that simply to survive means that we must learn to leverage change to our advantage by building organizations that are more adaptive, agile, creative, and innovative.

Improving your change strategy by becoming an Integrator Leader is therefore not only a matter of survival, but it is the key to thriving in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world.

Changing How We See Change

Great leaders lead change; that is, they don’t simply react to change―they create it. Integrator Leaders learn to see change, not as something to be avoided or managed, but rather leveraged to your advantage.

At the most basic level, nature teaches us that organisms that sense and adapt to changes in their environment will succeed, while those that don’t will fail. Organizations, like organisms, must learn to sense and appropriately adapt to changes in their environment to survive and thrive. Yet biological adaptation, while crucial to our survival, is only part of the picture. Biological adaptation can be exceedingly slow and, at its root, largely unconscious and reactionary.

Reactionary change is a form of change that reacts to symptoms rather than addressing underlying systemic causes. It is impulsive rather than methodical and systemic, like plugging your fingers in a leaking dike without realizing that the dike is already breached upstream. Humans are renowned for this form of myopic, sub-optimized behavior. We fail to look systemically, to take in the big picture, and to understand how our actions cause ripple effects throughout the world around us.

Reactionary change makes us feel better in the short term, as though we have taken actions that will fix the problem. This form of change creates a false sense of security and complacency about the true dangers that may be approaching. That is, we may have plugged the holes in the dike surrounding our community, but despite our efforts, the breach upstream means that disaster is approaching.

Becoming An Integrator Leader

Integrator Leaders create a clear compass heading for their team while helping them develop the map to get from here to there.

They understand that they must lead through influence and coordinate with other teams to create alignment behind their organization’s strategic goals. In this way, they forge new bonds of influence between functional groups, enabling teams to self-organize behind the mission.

As Albert Einstein reminds us, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Integrator Leaders help their team see their world through new eyes and to use challenges as crucibles for learning, growth, and development. They know this can have tremendous positive ripple effects across an entire organization, leading to superior outcomes for customers and a work environment that attracts, develops, and retains top talent.

While the industrial age ushered in forms of management predicated on precision, predictability, and control, these strengths have in many ways become our weakness, giving way to a premium on speed, adaptability, and flexibility. Rather than attempting to maintain some elusive state of stability, Integrator Leaders help their organizations leverage change to their competitive advantage.

Principles that Guide the Integrator Leader

Join others who have applied these principles as they were seeking to create an environment that embraces change to benefit their organization. They have been applied by hundreds of leaders who have reported an extremely positive impact to their organizations within the private sector, public sector, and with non-profits.

Principle 1: Work Yourself Out of Your Job. As an Integrator Leader, make it your objective to work yourself out of your job. This is your fastest route to success. Many leaders try to make themselves indispensable, but this should be avoided at all cost. Instead, you want to make your team less dependent upon you over time. Coach, mentor, give your team suggestions and guidance, but do not solve problems for them. Ultimately, you want your team to own the solution, rather than merely follow your orders.

Principle 2: Integrated Solutions Require Integrated Operations. Looking at your organization through the eyes of your customer, you must assume that customers don’t necessarily want what you are selling. Yet, they cannot necessarily tell you exactly what they do want. Instead, what customers expect are integrated solutions to their problems. However, we can’t create integrated solutions if we are fragmented internally; integrated solutions require integrated internal operations.

Principle 3: Focus on Outcomes Rather than Inputs. We must turn the mechanistic management paradigm inside-out. The industrial age paradigm focused on worker input rather than the outcomes achieved. Yet the only thing customers really care about is the outcome: that is, the products and services that they purchase. Too often, workers are expected to simply follow processes without analyzing and improving them. Unfortunately, standard operating procedures can become a substitute for thinking and innovation. We want people to be involved in continually refining the processes that they are expected to follow, and to be accountable for the outcomes they achieve.

Principle 4: From Command and Control to Strategic Intent. The most effective military leaders we work with focus on defining their intent, giving maximum latitude to front-line troops on how best to accomplish their mission. The U.S. Army refers to this as Mission Command or moving from a system of rigid, top-down control to commanders viewing front-line troops as their eyes and ears on the ground and as their operational advisors. Translating this to the civilian sector, the most effective leaders we work with today provide the compass heading, meaning that they set the priorities and the criteria by which they will judge a successful outcome. Employees then operate freely within appropriate left and right boundaries to create the roadmap for how to achieve the intended outcome.

Principle 5: Whole Systems Perspective. We too often think of the future in terms of the past. Favored ways of seeing become ways of not seeing. Individuals and functional groups become too myopic, failing to understand the big picture and what they need from one another for the operation as a whole to succeed. The team needs to view things from the canopy, so they don’t get disoriented when they’re on the jungle floor.

Principle 6: Ask — Don’t Tell. To the greatest extent possible, you want the team to own the how; ownership is key to building a culture of commitment. As the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “the leader of the past knew how to tell; the leader of the future will know how to ask.” He was not referring to being polite, but rather acknowledging the fact that knowledge workers know more about their job than their boss. Therefore, they must define the task. That is, specialized knowledge workers hold the critical operational intelligence necessary to accomplish the mission.

Integrator Leader Reflections

How can you help your own team become less reactive and more proactive in the face of change?
How can you help your team move from compliance to commitment?
How can you get your team to transition from taking orders to taking ownership?

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