Transition Leadership
Creating Sustainable Change Resilient Organisations
Catherine Hayes’s Transition Leadership Practice is based 30 years of business practice and practitioner research. Integrating 28 years of practitioner research, informed by business psychology, six different clinical psychotherapy practices and Buddhist psychology.
Catherine’s passion for writing this book was to provide new perspectives on resilient change leadership practices to support leaders and change professionals. Practical, sustainable and resilient approaches that consistently deliver successful outcomes in today’s continuously changing environment.
Providing depth of insight into the unseen and overlooked complex dynamics of working with transitional journeys in multiple contexts. It includes:
Approaches for working with the challenges that organisation transitions evoke and practices for developing sustainable resilient Transition Leadership capabilities.
It also explores resilient practices for working with complexity and ambiguity and how different core capabilities and mind-sets impact behaviour and outcomes. Key aspects of transitions that when overlooked can cause leaders to unintentionally get in the way of their own change agendas.
Summary of Content
For centuries, our Western mind-sets have been constructed behind a veil of the illusion of simplicity and control. Even though quantum physics has revealed that our universe is complex and in continuous processes of transition, we have become accustomed to creating a perceived reality that certainty is good, not-knowing and ambiguity are bad. The byproducts from these perceptions are the beliefs that change can be managed and ultimately controlled.
The belief that change can be controlled has been embedded into in how organisations are designed and function. Utilising power through organisational structures. Advocating individual responsibility and accountability. Broadcasting information. Managing behaviours, enforcing the compliance of rules and regulations. These are just some of the traditional leadership approaches that have been specifically designed to mitigate the risk of individuals, teams and organisations from being out of control.
Historically these change and leadership practices have been perceived to be successful. Although, in today’s constantly changing environment they are no longer achieving desired results. In fact, quite the opposite and particularly when it comes to leading successful transformations in organisations.
Our world is in a paradigm transition. Despite our aspirations, we can no longer rely on the beliefs and historical practices of simplicity and control. Leaders and their organisations are called to accept, adapt and work with things the way they are and becoming, not just the way they want them to be. Navigating environments of continuous change requires building sustainable infrastructures, developing new/different perspectives and resilient capabilities for working with the emerging complexities of an impermanent landscape. It’s a practice that I have come to know as Transition Leadership.
There are four key principles that contribute to successful Transition Leadership practices:
1. The only certainty is uncertainty
2. We can’t manage change we are called to embrace and work with it
3. Ambiguity is ambiguity – it’s all about the nature of the relationships that we have with ambiguity that makes a difference
4. No one person can know everything and have all the answers
Leaders who embrace these principles appreciate that they can’t lead others and organisations if they can’t lead themselves. This insight prompts leaders to develop capabilities for supporting themselves and their organisations to work with uncertainty, not-knowing, complexity and ambiguity.
With focused intent, leaders leverage the power of their positions to engage their workforces and create mutuality supportive environments. By co-creating transition strategies, developing sustainable infrastructures and resilient capabilities they build unifying contexts that connect hearts and minds. The outcomes result in shared understanding, collective accountability and sustainable success in multiple contexts.
As leaders return authority to their workforces, they can leverage the potential in diversity of thought through collective decision-making. This enhances their capabilities for honouring complexity. By investing time and resources in exploring and working with complex challenges, they and their organisations generate creative approaches for establishing resourceful solutions.
This in turn means that leaders and their organisations can work with and leverage ambiguity. Taking purposeful incremental approaches for stepping into unknown territories of the present and the continuously evolving future.
When leaders and their organisations adopt these Transition principles and practices, they become resourceful, creating sustainable integrated infrastructures. The outcomes result in systemic capabilities for navigating environments of continuous change. Organisations utilise uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity as opportunities for generating innovation, creating products and services that outshine their competitors. The same applies to leading edge science and health research, advancement emerges from what is unknown not from what is known