cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

LEADING CHANGEThe right way to manage change?Chapter 4, Leading Change, looks at how you can successfully lead andmanage change from a number of perspectives and highlights a numberof leading researchers, authors and practitioners in the field. Since thefirst edition we have become very interested in further exploration ofthe ideas set out in Chapter 4, and have begun an inquiry into the possibilitythat different leadership roles are required in different organizationalcontexts. This goes beyond a simple ‘situational leadership’approach of looking at one-to-one relationships, examining what rolesor combinations of roles are required of leaders of change to serve theorganizational need.We searched the literature, and combined this with our knowledge ofmany different sets of leadership competences from organizations wework with. From this process we derived a set of five leadership roleswhich cover the full set of possibilities using a clustered approach.We invited research participants, all experienced managers orOrganization Development professionals, to use their organizationalwisdom to select the leadership roles they thought would be most effectivein a range of contexts. We wanted to find out if different leadershiproles, or combinations of roles, matched up to any particular contexts. Weasked participants to select the one or two leadership roles that theythought would work best in each of a range of organizational contexts.The summary of results appears in Figure 10.1 below. It is clear fromthis information that a wide range of roles are useful, and that combinationsof roles work well. There are some interesting patterns to noticeabout particular contexts, but the overall message is that all the roles areuseful at times.In our book Making Sense of Leadership, we describe our research, setout the results and conclude that there are five roles to select fromwhich leaders need to use flexibly if they are to be versatile performers.Again, we concluded that there is no one right way, but there are someguidelines.The five roles (see Figure 10.2 for a summary) are:• The Edgy Catalyser: focuses on creating discomfort to catalyse change;• The Visionary Motivator: focuses on engagement and buy-in to energizepeople;343