Tethering Yourself to Fresh Ideas: The Center for Creative Leadership's Perspective of Business Transformation
A key part of leading business transformations is to focus on continually evolving your skills and capabilities so as to avoid becoming too much "a part of the problem" and mostly "a part of the solution." This is pretty easy to do as a consultant, given the organizational and contractual boundaries that exist when consulting to a company on transformation. However, if you find yourself driving change from inside the company that also prints your paychecks, you need to tether yourself to the outside to keep a fresh perspective. I believe this is a matter of survival for an internally led transformations. Without the outside influence, of course accompanied with a filtering process to determine which ideas are appropriate for your company, you run the risk of losing perspective and becoming "stale". There are a lot of ways to tether yourself, including but not limited to formal training, webinars, blogs, RSS readers, even good old fashion reading of books. One of the organizations that I have discovered helpful in maintaining my perspective from the outside is the Center for Creative Leadership. You can find them at www.ccl.org. While my relationship with this organization is relatively new and not very deep, I am impressed with their insights as a change leader.
In almost every business transformation or change management text, method, or technique, the topic of leadership is addressed. Many argue that it is the most important topic of change. Whether you rank leadership as #1 or #100 in your list of things to change as a change leader, you probably have it somewhere on your list, and it is probably not getting the attention that is really deserves (except thos of you who have it in the top 5).
If you recognize that leadership is an important component of change management, and if you recommend that leadership evolution is a part of a purposeful change management or business transformation program, you should take 15 minutes to check out the attached and determine if you may want to tether yourself to some of CCL's intellectual capital.