Chapter Summaries

  • Designing others’ success is rooted in change as your charge as a leader involves facilitating others, and the organization, to become something better than before. Change is fundamentally a people process. Organizations do not change unless the individuals within them change. To achieve and sustain change, those in leadership roles need to look for new approaches for inspiring others to follow their lead. Change can be considered at three levels: personal, incremental, and large scale.
  • Individual change happens in stages, which includes how people think about things (cognitive), how they feel (emotional), and how they interact with the leader and one another (social). Most people are uncomfortable with change and can initially react in very negative ways. The Prochaska model can help prompt individual change from initial awareness of a need for change all the way through maintaining a successful change.
  • Resistance to change at the individual level translates to challenges implementing change at the organizational level. The general ADKAR model can help remind leaders where followers are in their change process. Change fatigue, overreliance on rationality, and failure to fully consider the risk are just some of the many barriers to effecting change.
  • Transformational leaders are contrasted with transactional leaders by their focus on advancing all followers to be their best selves, versus simple compliance and organizational goal attainment. Adopting a transformational leadership approach, along with other interpersonal factors, comprises an initial step in executing change. The I3 and Kotter models of change execution provide concrete steps for planning, executing, and maintaining organizational change efforts. Adding a design framework further highlights the transformational human aspect of the change process.
  • It takes a special person to lead change efforts. Suggesting change is rather easy, but implementing change is challenging. You will need to continue to develop your CORE to persevere through to successful change and design others’ success.