Organizational change is a huge task, and often an overwhelming experience, that requires very strong leadership. If you are not willing to lead it, you will not succeed. While small changes can be accomplished by delegating to others, transformational change needs strong leadership, and requires everyone in leadership positions to be aligned and committed to moving in the same direction.
As a leader, you have probably been thinking about, planning, and analyzing the change(s) you want to implement for a long time. Of course! You wouldn’t be leading change initiatives if you were not convinced it would be for the better. The problem is that your leaders, managers and employees have not been thinking as much about change, and they need time to both adjust to the idea of change, and accept that change is necessary.
When it comes to your role and your leadership effort I always refer to the change curve. In the early stage of the change, your leadership effort has to increase. You have to invest more and more effort into that change (think: aligning the leadership team, cascading communications, engaging managers and subordinate managers, collecting feedback, influencing influencers) until the organization reaches critical mass.
Critical mass means that enough people have adopted the change that it is now self-sustaining. It is at this point, and this point only, that your leadership effort can start to decrease. There is no metric for critical mass—or at least no metric I have found. Sometimes once 20% of your organization has adopted changes it is enough for critical mass. Sometimes it takes 50% or more! It doesn’t matter if your organization has 20 people or 1000 people. What is vital is that you as leader know when that critical mass is achieved.
How do you know you have reached critical mass?
It’s all about your results. Usually you implement change because results are poor, or stagnant, or not improving by as much as you want. The irony of change is that as it starts to take effect and as you are giving more than you have ever given before, the results haven’t started to improve yet! This is right before critical mass. People are distracted and focusing on the adaptation to change and results are suffering. This is a dramatically demoralizing point when you have to be the best leader you have ever been. You can’t lose faith. It is essential to stay on track and get over the last hump before it starts getting easier, and your results start to improve.
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 David Swain, BSc Mgmt., MSOD, CEC, PCC with over 30 years’ experience in both coaching the leaders of large organizations and leading them himself.
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