Leadership is the most critical factor for successful change - Change Management is good leadership. In fact, typical change management effort requires
70-90% leadership skills as opposed to only 10-30% managerial skills. It touches every other success factor. If you have effective leadership, you'll have effective communication. You'll have vision clarity. You will have clear expectations, both near and long term, and motivation and performance recognition. You'll have focus on getting stake-holders involved and committed, because that's what effective leaders do, by definition.
Leaders may need to be educated and sometimes replaced - Weak leaders CAN be developed. But a weak leader left in place without improvement poses a risk, so the organization must take positive action to resolve it. Weak leaders create defining moments, where decisions made will either further the change, or degrade it. So leaders either get the education, training, or information to lead, or someone else takes on the role.
Change leadership accountability remains at the executive level - Executives can't abrogate their accountability. Sponsors at the executive level are the drivers of this transition, and their actions, behavior, visibility, and priorities need to reflect that accountability.
Cascading change leadership must be established and maintained - Leader commitment at all levels must happen if high level leaders don't want to find themselves pushing the proverbial piece of string. Leader commitment needs to permeate throughout the levels of the organization. Then, you have smaller pushing efforts all along the length of that string, and it will move.
Front-line advocacy is essential to most successful changes - To take the string metaphor one step further, it's the leaders on the front-line, the other end of the string that need to pull it. They're the greatest influencers of the end-users, not the head-office person. If they don't care about it, neither will their team members. If they're confused about direction or end states, their frustration will soak into the layers below. Therefore, senior leaders must invest thought and effort to engaging their middle and front-line leaders, assigning well-defined roles with clear expectations as change leaders.
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