How leaders can get out of the way of organizational change

Interviewer: Today I'm interviewing Ron Carucci, co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, a strategic development consultancy. The author of a string of bestselling books including "Rising to Power". We're going to discuss Mr. Carucci's article: "How leaders get in the way of organizational change", published in the Harvard Business Review of 30th of April 2021. It is assumed that listeners have read that article before listening to this interview. I've one principle question with I suspect, many different answers. That is, how can managers become effective facilitators rather than obstacles during transformations? Mr. Carucci: Well Neil, I think first of all, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be with you. I think most leaders would do well to actually prepare themselves for it. What is often the case is leaders wait until they're faced with a major discontinuity. In other words, not just an incremental change of a particular part of their work, but something systemic. They wait till that moment to realize they're over their skis. Of course, at that moment, their greatest instinct is to cover that up and try and make it look like they know what they're doing. They reach for all the familiar tools that they have to address smaller incremental changes that really don't work for larger systemic transformations. The first thing I would tell leaders to do is prepare themselves, build your skills, build your toolbox, build your plan in advance of needing it. Interviewer: Well, that raises the question of how,