In the past, when we made changes, we started at a known stable point and ended at a new but stable point. The transition for the people was uncomfortable but because we had a good understanding of the end point we could guide them. In future, the rate of change and the quantum of change will be so quick that we will not have the luxury of a stable end point ˜ CIO

Our client, a senior executive and functional lead of an IT Department in a global mining company recognised the division's leadership's role in facilitating change, not only within their own division but across the entire organisation as they instituted strategic technology-led solutions for the business. Understanding that leadership and support from top management is fundamentally important for any organisation that wishes to become truly innovative in a constant changing landscape and that leaders who support innovation are strategic thinkers who can empower others meant acquiring this vital capability. These leaders understood that they play a vital role in driving successful change, nurturing staff in an environment conducive to positive change and ensuring innovation occurs.

Objectives of change leadership capability development

To ensure that leaders can:

• Play a vital role in developing a work environment that promotes change and innovation
• Use resistance, fear and mistakes to make change happen
• Make a habit of being innovative
• Encourage participation and innovative contributions in everyone in the organization

We did this by:

Undertaking discovery: We conducted semi-structured interviews, individual and team assessments and surveys. This facilitates our understanding of the individual team members, their current capability and the focus areas for additional personal and team development.

Delivering Team Coaching workshops: We enabled the leaders to master change leadership by helping them:

• Understand their leadership role as a formal or informal change agent
• Understand what it takes to lead change, and determine whether the task is successfully moving downstream
• Learn critical change leadership concepts and practices
• Implement a rock-‐solid change methodology, processes and tools, and a set of Eps and techniques that will allow them to move beyond change management to change leadership
• Tackle the critical work needed to stimulate and facilitate change
• Use a step-‐by-‐step process (with supporting tools) for leading successful change
• Apply techniques for building greater commitment to change
• Prevent or counter people’s resistance to change with effective and appropriate skills and strategies
• Assess personal and organizational readiness to take on a specific upstream change

We also built change capability at the team level. The development of change capability in teams supported:

• Understanding formal and/or informal change
• Learning critical change concepts and practices
• Implementing change processes and tools
• Tackling critical work that facilitates change
• Dealing effectively with resistance to change
• Developing learning agility capability

We also delivered Individual and JIT (Just-in-time) Coaching to support the sustainable transfer of skills.

Outcomes achieved by the team leveraging their change management skills

• Effective configuration and implementation of new ERP systems.
• Prepared 10-year strategy until 2025 and implemented/executed.
• Organisation structure of department changed to enhance agile work – self-managed, cross functional teams were implemented.
• People developed a stronger sense of accountability for their own roles, inputs and project execution.
• Successful culture change – the business was prepared for the changes in technology in the mining industry. Prepared for the change and laid foundations for the changes.
• Innovation included doing safety tests underground leveraging mobile technology that created a daily safety report that provided real-time safety information to mine management.
• Implemented an integrated procurement system for a very difficult internal client. The work done by Kaya prepared the team to facilitate change in other teams and to assist them to go through the change.