Title:
Developing better change leaders. By: Smet, Aaron De, Lavoie, Johanne, Hioe, Elizabeth Schwartz, McKinsey Quarterly, 00475394, 2012, Issue 2
Database:
Business Source Complete
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Developing better change leaders

Contents
Scenes from the front lines of change
Making sourcing more efficient
Boosting yields at a factory
Closing a plant
Lessons observed
Tie training to business goals.
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Applied Insight
Tools, techniques, and framewoeks for managers
Putting leadership development at the heart of a major operations-improvement effort paid big dividends for a global industrial company.
Few companies can avoid big, periodic changes in the guts of their business. Whatever the cause- market maturation, a tough macro-economic environment, creeping costs, competitive struggles, or just a desire to improve -- the potential responses are familiar: restructure supply chains; rethink relationships among sales, marketing, and other functions; boost the efficiency of manufacturing or service operations (or sometimes close them). Such changes start at the top and demand a relentless focus on nitty-gritty business details from leaders up and down the line.
Too often, however, senior executives overlook the "softer" skills their leaders will need to disseminate changes throughout the organization and make them stick. These skills include the ability to keep managers and workers inspired when they feel overwhelmed, to promote collaboration across organizational boundaries, or to help managers embrace change programs through dialogue, not dictation.
One global industrial company tackled these challenges by placing leadership development at the center of a major operational-improvement program that involved deploying a new production system across 200 plants around the world. While the need for operational change was