Week in Review

Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within
Written by James S. Williams (1/06)

Robert Quinn in his book, Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within writes, “One key to successful leadership is continuous personal change.” Continuous personal change is the process of continually re-evaluating who you really are, what you value and doing what is necessary now to shape your exterior environment. It is acting without fear of organizational perceptions and taking risks to model the behavior needed to effect positive change. It is both being empowered and empowering. This personal, internally driven change is the seed of successful leadership which then yields an organization with deep capacity to change.

Personal capacity to change translates into an organization’s capacity to change, renew and remain aligned with an ever-changing external environment. It is a bottom-up approach that is motivated and driven by persons experiencing various levels of change in the organization. The top-down approach by contrast occurs when an organization reacts to external pressure that in turn is transferred downstream to the individuals. Organizations and persons can experience incremental or deep change, which vary in scope and relationship to past practices.

Incremental change is small in scope, planned, rational and usually reversible. By contrast, deep change is characterized by major, discontinuous, sometimes irreversible shifts in a person or organization’s assumptions, values, theories and fundamental guiding principles. Deep change requires you to take risks and be fearless in your execution of what needs to be done to improve the situation. This change agent model is critical to my personal and professional growth because I constantly need to adapt to various situations.

The beauty of being a change agent is that although I modify and reinvent my actions based on the needs of the present situation my goals, of optimizing the opportunity or creating value for all parties when possible, don’t change. Aside from unethical practices, I am able to adapt, re-evaluate, challenge, revise and reverse direction based on new information and learn new models just in time to implement a better solution.
My mentor exhibits these traits and had demonstrated over the years that principled action is not at odds with the adaptable organization or successful professional. I am learning that aside from a few key fundamentals, you can reinvent yourself and create an environment that you love and that is valuable for your organization to emulate as it serves a larger external environment. As such I would like to learn how to understand and work with as diverse a group of people as possible to leverage the diversity of thought and talent, yet be able to influence the creation of a cohesive group able to accomplish more than we could do individually.
(NOTE: While this was written for a leadership class, there is still information that can be gleaned that helps us see how to better handle leadership in every area, our lives and our churches. Are we able to allow change to happen in our lives or do we resist it? Are we allow God to develop us in our ability to lead or do we want to stay they way we are because that is where we are comfortable at?)