Leading Through Change: A Proven Model for New Senior Leaders

They just assume it's all bad and it's really easy to do because you're like well , I just came into this role to change it , to grow it , to enhance it , but all of those things you can do with again the wheels on the bus not throwing all the wheels off the bus the wheels on the bus not throwing all the wheels off the bus .

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast . I am super , super , super , super excited to have not only a former colleague and also someone that I call a friend , alita Alsati , who is a futurist , a disruptor , an executive coach , facilitator , advisor , all around . Just super wonderful person , and I'm just excited to have you here , so welcome .

I had many years of like raising my family and getting my education before I went into sort of the big consulting world . And then I jumped in both feet and thought , well , I really just want to work with people who are going through transformation and change and whatever that is , and when they are facing life disruptions . What does that look like ?

And how can they build their life , their business , their organization for the future and how can they do that in a really meaningful way ? And so I have quite a journey between big consulting firms and small consulting firms and boutique firms along the way .

And so I have quite a journey between big consulting firms and small consulting firms and boutique firms along the way . And , yeah , and Nancy and I we just continue to ride together . So it's been quite a career , quite a journey .

So I hope that people realize that there isn't one particular path , and your commitment to and I guess I should say both of our commitments to kind of disrupting kind of the status quo in terms of how we view leadership , how we view workplace culture , is something I think that just kind of like bonded us on our journey .

But before we delve into that , what's exciting you right now ?

In this time , right now , we can look at our lives and we can say all of this disruption , all of the upheaval , all of the uncertainty and the messiness of life really can bring us to a place of new vibrancy , and so I'm very excited about the time we are living in , and this time specifically .

I think I was feeling the first couple of adjectives that you described , but I do agree with you that whenever there's change , whenever there's disruption , whenever there's transitions , whenever there's disruption , whenever there's transitions , like we'll talk about , when people are transitioning into leadership roles or senior leadership roles , that that is an opportunity to

reinvent ourselves . And it may not feel like it doesn't always feel good , but it can be again , as you said , that catalyst to think about how might I reinvent myself , how might I reinvent my team or my organization , and so , again , it's a different way of looking at it Well .

And that's where it really gets juicy for humans to be able to say , okay , all things are on the table now , not just a few , and what does that really mean for how we want to make our future look and how we want to design for that ? I think it's a great time .

So literally almost like 10 years ago , you and I , I remember we were sitting in a co-working space in Wisconsin I believe Milwaukee , wisconsin , you know thinking about leadership and thinking about change and change management and thinking about like , okay , why is it that leaders fail ?

Like you and I have both seen this in the number of years that we've worked that you'll have really bright people placed in these roles and they fail . And I pulled up some really interesting statistics and they actually haven't changed much since we pulled our statistics from like 2014 . So it was a statistic from 2023 from Chief Learning Officer .

They do a ton of research for chief learning officers and organizations and I want to ask you , before I say it , what percentage of new managers so let's say this is like a new manager what percentage do you think fail within two years ?

. I have to dig deeper into that research because that particular article did not say what that looks like , but you and I can talk about that . There was also something interesting from Harvard Business Review , and so this was new executives .

So you're talking about folks entering into the ranks of vice president , c-suite we'll say any C-suite or executive director role . I'll put that in there as well , too , for our nonprofit listeners as well . That was a range between 50 to 70% , so closer to what you were saying , around the 80% . So it's still quite high .

And when I look back at our numbers for 2014 , it was pretty much around that like 60 to 70% range of leaders that fail . I'm curious . Let's talk about why we think that is and how , when we were sitting in that room , what we came up with as a tool or framework that could potentially help leaders .

And when you are doing this as a leader , people really struggle with what is the balance between disruptor , disruption and disruption , status quo ?

And on top of that , they're stepping in and trying to operate from a place where they're really trying to figure out like what is the company , how is the culture operating , how should I communicate within this , what is the context by which I'm working and how do I show up within this community and communicate to the different people that I am working with ?

And so there's many moving parts , all while showing up in a state of newness for oneself . So it is there's many factors that start to layer on top of each other .

I don't want to rely over rely on this , because I think it's sometimes overused , which is the imposter syndrome , but I use that as an example of there's this change inside of you when you step into a new role , where it's like oh gosh , am I supposed to be here ? Oh , my gosh , do I know what I'm doing ? Oh , my goodness .

I'm pulling a statistic from what you and I had done a while back , which said that most people step into their new leadership role was managing people at the age of , let's say , around 30 , 30 . But they a lot of times don't get their first formal training until like 42 .

Now , again , maybe that statistic has changed , but even if it has , you and I know that there's also a lot of times that leaders don't get any training , so they're really good at a particular role . I'm a great engineer , I'm a great physician , I'm a great program director , and now I'm leading a team , and now I've not had any training .

So all of that change is happening inside of you as a leader , and then you're also , as you said , you're imparting change on your team , on the organization , and so all of that is happening simultaneously .

And when you were talking , I thought about you know , it's the disruptor and the designer , and it's like how do you balance those two , sometimes seemingly like competing states , when you are entering into a new leadership role ?

I mean , you know you're stepping in and there's always the pressure to the bottom line and there's always the pressure to ensure that you are aligning your strategy to the business strategy , to other functions within an organization , and so , even if you have a mission in mind and a style that could be effective within your core team , it may be a complete disaster

when you put it in the context of a much larger organization that has different and competing priorities and agendas and leadership styles all wrapping around that .

So you hinted on the five C's . I don't know if anybody picked up on it , but it's context , community , culture , communication and continuity . Right , these five C's coming together to help support , or I should say , even beyond supporting , to be the lens in which a new leader can step into their role .

And that could be context of a new leader stepping into a new organization . You're an outsider stepping in . Like you talked about Accenture , we're kind of outsiders as new or experienced hires stepping into the role , or it's also something that we forget , I think sometimes .

Even the context when you're in the organization is sometimes even more tricky to figure out in terms of what it is that you are stepping into within your organization and also the context that's going on outside of your organization .

And how do you step into that in a way that establishes rhythm and cadence , but also some sort of new relationship within your context , that you're working , and so I have to look inside myself . I have to look outside , in the external world , in a different way , and I'm getting new information that I didn't have as a colleague before . And so what does that ?

How does that now start to play out in that environment ? And you know what does that mean in terms of how do I start to make these , as you said , all of these new decisions that I wasn't making before , now I'm making based on new information that I did not see before , but now I do , or now I'm getting this information that I didn't have before .

When we originally talked about you know community , because we talked about it when we originally put it together in terms of community in which you build within your organization right , and I'm also thinking now too , alita community that you build outside of your organization and that support network . That , again , I think we often forget about .

When we're in our roles and we've got our heads down , we're not thinking about what support do we need internally , but also externally as well too .

It's changed so dramatically in the last five years , and so I think of how permeable the boundaries of business are today far more permeable than they were before and the partnerships that are forming and the ecosystem plays that are developing and people who are creating their own sort of external side hustles along the way , and so , if you take all of those things

and you ask the question , okay , I need my own personal board of directors to help me think about this , and I'm thinking about in a business where there may be some confidentiality , but I need a set individuals outside to really help me reflect and think about how am I going to navigate as a leader .

So , yeah , I think that external community becomes even more critical now than it ever was before .

You don't have to make it complicated , it doesn't have to be you know 15 different people , but ensuring that you've got some community , some network and I don't mean that in terms of like a networking , but just a network of trusted yes , very trusted .

And so that is a network that you can forge over the years , whether you're within an organization together or whether you move outside of the organization , and I have many individuals that I've worked with and rode along for a time within an organization , but we continue to ride as colleagues and co-workers , even though we are not co-working in the organization we're

in anymore .

I'm laughing a little bit because I just had a conversation with a couple of colleagues and they were like oh my gosh , culture , like does that even sell ? Does anybody even know what that means anymore ? And so I'm curious .

You know , I know when we talk about culture , we talk about the culture within organization , the ways in which I always call it , like the , sometimes the unseen ways in which you know we operate and behave , which can be really really difficult to comprehend , especially when you're in it .

We're in a state of fight , fight , flight , freeze , fawn all the time the minute we get into the organization because our livelihood depends on it , and so we are busy saying all these nice words and we're busy talking about this is the memory of the organization , but realistically , we have a lot of humans coming to work in a very disrupted and dysregulated state

and then we wonder why things are not working well and people are like walking around and being irritated and angry . So I heard this story the other day and it just makes me laugh .

These people got together for a two-hour meeting Now , and this is like a very large organization meeting Now , and this is like a very large organization , they get together for a two hour meeting and they were going line item by line item through an Excel spreadsheet to discuss functionality on this I don't know what it was and every line they had argument after

argument after argument . Now , this is not why we show up to work and this is not the culture that our signs say on the wall . And yet somewhere along the way we've decided that an Excel spreadsheet with one line item is incredibly important and we have to fight till we die . This isn't a fight flight freeze that we see all the time .

That sort of permeates our cultures that nobody is really talking about but is really driving a sense of how we actually are showing up at work every day .

Is it when you go into your conference room ? Or it could be virtually if you're sitting in a room and looking at it , those values or the words that are there ? So it's what you see and it's the unseen part of it as well too . And that's the part that I know .

This has been overused time and time again that the culture eats strategy for lunch right , but I think it's overused and it's stuck around for so long because there's some truth to that . So it's really knowing and understand like there's what's set on the wall and there's what's underneath .

That's really driving things around the culture and when you can know and understand that , it's kind of like the's underneath there's another layer , more than likely or two layers down .

I think we walk in and we are in a state all of us are in a state where we are there to succeed , we want to do right , we want to be by our people , by our organization .

I mean , like you didn't move into a leadership role to be a failure , but in so doing , the focus is sometimes so much on oneself's desire to succeed that we fail to sort of start to peel back and really move into , as you said , the context of the organization , really understanding the community that surrounds us , really looking at those three , four layers down

and pausing and slowing down enough to set aside some anxiety of success to really look around at what is that organization and how does this organization really function and how are we going to work together to build ?

How are you moving this quickly , whatever these measurements that we have , and you just get on that proverbial treadmill and the next thing you know , it's going so fast , it's like at 7.0 and you've like fallen

off of it .

He took his tent and he flipped it over sideways and he decided this was his hamster wheel and he was like running up and down the hall in his hamster wheel , but what was happening is all of the folks kept falling out of his tent then , because they were not really meant to be rode that way .

And sometimes I think that we flip it over and we're riding a thing in a way that we aren't really supposed to ride it , thinking that we're doing all the right things and all the folks are falling out off the side of it .

Right , it's the importance of you know the communicating to your team and being clear around what it is that you're actually striving for and trying to achieve . And also there's this piece around communicating bits of yourself and your own vulnerability as well too , which can be difficult in some organizations and in some circumstances .

But this piece around communication is pivotal .

There is a candidness and an honesty or dishonesty in the things we say and do .

When you show up and I will tell you , no matter how much communication training I have had and I also have a background in this , nancy no matter how much I'm not always successful or well-designed communicator and one of my last roles I was a terrible communicator because there were pressures coming from others saying how one should or should not communicate within

a system Handedness and honesty and truthfulness no matter what you try to do , they will show up as either truthful or not truthful , and people pick up on that , whether or not you want them to . And so candidness and honesty is really something people look for . When there's something disingenuous , people snuff it out , right .

And then there's something around intentional listening as well . That I just think is incredibly critical , because we all are listening for the moment in which we can speak . This is something I really have to stop doing , but we want to say what we want to say , and so this is not intentional listening .

Intentional listening is waiting and listening and hearing throughout the process until somebody pauses and then you let the conversation continue .

And so when we are building as a leader , learning how to really again I'm going to use the word slow down and be intentional in hearing and listening to the words that are being said and listening to the bodies that are showing up and listening to the humanness that is arising within the theme is just probably the most fundamental big reason why leaders are

successful or not , and it's easy to turn that off really quickly .

You talked about the deep listening , which is profound , the intentionality , the slowing down , and there's also a piece , too , around communication , where what's not said 100% 100,000% . And I was thinking of a particular example where it was probably back in about what was it 2020 .

And I remember I was working with a leader and it was in the midst of all the social unrest after the murder of George Floyd . And what if I don't say anything ? And my question to him was like what's the impact if you don't say anything ? Right ? And so it's like , oh , what if I don't say anything ?

There's a whole cascade of things that come with that as well too . So I think it's important for us to think about . It's not only what we say , but sometimes , in the absence of not saying anything , what impact does that have ? I mean , it's an incredibly important question .

It's like what should remain the same , and there's times that you need to get rid of things , but oftentimes , when we come in I've seen this , I know you've seen this with new leaders it's like I'm getting rid of everything . Everything that was done was wrong , the people who are in these roles .

They're not good or trusted , so they got to go too , and so there's this upheaval and there's nothing left . There's no continuity . And when you talk about change and change fatigue , that's part of it . Right , it's this . You've left nothing of that through line , as I call it for that stability , for that continuity .

You can't keep a business going in that way if you throw every bit of status quo out the window . So one thing that is incredibly important is that you come in and you actually look at what is happening . I have seen many leaders walk into their roles and not actually evaluate or assess the things that are there .

They just assume it's all bad and it's really easy to do because you're like well , I just came into this role to change it , to grow it , to enhance it , but all of those things you can do with again the wheels on the bus , not throwing all the wheels off the bus .

afraid to change it , and that might be policies , processes , people that you need to take a hard look at as well too .

Who is there ? Why are they working ? Is there a system in place that I am maybe missing ? And really dig and dig before you start to . I mean , like you can go in and you can disrupt . I am all about disruption , but you also want to disrupt in all the right places .

So , yeah , I'm excited to share this change model because I know this will be really , really , really beneficial for leaders and for organizations , and I know we're kind of wrapping up and we're going to do a part two . But I'm curious for you . I don't know if we answered this question .

We started off with like talking about why leaders fail , but I'm also curious why are organizations not supporting our leaders ? Because millions of dollars are spent when there's turnover .

To me , when we think about our return on our investment and the cost of leadership failure we talked about the statistics why are organizations still , after like 10 years plus , we still have around the same failure rate and the same lack of investment ?

And I'm talking about in general , because I know there are some organizations that are going we invest in our leaders ? Yes , great , fantastic , but many are

not .

I would say this is a human condition we have , and so when we walk into a system , the system starts to run itself and we start to fall in line with a system that maybe is not established in a way that is there to support the people that are actually within the system .

And so there is something to be said for us , really evaluating and looking at how organizations are structured , how the system is structured , and whether or not the leadership within the organization is being driven by the organizational systems and structures as opposed to it going the other way .

And so you're a new leader and you step into this role and you're getting a piece of information in a much bigger ecosystem that has far more information that you may not even be aware of , and then you're hopefully going to succeed . That doesn't always work , and so , yeah , we have a high failure rate right now .

Yeah , so , as we wrap up , I'm curious what's one piece of advice that you would give to a new leader ? Yeah , I'm going to give you a couple of things .

We talked about this kind of earlier on having your ecosystem , board of directors , your network that you can trust to really go to , I'm going to say , outside of your organization , is critical to helping you .

So , whether that be a coach , whether that be like friends , whether that be you know mentors , whether that be advisors , all of those are really critical , especially when you're stepping into a new role , because you need somebody to reflect back to you , not only you , not only some of the things you go and you say I'm full of anxiety .

You need somebody to reflect back to you the things that you're doing very well , that helps you step into that role , but you need somebody to also go and say I do not know what I'm doing . Can you help me navigate this ? Very , very critical . So that would be number one . And then I think the second thing is recognizing , just full stop .

This is new territory . You have done this before , and if you have not done it , even if you've been a leader before , you've not done it here before and you've not done it in this context before , and so what you've been successful perhaps before doesn't mean you will be successful here .

So recognizing you are in new territory , in a new circumstance , in a new context , in a new culture is going to be critical for you to step into this role .

So , alita , I want to ask you this question it's like I wrap it up with every person that I bring on and that is , if you had a magic wand , it could change anything . What would it be ?

And for all of us who are committed to making our workplace more equitable and inclusive , let's keep fighting the good fight .