Getting Unstuck – Leading Change During a Crisis
“Most executives still don’t value the pure “people are important” discussion. What I have found, though, is that when you when you really speak to them in the language that they care the most about – Who could cause this project to fail? – suddenly now they’re starting to realize there’s people and human dynamics that absolutely can stand in their way of success.”
Today on Getting Unstuck
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re fortunate to be able to welcome April Armstrong, an expert in transformative change and pandemic preparedness and response. She has worked with the White House, and National Security Community including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. April played a lead role in the nation’s largest catastrophic disaster preparedness training program (Exercise Top Officials) for which Dr. Anthony Fauci served as a lead advisor. This training program featured a viral pandemic and related Cabinet-level tabletop exercises to shape national policy in catastrophic disaster response.
April is CEO of AHA Insight, which is helping companies build and execute COVID-19 strategic recovery roadmaps to get back to business, mitigate short-term threats and prepare for the future.
The Essential Point
Leaders of complex change have to manage both the human aspects of change , e.g., resistance to change and consensus build as well as the more technical aspects of change, e.g. What concern do we attack first? How do priorities shift over the life of a complex change?
Listen for:
How to get leaders to consider the human factors in complex change initiatives.
What are three pieces of advice that school leaders need to keep in mind during the COVID-19 pandemic, and why a communication liaison between staff and administration is so important.
Leaders needing to determine the priority – that which is most elemental – versus priorities; and related, why it’s important to see the full “temporal” range of action and decision making
How leaders / change facilitators need to define and work toward consensus.
Different decision-making models.
“I’m a believer that under normal circumstances you have to start small because it’s really hard sometimes to get people to buy into the premise that this big change is going to be worth it because they’re clinging to how things are today. It’s the fear of the unknown, and to change you have to sometimes pry their fingers off what they know. Managing a crisis change is completely different because you don’t have time to go slow.”
“What I realized early in my career working with large organization on complex change projects was that the biggest barriers to success were not technical. They were people related.” — April Armstrong
Connect with April
Could a book on how to effectively lead change in schools be more timely?
We’re pleased to announce …
…that our book Shifting: How School Leaders Can Create a Culture of Change is now available from Corwin Press or Amazon. If you purchase from Amazon, please consider leaving us a rating and review. Thank you!
From our publisher:
In Shifting, educators and leadership experts Kirsten Richert, Jeff Ikler and Margaret Zacchei empower educational change leaders to proactively and coherently navigate complex change in schools to achieve the desired outcomes.
Using a three-part framework—Assess, Ready, Change—this book leads educators to examine a school’s imperatives and readiness for change, identity the tools and abilities required to manifest change, and take action by defining the roles and processes necessary to effectively implement both sweeping change and smaller day-to-day adjustments.