Leadership competence development framework : fostering responsible change leadership

Abstract

In today's world and in dynamic business landscape, organizations must navigate constant change. The internal change in organizations is challenged in keeping pace with external change and volatility. Employees at all levels in organizations are expected to keep pace by not only adapting to continuous change, but both driving the change and keeping learning new ways of working continuously. This also requires that people need to learn new skills and behaviors continuously and bring them into practice faster than ever. As organizations struggle to keep pace with external change, changes are implemented often with a non-structured approach. This causes additional worries and uncertainties for people. The thesis aims to encourage the organizations to pay more attention on responsible change leadership, which consists of structured change management approach and leadership, that highlights the importance of employee experience. The thesis focused on investigating, why organizations fail with their change initiatives and what is needed for organizational change to be successful. Furthermore, it was investigated what are the key competences, skills and behaviors of leaders, that enable successful change. All the questions were studied from the employee experience point of view. The qualitative study, conducted by interviewing 7 experienced knowledge workers with people development experience – having also employee experience from multiple leadership styles and multiple large organizations – provided a validation, that changes in organizations need to be managed with a more structured approach and with responsible, ethical leadership principles. In the light of the study, it is suggested that organizations ensure they have a change model in place guiding their structured approach for managing change, including ethical leadership guidelines and development plan for leaders to enable them to lead change responsibly. As a result of study, a leadership competence development framework has been designed to guide organizations to foster responsible change leadership in their organizations. The leadership competence development framework consists of practical guidelines, encouragement for continuous dialogue and a proposal for a learning journey to accelerate responsible change leadership in organizations.