Monika Sahni_HRLP022_Self Leadership_Sep’11

During the last Self Leadership session, Anil Sir asked us to identify where we feel the need to change and what we are actually doing to carry out that change within us.

In order to bring out the change, action shall be taken at three levels:

1. At intellectual level

To bring about a change, is one of the most difficult tasks. One should first understand why he needs to bring about a change in oneself.

2. At heart level

Once realizing why a person needs to change himself, he should have the willingness and zeal to bring about the change.

3. At body level

After realizing the need and bringing in the willingness to change, one should actually do the things required to bring out that change.

Then we talked about immunity X- ray in which we were asked to think on the following:

·         What we think we need to change/develop within us?

·         What are we doing or what do we not do instead to bring about that change?

·         What are my hidden competing commitments (i.e. an underlying root cause, that competes and conflicts with a stated commitment to change)?

·         What are my mental assumptions behind that hidden competing commitment?

In the book: "Immunity to Change. How To Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization", Robert Kegan (Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education) and Lisa Laskow Lahey (Associate Director of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group) address the question: "Why is personal change so difficult?"

They begin by noting that leaders who view capacity as a fixed resource will fall behind those who work to enable the growth of capacity in their organization.

The "knowing doing gap"

This book and the tools and techniques outlined within it tackle what is often referred to as the "knowing doing gap", or as Kegan puts it:

"...how to close the gap between our intentions, things we actually want to carry out, and what we are actually able to do".

The authors then make three premises about overcoming the kind of immunity.

First, that overcoming it does not mean needing to get rid of all our anxiety management systems. Second, that anxiety is produced not merely from the onset of change, but from feeling defenceless in the face of it.

Third, that the immunity systems we have developed can actually be changed.

They draw on the distinction by Ronald Heifetz (1994) between technical and adaptive challenges to show that most of the challenges leaders face today is adaptive rather than simple application of technical solutions. The scale and pace of change that is impacting organisations now is such that it cannot often be planned for and thus it pushes leaders and followers into positions that require adaptive solutions - and that can only happen when leaders and followers interact with their environment and change their behaviour in response to that environment.

This is only possible when those being impacted by change have either the personal developmental capacities to do this, or have resources such as the immunity to change model and process to help them.

There are many developmental models that attempt to map and model the stages of complexity associated with mental development.

It has been assumed that adults don't change - can't change - beyond early adult-hood, that a level of development is reached and remains static.

Kegan & Lahey challenge this and assert that based on their research, adults are capable of continuing development throughout their lives. They identify three qualitatively different dimensions of mental complexity what they call —the socialised mind, the self-authoring mind, and self-transforming mind, each of which interpret the world in different ways.

And above all is the need of driving this change…From within..which is the concept of self leadership..