Leading at the Edge of Chaos
by Daryl Connor 

Notes From The Text

Organizing Human Due Diligence

Future Shock

Change Load

Interview Questions

Change Leadership Styles

Do/Don't of Turbulence

Building Blocks of Empowerment

Adaptation Reflex

Interview Questions Regarding Change

  • Tell us about the most successful change initiative you personally helped orchestrate.  
    • What were the main contributors to that success?
  • What about the biggest change disaster you oversaw?  
    • What happened and what did you learn?  
    • How have these lessons been incorporated into the way you would lead a major initiative today?
  • From your experience, what are the key reasons why change efforts fail to meet their full potential?  (cf.: Why Change Fails)
  • As CEO, (or COO, CFO, CIO, etc.), what are the most important messages you would convey to this organization about change in general, regarding issues like: 
    • How much transition can be expected?  
    • When will it slow down?  
    • What level of involvement will people have?  
    • How should they prepare themselves?
  • Have you ever decided not to proceed with a major change you were interested in or were under pressure to execute, because you believed people who would be affected were already overloaded with other change demands?  Please explain.
  • How do you determine whether others are truly committed to projects you feel strongly about?
  • When engaging important changes, do you require those responsible for execution to use structural approaches to implementation, such as diagnostic tools and proven guidelines to deal with the people issues, or is it okay for them to depend mostly on their instincts and intuition?
  • What do you rely on to indicate when an organization can no longer absorb more change?  
    • What do you do if this point has been reached, yet it's imperative that new initiatives be successfully executed?

Six Factors to Add to the Hiring Criteria

  1. A keen understanding must encompass the reasons the board identified certain changes as imperative to the organization's future, as well as the precise consequences, for the organization and the candidate, if these efforts should fail.
  2. a proper match must be made between the candidate's leadership orientation toward the execution of organizational change and the magnitude of change the organization is currently experiencing, as well as the change-related pressure the organization will confront in the next few years.
  3. An ability for mastery-level competence in the dynamics of change must be demonstrated.
  4. A sufficient demonstration of personal resilience must be present to suggest the candidate can sustain the change-related challenges that will arise while in office.
  5. An ability must exist to understand and operationalize the knowledge and skills necessary to optimize the shelf life of various organizational paradigms in place when the candidate is hired, as well as those that will be developed in the future.
  6. A capacity must exist to create the proper working environment (i.e.., the enterprise-wide envelope ) that will allow people to be hired and managed in such a way as to maximize Nimbleness.

If there is too large a gap between the candidate's change skills and the organization's transition demands, no employment offer should be made.

cf.: Behavioral Based Interview Questions

Source: Leading at the Edge of Chaos, Daryl Connor, page 143-145

 

Ashley Guberman, Primary Goals Consulting