The Transition Suspicion
Confident About Your New Leaders?
By Kevin Fleming Ph.D.

Renowned speaker, author and consultant William Bridges once said, “It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions. Change is situational—the new site, the new boss, the new role. Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external, transition is internal.”

As The Inc. Shrink, I was relieved to hear this. Why? The corporate hallways always seem to harbor a bit of coldness when a corporate shrink like me is found investigating things around a company site. However, as we see above, so much of what makes success happen in leadership decisions really is a psychological phenomenon. Something that many coaches without the Ph.D. may be ill-prepared in dealing with as they craft the motivational mantras for your team to “believe in themselves” and reach for the stars. Yes, that was sarcasm, folks.

A recent study from the training and consulting firm Client Skills showed that only 25% of managers, admitted by self and others, that they were fully transitioned leaders. This should make you pause. Forty-eight percent were characterized as still acting as individual contributors, and 27% were still in transition.

This is actually not that surprising. You see, most corporate training is immersed in skills-training modules, which ignore stages of change. Any information received is processed by the brain in a unique readiness state as noted by James Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model of Change (precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, maintenance).

There are five “stages of change” and I will outline the signs of each stage that senior management should keep in mind when building individualized succession plans to help their managers transition to true leadership roles...and yes, real executive talent can be distributed across these five stages, despite the bias that the real talent is always ready and willing in the action phase:

Precontemplative Talent–These folks score the great scores on all the executive development assessments, have solid “objective evidence” of their propensity to lead and have supervisors singing their praise. What makes them precontemplative is their lack of connection to their own need to change in making this leap. Others will follow naturally, they believe.

Contemplative Talent–These folks speak the language of change publicly and say “the right thing” in those forums, yet in their private one-on-one dialogues with colleagues and peers when challenged about what they are doing to stay on top of their transitioning role a lot of “yes, but’s” are noted. They are not completely resistant but still lag a bit in their true belief of them needing to maybe do something different.

Preparation Talent–In this stage, we see managers who have demonstrated a high EQ (emotional intelligence) component of utilizing self-awareness around their “own issues” to change their leadership interactions in their new role. The difference here is that not only the talk has turned into walk, but also self-development options (i.e. hiring a coach) is being considered outside the office in a committed way—with no one asking them to do this. They appear to “sample” willingly new ideas.

Action Talent–These individuals have fully transitioned in many ways, and in fact one sees their applied wisdom used in multiple contexts of their life where the need to befriend transitions and change is highly encouraged. That is, linking of concepts between work and family life are seen here as evidence of “getting more legs” to behavior change.

Maintenance Talent–This is the final stage of change where longevity and sustainability are finally seen. Senior leadership has traded in theories of beginner’s luck, brief spurts of productivity and high-performing colleagues for evidence of group, values-aligned decision making, courageous authenticity in low popular situations and non-ego-related strategic decisions.

And you thought stages of change were reserved just for the awkward voice-changing teenager going through developmental changes, eh? Nope. Many of your managers transitioning are “changing their voice,” too.

This is the intellectual property solely of Dr. Kevin Fleming and no reproduction or duplication of this material is permissible without consent.