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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, A Comprehensive Guide to Change Management (586-slide PowerPoint presentation). This "new and improved" A Comprehensive Guide to Change Management,, which replaces my previous "best seller" of the same name, contains everything (well nearly everything) you would ever want to know about Change Management. This slide-deck now contains over 580 slides which includes [read more]
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First of all, let’s start with the word “professional.” Well, I tried searching Google and found this one in Business Dictionary:
Person formally certified by a professional body of belonging to a specific profession by virtue of having completed a required course of studies and/or practice. And whose competence can usually be measured against an established set of standards and/or a person who has achieved an acclaimed level of proficiency in a calling or trade.
That’s cool then! Or is it?
Let me just take the following key phrases from the above:
I have covered my view on all of the above in a previous article called Change Management — Do You Need to Be Certified?, so I don’t intend to dwell on this anymore.
Instead, let’s focus more on what kind on personal attributes someone needs in order to be able to “cut it” as a Change Management professional. Why? Because I think this is equally, if not more important, than the three bullets above.
Again, in my inimitable way, I like to be clear about what I mean so I checked in Google again and came up with this definition for the word attribute on Your Dictionary:
An attribute is a quality or characteristic of a person, place or thing. Personal attributes are character traits or personality traits.
So, let’s have a look at a sample selection of what I mean by this.
I quote on my LinkedIn profile the following list of attributes which I aspire to. These were taken from “Agents of Change dtd June 1999:”
I also recently published an article called Chef de Change, which likened the attributes needed to be a good change agent to those of a Chef; e.g.:
And from the Change Management Toolbox blog:
Then from Change Designs the following list:
Daryl Connor also addressed this issue in 2012 in his first of his two blogs on “Assessing Leaders for Change” called Assessing Leaders for Change Roles, from which the following are just a few of the many attributes/characteristics:
I could go on forever with these lists if I wanted to, but, don’t worry, I won’t. What I would like to do is just delve a little deeper into something called “charisma.”
In my recent article called Change Management Methodologies I talked about charisma–i.e. I read an interesting article published by the Fast Company last year called “Cultivating Charisma: How Personal Magnetism can Help (or Hurt) you at Work” by Olivia Fox Cabane author of “The Charisma Myth,” in which she says, “There’s no one form of charisma that is good or bad per se. There’s only the right form of charisma for the particular situation” and “It’s charisma that helps determine which ideas get adopted and how effectively your projects are implemented.”
But can you develop charisma or is it something you were born with?
This article called “How to Be Charismatic” on wikiHow seems to think you can as it cites the following (oops sorry another list):
My personal view is that whilst you can develop confidence, you cannot develop charisma.
I’ll bet you are wondering what the point of all this is!
What I am alluding to is that a person who has a calling to be a Change Manager not only needs an amount of training and experience, but also needs many personal attributes/characteristics to be successful at what they do. Clearly, training is the first rung of the ladder which is followed by experience, but personal attributes/characteristics are those that are already there, but (to an extent) can be nurtured and honed through experience.
Basically, a Change Manager needs to be many things to many people.
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