Why Great Leadership Is Key to Navigating Change

By Carlos A. Sabbagh

This month, I am pleased to offer you a blog article from one of the best consultants and leaders I have worked with. I love his approach to life, and his consulting work is entirely consistent with how he lives his life: warm, engaging, and full of love. I know you will enjoy reading his article on leadership and change. 

Carlos A. Sabbagh is a leadership consultant specializing in organizational transformation. His organization is The Intentional Leadership Institute (TILI), which specializes in helping people and organizations achieve long-term success. TILI provides learning experiences that improve business performance across all levels of an organization, resulting in the organization becoming a stronger and better competitor in the marketplace.

Successful organizations need leaders who can guide their teams through these shifts with minimal friction. That means embracing new leadership skills that focus on vision, values, and purpose.

Land said that organizations must either grow or die in today’s rapidly changing environment (Land 1973, 127), which is truer today than ever. Organizations must constantly adapt to a rapidly evolving marketplace with its fair share of challenges. One of the biggest? Learning to navigate the paradox of maintaining the core business while simultaneously reinventing it to stay ahead.

This balancing act requires leaders who can seamlessly blend management and leadership skills. You can’t choose one over the other, and you certainly can’t let them cancel each other out. Instead, leaders must master the art of keeping both in harmony, without feeling like they’re being pulled in two opposite directions.

THE LEADERSHIP PARADOX

The paradox requires a new synchronization of management and leadership skills because the two sides of day-to-day business and transformation must coexist simultaneously. There is no middle ground, no averaging of the two, nor can one side be allowed to cancel the other out. In the organization, the leader must learn to focus on keeping the balance because these are just two sides of the same coin.

This balancing act requires fundamentally different leader-manager competencies. It also demands different skills, rules, and behaviors from the members of an organization. This new capacity is represented in organizations that empower people to act and are not paralyzed by paradoxes.

The new leadership framework should contextualize contemporary challenges while providing a structured approach that balances organizational stability with forward-thinking innovation. By adopting a future-oriented perspective, leaders can effectively integrate essential maintenance activities with transformational initiatives to ensure operational excellence and long-term adaptive capacity.

NEW PARADIGMS FOR NEW CHALLENGES

The new leadership tools must help participants understand that the old paradigms resemble sinking ships. Instead, they must be replaced with new ones to deal with the business issues of the millennium by using processes that aid the participant in realizing that “Business as Usual” is no longer the case since “Change is a Constant.”

We know that a tremendous amount of know-how exists today in American business and industry. It’s referred to by many as intellectual capital or an organization’s intellectual assets. Everyone agrees that knowledge is critical for the success of our companies. We also know that if a person knows “what” happens as a result of their knowledge, that they have average ability for that level of knowledge. If they can honestly describe in changing circumstances “how” it happens, they have superior ability. However, most significantly, if someone knows “why” something happens, they have exceptional ability.

LEARNING VERSUS TRAINING

Traditional training emphasizes knowledge and skills. It assumes that we know what to do and how to do it. In today’s environment, we may know what we want to accomplish, but we need to discover how to achieve it. With training, people receive information and processes, hoping that “something” will filter down or sink in and cause them to think or act in a certain way.

On the other hand, learning taps into an existing set of experiences or knowledge base and causes understanding and motivation to grow from the inside out. Through learning, people are encouraged and challenged to develop awareness and gain insight into their thinking and actions. Learning provides results that apply to many situations, on or off the job. Learning creates an adaptive resource that can shift, unlike traditional training, which delivers fixed knowledge that becomes outdated as circumstances evolve.

CONCLUSION: LEADING THROUGH PARADOX

Human capital, our most valuable resource, is the critical variable determining business success. Organizations thrive when they can pivot quickly to meet progress head-on. This behavior must be modeled at the highest levels of leadership, where the responsibility for organizational performance, innovation, and profitability ultimately rests.

Effective leadership in our paradoxical world requires a delicate balance—embracing uncertainty while providing direction. By crafting a compelling vision, leaders embolden a team that feels confident taking risks, which sometimes means tearing down institutional structures that inhibit an organization’s relevance. More than 30 years ago, Kriegel and

Patler said, “If It Ain’t Broke…Break It!” and that holds even more true today for companies that want to achieve true innovation in our rapidly changing business landscape.

Leaders who foster change, and not just train people to do a task, form organizations that use change as a tool for creativity and moving ahead. By developing this organizational capacity to shift, leaders can confidently navigate complexity, turning disruption into opportunities and building resilience that sustains growth through ever-evolving conditions.

1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 93.
2. George Land, Grow or Die: The Unifying Principle of Transformation (New York: Random House, 1973), 127.
3. Robert J. Kriegel and Louis Patler, If It Ain’t Broke…Break It!, And Other Unconventional Wisdom for a Changing Business World (New York: Warner Books, 1991), 83.