Mary Beth O’Neill (2000) agrees with Senge’s idea of communities of leaders, and identifies four specific leadership roles necessary for successful and sustained change efforts in organizations. She uses Daryl Conner’s work on family therapy as her model for the change process, and identifies the important roles as sponsor, implementer, advocate and agent.
Roles in a change process Role
Description
Hint
Sponsor
Has the authority to make the change happen.
Has control of resources.
Needs to have a clear vision for the change.
Identify goals and measurable outcomes.
Sustaining sponsor
Sponsors change in own area, although top-level responsibility lies further up the hierarchy.
Must be careful not to transmit cynicism
Implementer
Implements the change.
Reports to sponsor.
Responsible for giving live feedback to the sponsor on change progress.
Needs to listen, enquire and clarify questions with the sponsor at the start of an initiative
Change agent
Facilitator of change. Helps sponsor and implementers stay aligned.
Keeps sponsor on board.
No direct authority over implementers.
Acts as data gatherer, educator, advisor, meeting facilitator, coach
Advocate
Has an idea. Needs a sponsor to make it happen.
Usually highly motivated.
Must make idea appealing to sponsor
Sponsor
The sponsor has the authority to make the change happen. He or she legitimizes and sanctions the change, and has line authority over the people who will implement the change and control of resources – such as time, money and people. There are also sustaining sponsors who are responsible for sponsoring change in their own area.
Good sponsors have a clear vision for the change. They identify goals and measurable outcomes for the initiative. Sustaining sponsors must be careful not to telegraph cynicism about the change to the team of implementers.
Implementer
Implementers are the people who must actually implement the change. They have direct line responsibilities to the sponsor. Their job is to provide the sponsor with live feedback from the change initiative. They can save the sponsor from tunnel vision, or from being surprised by obstacles that those closest to the change sometimes notice first.
Implementers are most effective when they listen, inquire and clarify their questions and concerns with the sponsor at the beginning of an initiative. This means they can commit to an effort rather than falsely complying early on and sabotaging later.
Change agent
A change agent is the facilitator of the change. He or she helps the sponsor and the implementers stay aligned with each other. The effectiveness of this role depends on the sponsor not abandoning the change agent to the implementers. The sponsor must not ‘drop the ball’. When this happens the change agent can over-function, making the system ineffective and unbalanced, and the change temporary.
The change agent acts as data gatherer, educator, advisor, meeting facilitator and coach. Most often he or she has no direct line authority over the implementers, and is therefore in a naturally occurring triangle among sponsor–implementer–agent.
Advocate
An advocate has an idea about how a change can happen but needs a sponsor for his or her idea. All change needs to be sponsored.
Advocates are often passionate and highly motivated to make the change happen. They must remember the key factor, which is to get a sponsor. Without this, advocates become frustrated and demoralized. Shrewd advocates promote ideas by showing their compatibility with issues near and dear to sponsors’ change projects and goals.
We have included Mary Beth O’Neill’s definitions of these roles because they provide a clear framework for those approaching organizational change, and illustrate the range of leadership roles necessary for change to occur. Our experience is that people at all levels in organizations find this framework useful for kicking off and sustaining change, and for judging how well the community of leaders is supporting the change process. This model seems to provide the necessary amount of clarity in today’s organizations, where hierarchy is unclear and jobs and projects overlap. There is often a need for a simple but flexible way of defining who does what in any process of change.
STOP AND THINK!
Use Mary Beth O’Neill’s four roles to analyse a change process in your organization. Who performed which role? How well were the roles performed? What contribution did the performance of these roles make to the level of success of the changes?