Leadership Into Action: Turning Vision into Change

The saying that everything rises and falls on leadership is far from the truth. Leadership is not about fanciful titles; it is about your daily decisions and actions. It is about repeated choices or decisions made that either move the organisation forward or drag it back. Before anything else, leadership starts with three basic questions that leaders must contend with: Am I being an initiator? Am I driving change? Have I identified the problem, or am I firefighting the issues?

Lots of leaders can say they are initiators, but when it comes to doing the hard thankless work of starting change, most pull back. Most leaders can answer the first question in theory. However, few can answer this in practice, because change initiation is quite an uncomfortable path, and less rewarding when it is in motion. This is why leadership into action deserves attention and is worth talking about.

From Insight to Execution
Every meaningful change follows a similar pattern, irrespective of the organisational complexities:

1. Identification of the problem — naming precisely what is not working, rather than what is merely uncomfortable, is the first step. Problem identification is fundamental to any change decision.
2. What could be done — generate solid options, not just the first idea that feels safe, brings you to what should be done.
3. Doing it — execution — the step most strategies quietly die at, because it demands sustained effort long after the initial interest diminishes. Execution sets effective leaders apart.

Leaders almost always have ideas. What separates change makers from those who merely discuss it is the willingness and ability to move through all three steps in order, notably the last one.

The Skills That Carry You Through Change

Successful change implementation demands a particular kind of agility; not a single skill, but all three working together:

• Emotional agility — the capacity to stay calm and focused, and keep your team steady, when everything around feels shaky.
• Technical agility — knowing exactly what new things need to be done and having the competence to do them, not just talking about them. You must have total understanding of what you intend to change.
• Learning agility — the willingness to acquire new skills quickly and learn from mistakes in the middle of pressure and uncertainty and while moving on with execution.

Among the three, learning agility is perhaps the one leaders pay less attention to; and also, the one that determines whether a leader would be successful with change or not.

A Framework for Change
Kurt Lewin's classic three-stage model is a good guide for change undertakings in any setting. It remains one of the clearest lenses for scanning organisational change. It’s a simple but powerful way to look at change in an organisation:

• Unfreeze — unsettle the current state enough that people genuinely accept change is really necessary and urgent. This calls for effective communication by painting the right picture of the status quo- make the team see why things can’t stay the same.
• Change — introduce new behaviours, processes, or structures. Announce the alternatives and replace them with what is in place.
• Refreeze —this involves consolidating the new state so it doesn't quietly slide back into the old one. This is very important to make the driven changes stick. The possibility of a relapse is always apparent; old habits easily sneak back.

Most failed change initiatives fail not in the process of the change, where the energy and attention peak, but in "refreeze"-the stage where the low-key work of making sure the new order stays after initial changes have been made.

The Real Challenge of Change
The hardest part of leading change is not the plan. It's alignment — that is, what connects your own vision as a leader with the vision of the organisation you serve. When those two visions move in opposite directions, even well-designed change initiatives lose their authority and rigour.

This calls for two kinds of honest reflection:

• Look at yourself in the light of change. Are you prepared to be changed by the process you are asking others to go through, or are you expecting to lead from a position that you are comfortable with?
• Look at your team's behaviour relative to change. Not everyone moves at the same pace, and treating them as if they should is one of the reasons leadership fails at change initiatives and implementation. That is not how people naturally are wired to work.

Understanding Your Team's Readiness

Change adoption among any group tends to follow a pattern, which is first popularised by Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovation research:

Understanding this curve changes how a leader plans a rollout. Innovators and early adopters need very little convincing. What they need is permission and a place to start. The early and late majority need some evidence that the change is working before they commit. Laggards, on the other hand, need patience, clear reasoning, and sometimes ample time. Leaders who expect uniform enthusiasm across a team and sudden adoption are, in effect, delusional about the reality of human behaviour.

Learning Agility: A Key to Change
If there is one individual trait that predicts how well a person will navigate change, it is learning agility; the ability to learn from experience and then apply that learning quickly to new, unfamiliar situations. Technical skills tell you what someone can do for now. Learning agility tells you what they will be capable of doing two years from now, under conditions that don't yet exist.

Knowing Your People
A simple four-quadrant model offers a useful shorthand for understanding how people are wired to respond to change and to each other:

1. Dominance — direct, results-driven, comfortable taking charge
2. Influence — persuasive, relationship-oriented, energised by people
3. Steadiness — patient, consistent, values stability
4. Compliance — precise, analytical, values accuracy and process

Dominance and Influence tend to be extroverted orientations; Steadiness and Compliance tend to be introverted ones. Dominance and Compliance are the orientations most needed for task management, while Influence and Steadiness are most needed for people management. A leader who recognises which quadrant a given moment calls for and which quadrant a given team member naturally operates from will get far more out of both the task and the people involved.

Leadership Communication and the Call to Action

None of the above matters if it is not communicated in a way that moves people to act. Good leadership communication ends with a clear Call-to-Action (CTA); a specific, unambiguous next step, not a general appeal to "do better" or "embrace the change." Whereas vision inspires, a CTA mobilises. Leaders need both.

Estimate Your Potential
Personal commitment is key to effective change-leadership, which eventually comes down to a set of very personal questions:

• What is it that I can do better?
• Are you stacked with constraints — real or self-imposed — that are limiting what you attempt?
• Are you willing to step into the gap when no one else is?

This is where “sticking your neck out” stops being a cliché and becomes a practical leadership requirement. Risk-taking is an essential element of leadership and not a marginal trait of it. Leaders who wait for total certainty before acting are, in practice, choosing not to lead. The perfect time to act is when a problem is identified.

What Drives You
At the core of every leadership decision is a driver — the underlying motivation shaping why a person acts the way they do. Broadly, these fall into four categories:

• Sensual — driven by physical comfort, pleasure, or experience
• Rational — driven by logic, evidence, and reasoned analysis
• Emotional — driven by feeling, connection, and relationship
• Spiritual — driven by meaning, purpose, and something larger than self

Most leaders operate from a blend of these, but usually with one dominant drive. Knowing your own and recognising it in the people you lead makes both self and team leadership considerably more honest and easier.

Bringing It Together
Leadership into action is not a single decisive moment. It is initiation, followed by honest problem identification, followed by the uncomfortable work of execution, executed with emotional, technical, and learning agilities, guided by a clear framework for change, and communicated with a call-to-action, clear enough that people know exactly what to do next.

The organisations that change successfully are not usually led by the most naturally gifted communicators or the most brilliant strategists. They are led by people willing to look honestly at themselves in the light of change, understand where their team stands, and step into the gap before it's comfortable to do so. This is what ultimately turns leadership into action.

Bibliography

• Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human relations, 69(1), 33-60. Rogers, E. M. (1962). Diffusion of Innovations. Free Press.
• Eichinger, R. W., & Lombardo, M. M. (2004). Learning agility as a prime indicator of potential. People and Strategy, 27(4), 12.
• Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (2000). High potentials as high learners. Human Resource Management, 39(4), 321-329.
• Marston, W. M. (1928). Emotions of normal people. K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company Limited.
• Team, C. I. (2025). Learning Agility Assessment: The Evidence.

Gilbert Sebe-Yeboah is a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team Member and currently the Head of the Commercial Banking Department at ADB Plc. He can be reached via email at gsebe_yeboah@yahoo.com

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