How leaders talk is critical in navigating major organizational change
Learn more about Professional and Continuing Studies.
Change is constant and understanding, managing and leading through organizational change are constants in Kathy Cowan Sahadath’s professional life.
For more than 30 years she’s worked in HR and change leadership in the public and private sectors, and as a consultant and university instructor.
Now, she is sharing her insights with the publications of her first business book. It’s titled Empowering Strategic Change: Conversation-focused Project Leadership and is the first in the four-volume Conversations That Inspire Change series she’s writing for Business Expert Press.
Cowan Sahadath credits her work as an instructor in Professional and Continuing Studies at Royal Roads University — notably, the mid-career learners whom she teaches — for helping her focus and refine her ideas for publication.
“Kathy’s work is a powerful example of how insights developed in our classrooms extend far beyond the university, influencing how organizations everywhere approach leadership and transformation,” says Zoe MacLeod, RRU’s associate vice-president, Professional and Continuing Studies.
“Her contributions reflect the strength of our faculty in Professional and Continuing Studies — professionals and scholar-practitioners who not only teach but shape the evolving fields they work in,” MacLeod adds. “Her new book and her teaching both highlight how learning at Royal Roads equips leaders to navigate complexity and drive change with humanity and purpose.”
Change requires people-centred conversations
Cowan Sahadath is RRU associate faculty and teaches courses on Leading Strategic Systems, Culture Change and Advanced Models for Organizational Change, and shaped the design for the Digital Transformation program. She’s also a thesis supervisor for master’s students.
She came to Royal Roads after working for IBM and the Ontario power utility Hydro One. She also has an MBA in project management, a Master of Arts in human development and a PhD in human and organizational systems.
Empowering Strategic Change “explores how leaders can drive meaningful organizational change through reflective, people-centred conversations that connect strategy, culture, and practice,” she explains, noting organizations face changes due to advancing technologies, evolving business cultures, ever-changing markets and even the effects of climate change.
Discussions can’t all be about the bottom line
The book, which features a case study as well as a tools for leaders to use, was borne from her experience with the professionals who take her courses at Royal Roads and Cowan Sahadath’s doctoral dissertation.
“I wanted to understand how or if leadership conversations helped move change,” she says of her dissertation. “And I found out that some great leaders are very strategic about how they have conversations with staff and how they move them through the change process in very subtle, very different ways.”
One key, she says, is that leaders don’t view conversations with staff on change issues — for example, company-wide systems software renewal or major business pivots — simply as opportunities to check off bottom-line items such as milestones, deliverables and deadlines; rather, they’re an opportunity to make sure all members of the team are aligned on purpose, comfortable with their work and free to share their concerns.
Leaders all have jobs to do and bosses to whom they must answer, “but sometimes you need to stop and really listen to your people,” Cowan Sahadath says, noting that ability to have honest conversations isn’t a one-off or quick-fix, but the long game of a positive and productive company culture.
She saw this in her research and work experience and heard it from her students.
“My greatest learning experience right now is with Royal Roads students because these are all mature students working on master’s. They all have careers at various stages, families, lives. They're in all kinds of different businesses,” she says. “There are so many more rich experiences when you're talking to a class of 25 or 35 students that all have the whole variety of experiences.”
Leadership skills for a new era
The COVID pandemic generated stormy seas for many organizations, revealing how much leadership expectations have evolved.
“COVID didn’t just expose gaps,” Cowan Sahadath explains, “it highlighted how even strong leaders need new capacities to navigate complexity, uncertainty and change. We’re now in a time that calls for more people-centred, adaptive leadership.”
She continues: “If you want your business to succeed, you need your people fully engaged — and today’s workforce is making that clear. They’re saying, ‘Listen to me. Purpose, well-being and voice matter.’”
Leaders are rising to meet this challenge, developing the reflective, relational and change-ready skills needed for modern organizations. These are the capabilities she aims to cultivate in RRU learners — the kinds of insights and practices they can immediately take back to their workplaces.
They’ll need them given a pace, volume and variety of change that would have been unthinkable to business leaders even 10 to 20 years ago.
“One of the big things that I say to Royal Roads students is, several years ago, most organizations were implementing one major change at a time — it was much simpler. Today, everything is shifting at once. New business models, rapidly evolving markets and new generations entering the workforce are reshaping how organizations operate. Leaders can’t afford to look away — they have to pay attention, adapt and engage differently.”
Learn more about Professional and Continuing Studies.