Change is without doubt disruptive and traumatic, and when it affects you, your natural inclination might be to flee that employer, resist the transformation, cope with it - or you can capitalize on it. You can grab the opportunity that change presents to develop new self-concepts, specific skills, and mental attitudes for handling, leading, communicating, and taking advantage of organizational change. Those skills will make you more marketable when you decide to leave your employer.
Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.
After all, just as your own organization is changing, change in other organizations, along with its accompanying employee turnover, creates needs for new employees with different characteristics from those hired in the past. These new workers will be those who are flexible, trainable, technologically savvy, and more highly educated. For an illustration of how continuous change creates opportunity, see the sidebar, Communication Change Continuum in Organizations.
Given that most organizations undergo change, managers will need change agents/change leaders: people for their teams who possess competencies that catalyze change. In fact, experts see the pursuit of change-savvy talent as a key management strategy. A major mission of this book is to look at how you can incorporate change and other skills into storytelling - both stories to facilitate your advancement in your current organization and stories to help you get your foot in the door in new organizations. “Develop a positive hunger for change,” advises Pamela Kaul, President of Association Strategies, Inc. Kaul points to interviewers and search committees who want to see evidence of change and how you’ve motivated it. How have you contributed to effectiveness and faster, better, cheaper operations?
