Change Leadership Team: How to Charter One Successfully

Why Change Efforts Fail: The Impact of a Change Leadership Team
We know from organizational culture assessment data that most large-scale change efforts do not achieve their objectives.  For the vast majority, the desired changes were either:

• Aborted before full implementation.
• Went awry as they began.
• Never realized the expected business results. 

When we look deeper, organizational change efforts typically fail because people interpret disruption through a “business as usual” lens — defaulting to familiar habits, assumptions, and ways of working — rather than adopting the mindset required to lead change effectively. Without a deliberate shift in perspective, even well-intended initiatives get pulled back toward the status quo.

That is why successful transformations rely on a dedicated change leadership team — individuals equipped to:

• Challenge legacy thinking.
• Model new behaviors.
• Guide the organization through uncertainty with clarity and discipline.

The Key Task
Data form our change management simulation makes the priority unmistakable: the central task of any change leadership team is to ensure that people not only understand the change, but actively engage with it and commit to making it work. Awareness alone is insufficient — sustained performance requires ownership.

This places a clear mandate on leaders. Success depends on their ability to accurately diagnose the nature of the change and guide people through it in a way that is coherent, credible, and actionable. When leaders translate complexity into clarity and align behavior with intent, change becomes something people drive — not something they resist.

How to Begin to Charter a Change Leadership Team

One of the first steps required to mobilize an organization to change is to select, train, and develop the team responsible for leading the change — i.e., chartering a change leadership team.  Project postmortem analyses reveal that change does not take place using normal pathways or normal organizational channels.  By definition, change represents an upheaval to the way things are done.

Setting Up the Team
To set change up for success, high performing organizations typically create a special cross-functional, multi-level group of empowered leaders to design and guide the change process. This is often an entirely new type of team and role for an organization.  The purpose of the Change Leadership Team is to lead the change in terms of the people, cultural, and organizational structure needs of the project.

This includes actively engaging stakeholders, anticipating challenges, managing resistance to change, addressing difficult issues, and guiding the overall change process.  The Change Leadership Team also acts as “Super” Change Catalysts supporting those tasked with leading the change in each organization.

Common Change Leadership Team Criteria
Ideally, members of the change leadership team must be:

• Representative
  Represent the perspectives and ideas of the key stakeholder groups affected by the change in terms of functions, levels, information flows, power structures, perspectives, and resistance.
• Influential
  Have the organizational authority and be comfortable driving and approving decisions that impact change.
• Active
  Be able to successfully remove barriers, provide access, and make decisions.
• Models
  Be role models of company values and leadership expectations.
• Willing
  Be willing to learn and attend intensive change leadership training.
• Available
  Be able to devote between 20% and 100% of their time depending upon the scope of the change.
• A Workable Size
  Be a team of no more than 10 people. Why that project team size?

Components of a Change Leadership Team Charter
The new change leadership team must spend time upfront understanding their charter and developing clear goals, roles, and metrics for their highly consequential assignment by agreeing to:

• Purpose
  The team purpose that typically revolves around educating the organization, anticipating and managing change resistance, addressing difficult issues, and guiding the overall change process based upon feedback from the Change Champions and the organization.
• Success Metrics
  How success and failure of the team will be measured.
• Scope
  The scope and decision-making boundaries between the change leadership team, the executive team, and other project teams.
• Roles & Responsibilities
  The role of the team leader, team members, and any external change management consultants.  Typical roles include some combination of a:
  • Change Advocate/Sponsor
    Creating the conditions for success and maintaining a clear line of sight between the project objectives and the the people side of change.
  • Change Process Leader
    Designing and implementing a change strategy that successfully aligns the project purpose with people strategies, structures, relationships, and business results.
  • Change Project Lead
    Managing the overall project execution to be on time, on budget, on scope, and at the right quality.
  • Change Sprint Master
    Representing the technical requirements of the project and ensuring that the people, process, structure, information, relationship, and culture components of the change are represented during the project.
  • Change Communication Partner
    Owning, executing, and measuring the change communication strategy and stakeholder involvement plan.
  • Change Stakeholder Engagement Manager
    Connecting, representing, and communicating with Key Stakeholders who have high interest and high influence in the project.
  • Change Coach
    Building change leadership capability and measuring the impact through formal and informal feedback loops.
  • Change Champion Liaison
    Engaging, motivating, and holding Change Champions accountable for effective stakeholder engagement to accelerate adoption and minimize change resistance.
  • Change Learning Partner
    Developing individual change capability throughout the project
  • Change Culture Champion
    Ensuring that all change initiatives complement and support the desired culture through appropriate rewards, recognition, and consequences.

The Bottom Line
Leading an organization through change is complex, demanding, and unavoidable — yet the real challenge is not initiating change, but sustaining it long enough to deliver meaningful results. Without discipline and follow-through, even well-conceived efforts lose momentum and fade before they take hold.  Do you have a capable enough change leadership team that can create the conditions for success?

To learn more about setting your organizational change up for success, download the 5 Science-Backed Lenses for Leaders of Change

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.