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456 PART 5: THE LEADER AS SOCIAL ARCHITECT
• They are capable of managing complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity.
• They have vision and can describe their vision for the future in vivid terms.

One leader who illustrates many of the characteristics of change leadership is
Barbara Waugh of Hewlett-Packard.

IN THE LEAD Barbara Waugh, Hewlett-Packard
Barbara Waugh began her career at Hewlett-Packard Company in a mid-level per-
sonnel position at HP Labs—not the place one would think of for instituting mas-

sive change. Yet Waugh always identified herself as an agent for change and looked
for opportunities to make things better. She had a vision that the organization could
be the “world’s best industrial research lab” and she activated dozens of people to
talk about what that would mean and how it could be accomplished. She also had
the courage to question and challenge senior executives, serving as a reality check
for leaders who had gotten too far away from the day-to-day work of the organiza-
tion. Waugh believes to be a change leader, “You have to always be willing to lose
your job.”
Waugh quickly developed a reputation for getting things done, and many peo-
ple from various parts of the organization would come to her with problems. Rather
than solving the problems herself, Waugh helped each individual assume respon-
sibility and take steps toward accomplishing their own change goals. For example,
Tan Ha, a former Vietnamese refugee working at HP Labs, regularly sent money to
a Buddhist orphanage in Bangladesh, only to have the money disappear en route.
When he learned about a new HP project developing low-cost telecommunications
and computing services for developing countries, he contacted Waugh and asked
her to do something about his money transit problems. Waugh told Ha that she
couldn’t solve the problem for him, but that she would help him take the steps
needed to become personally involved in the project and make sure his concerns
were addressed.
During her time in personnel, Waugh contributed directly or indirectly to numer-
ous change projects, including new products, new mentoring relationships among
engineers, and a 20 percent reduction in R & D development life cycles. Her passion
and ability as a change leader eventually led her to a position as worldwide change
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manager at HP Labs.
Change does not happen easily, but as illustrated by this example, good leaders
throughout the organization can facilitate change and help their organizations
adapt to external threats and new opportunities. One does not need to be a top
leader to be a change leader. In the following section, we examine a model for lead-
ing major changes, and later in the chapter we will give some tips for how leaders
can overcome resistance to change.

Leading a Major Change

When leading a major change project, it is important for leaders to recognize that
the change process goes through stages, each stage is important, and each may re-
quire a signifi cant amount of time. Leaders are responsible for guiding employees
and the organization through the change process.
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Exhibit 15.2 presents an eight-stage model of planned change. To success-
fully implement change, leaders pay careful attention to each stage. Skipping stages
or making critical mistakes at any stage can cause the change process to fail.