Leading change : leaders experiences of navigating change and influencing their organization to become more adaptive

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how four leaders from a Norwegian engineering company experience navigating change and influencing their organization to become more adaptive. Organizational change is presented as an introduction to the theoretical field going more into adaptive leadership, organizational transformation, consciousness, self-awareness, developmental theories on stages of leadership, helping skills in the counseling field and the LIFO method. This is a qualitative study based on an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as the methodological approach. The participants lived experiences are explored and made sense of through contextualized interpretations. IPA`s roots are presented through phenomenology, hermeneutics and ideography. The analyzing process is described to give an insight of the research process, as well as the validity of the study, the researcher role and ethical considerations. The findings are presented in four main categories; the experience of change processes, controlling change and creating the correct behavior, influence in decision-making processes and inner development in the change process. To make more meaning of the findings they are discussed in light of relevant theory, in the four categories; control, communication, adaptability and influence. Through analyzing the participants experience according to the literature it is shown a complexity gap. The literature describes how navigating change in an adaptive way requires a complex mindset and this being a gap to how the participants experience it. It is further linked to how learning counseling skills can contribute to close this gap