Change Managment

Change is inevitable and accelerating. Organizations that manage it effectively will pull ahead of their competition. Change initiatives are time consuming and costly, but by approaching change management with a disciplined approach, organizations can survive and thrive.

The Change Challenge?

In major transformations of large enterprises, they and their advisors conventionally focus their attention on devising the best strategic and tactical plans. But to succeed, they also must have an intimate understanding of the human side of change management — the alignment of the company’s culture, values, people, and behaviors — to encourage the desired results. Plans themselves do not capture value; value is realized only through the sustained, collective actions of the thousands — perhaps the tens of thousands — of employees who are responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment. Long-term structural transformation has four characteristics:

Scale (the change affects all or most of the organization)
Magnitude (it involves significant alterations of the status quo)
Duration (it lasts for months, if not years)
Strategic importance

Yet companies will reap the rewards only when change occurs at the level of the individual employee!

When asked what keeps them up at night, CEOs involved in transformation often say they are concerned about how the work force will react, how they can get their team to work together, and how they will be able to lead their people. They also worry about retaining their company’s unique values and sense of identity and about creating a culture of commitment and performance. Leadership teams that fail to plan for the human side of change often find themselves wondering why their best-laid plans have gone awry.

No single methodology fits every company, but there is a set of practices, tools, and techniques that can be adapted to a variety of situations:

1. Address the “human side” systematically. Any significant transformation creates “people issues.”
2. Start at the top. Because change is inherently unsettling for people at all levels of an organization, when it is on the horizon, all eyes will turn to the CEO and the leadership team for strength, support, and direction.
3. Involve every layer. As transformation programs progress from defining strategy and setting targets to design and implementation, they affect different levels of the organization.
4. Make the formal case. Individuals are inherently rational and will question to what extent change is needed, whether the company is headed in the right direction, and whether they want to commit personally to making change happen.
5. Create ownership. Leaders of large change programs must overperform during the transformation and be the zealots who create a critical mass among the work force in favor of change.
6. Communicate the message. Too often, change leaders make the mistake of believing that others understand the issues, feel the need to change, and see the new direction as clearly as they do.
7. Assess the cultural landscape. Successful change programs pick up speed and intensity as they cascade down, making it critically important that leaders understand and account for culture and behaviors at each level of the organization.
8. Address culture explicitly. Once the culture is understood, it should be addressed as thoroughly as any other area in a change program.
9. Prepare for the unexpected. No change program goes completely according to plan.
10. Speak to the individual. Change is both an institutional journey and a very personal one.

Change must involve the People – Change must not be imposed upon the People!

You cannot impose change – people and teams need to be empowered to find their own solutions and responses, with facilitation and support from managers, and tolerance and compassion from the leaders and executives. Management and leadership style and behaviour are more important than clever process and policy. Employees need to be able to trust the organization.

Kotter’s ‘eight steps to successful change’!

Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people’s response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change. Kotter’s eight step change model can be summarised as:

Increase urgency – inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
Build the guiding team – get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
Get the vision right – get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
Communicate for buy-in – Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people’s needs. De-clutter communications – make technology work for you rather than against.
Empower action – Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders – reward and recognise progress and achievements.
Create short-term wins – Set aims that are easy to achieve – in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
Don’t let up – Foster and encourage determination and persistence – ongoing change – encourage ongoing progress reporting – highlight achieved and future milestones.
Make change stick – Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.