Trying to implement change without first securing the backing of your workforce is not only hard, it’s pretty foolish. Matt Henkes looks at how learning to manage change properly can be vital for long term business survival.
In the far-off future, when our sun begins to die, humans will face a harsh choice: evolve or disappear. We can only hope that by that time, a couple of billion years down the line, our descendants will have honed their ability to manage such a change effectively.
For now, it’s the survival of business that is dependent on change management. It’s certainly not an alien concept, with plenty of brain power being devoted to the issue in boardrooms across the country. The problem is, change can fail for any one of a hundred reasons.
Antonia Maclean, Wingivers
Every situation is different and there are no hard and fast rules. However, application of a few general principles should increase the odds in your favour. For starters, full comprehension of the issues and motivations for change needs to be fostered at various levels in the organisation.
Even if you have strong executive leadership that has already identified the reasons for change and the challenges ahead, can they cascade these messages back down through the company and take on board to how it reacts?
Board level buck-stop
You’d better hope your executives are up to the task because their job isn’t an easy one. They need to hold and ‘contain’ the change whilst it is in motion, says Antonia Maclean, consultant at business change specialist Wingivers, particularly while they are establishing understanding and ownership in people throughout the organisation.
“Is there some active management to keep that ambition alive?” she asks. “This is vital because the change management process relies upon their successful communication and leadership of what is happening.”
Maclean believes some change projects can be outside of HR expertise but this needn’t be the case. Her view is that to successfully facilitate change, HR professionals should be interested in how adults learn and get to grips with how to get them engaged and involved in the change. “Don’t be content with simply being an expert in the systems and the processes,” she adds. “Expand your expertise and develop a real curiosity about what helps people shift their behaviour and learn new things. That is what will make your project a success.”
Understanding and acting upon this is fundamental for the alignment of the workforce with the change objective. Although, not everyone agrees it is HR’s responsibility. “People often suggest HR should be working to ensure change is successful,” says Matthew Tickle, change management expert at Morse consultants. “Here’s a radical thought: HR may not be the best people to run the change work-stream on a major business project.”
Instead, he believes HR needs to stick to its professional competencies, supporting organisations as they deal with the fall-out from major change initiatives. These could include new organisational designs and structures, coaching line managers on how to communicate role changes to their teams, and dealing with redundancies or re-deployments.
Inform to align
John Fay, founder and chief executive of the leading consultancy SFL, says change fails most often because business leaders neglect to address the people aspect of their plans. He believes while HR is an important stakeholder in getting the workforce aligned with the change, ownership needs to come from the very top of the organisation and work its way down.
“It’s all very well a chief executive saying, ‘this is what we’re going to do’,” he says. “But it’s more powerful when they engage their people in the process by saying: ‘we’ve got to do something, there’s no way around it – how do you propose we get there?'”
The process can be very enlightening as employees are quick to recognise a chance to contribute to a strategy. People start buying into the change process because they feel like it actually belongs to them and want to make it happen because it involves their ideas.
Andy Neal, ChangeMaker International
“Only 10% of the working population will have the general foresight to understand why the change is happening. Most people will need to have it explained to them,” says Fay. “If you don’t give them the opportunity to engage in the process, it’s going to take longer for them to come around to the new direction.”
Unfortunately, many employees are still being left out in the cold. “If you don’t involve your people, who will make the change happen?” asks Andy Neal, director and co-founder of business consultancy ChangeMaker International. “CEOs don’t make change happen; big consultancies don’t change companies. It is the employees who create sustainable change.”
Carl Tomlinson, lead practitioner at the Manufacturing Institute, agrees engagement is key. But how you communicate is just as important as what you say. “People don’t resist change, they resist being changed,” he argues. “The key to success is getting them to think about the business every day; about what they can do, what they see and what they can do to improve it.
“Recognition and reward is very important and you should reward positive behaviour – not necessarily with financial incentives. It’s about celebrating success in a public way within the business.”
People are much more likely to react favourably to a change proposal when they feel they’ve been given a chance to participate in its creation and their ideas are being heard. It’s a small step for business but a giant leap for change management.
2 Responses
Why HR Often Misses the Mark
Change management is tough in the best of circumstances, but HR often shoots itself in the foot. The biggest problem is that HR inflicts change on the rest of the organization. (And even if these changes were mandated from on high, it appears to employees that this ideas was yet another HR folly.) HR often gets people involved in planning and that’s a good thing. But they fail to make a case why a change is needed. They jump to How before addressing Why. People are only interested in how to plan and implement once they believe that a change is needed. This is a doable task, but HR leaders must understand that addressing why a change is needed must happen before other steps.
In a study I did of change in organizations, I found that organizations that addressed why sufficiently had a higher success rate and didn’t have to deal with crippling resistance later on.
Rick Maurer. http://www.beyondresistance.com http://www.changemanagementnews.com
We must change the way we think about change
Part of the problem of change management programmes is that they focus too much of the ‘learning’, ‘communicating’ and ‘engaging’ without having specific plans on how to do it – other than massive communication programmes that intend to touch every corner of the organization. The model is flawed. There is no change unless the change is behavioural. Behaviours can’t be taught or communicated in the traditional way. Behaviours travel and spread via imitation and social copying. Also, only a small percentage of people in the organization have the influence to spread those behaviours – and they are not in senior management. The traditional academic and consulting model is linear: big change needs big set of initiatives cascaded down to all via big communication programme, with emphasis on a naïve rational appeal (‘B is better than A, we should go for A’) and vague conceptual black boxes such as ‘employee engagement’. We have developed and implemented many times a completely different model called Viral Change™. In this model, a small set of behaviours spread by a small number of people through their networks of influence and properly reinforced create massive behavioural tipping points with new routines and ‘cultures’ appearing and becoming stable. Change for us is to create an internal infection of ( here whatever the object of the change may be) and making success ( in whatever operational definitions have bee agreed) fashionable. The change may have to do more with fashions and infections than rational presentation of objectives and rational persuasion is hard to swallow when people have spent their lives supporting and trying to implement mechanistic top-down so called change programmes. Leandro Herrero (www.thechalfontproject.com; http://www.viralchange.net)