The landscape of business is littered with examples of attempts to introduce change initiatives, only to have them fail miserably. A few famous examples are John Sculley’s inability to overcome the culture at Apple, after a great career at PepsiCo, and Carly Fiorina’s head-on collision with The HP Way. This blog post will cover some of the most useful tips I have learned regarding how to implement organizational change.
A common thread in most change management failures is underestimation of two dimensions, which I will attribute to an old 2006 Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Tools of Cooperation and Change” by Clayton Christensen, Matt Marx, and Howard Sevenson. This is a great article I encourage all managers to read and benefit from,so I won’t elaborate in detail but will parse a few key points from it
The first dimension is the extent to which people agree on what they want from their jobs, essentially what they hope to gain from the organization, and the second dimension is the extent of agreement on how to get there, or cause and effect. These two dimensions are referred to as The Agreement Matrix illustrated below.
Credit: Harvard Business Review
The important aspect of this matrix for most organizations, is the upper right quadrant of broad consensus on both dimensions. Why? Because this signifies a strong culture, which sounds great…until you want to introduce change. This is exactly what both John Scully and Carly Fiorina ran into, and it was like hitting a status quo brick wall. Each quadrant has different tools to promote successful change, but that pesky “culture” quadrant is the least likely to introduce anything significant without invoking a crisis environment.
In many ways, John Sculley very accurately envisioned where the computer market was heading, almost with laser accuracy in fact. He saw competitors like Dell and Microsoft attacking the lower end of the personal computer market and developing more open systems that would lead to wider adoption and consequently greater market share. He also envisioned in the early 90’s that portable, handheld devices would be an important growth market. What happened? Apple fired him rather than change the entrenched culture of high-end niche products. Many say that Apple put the “cult” in culture and Sculley found out the hard way, and his successors did not fare any better until Steve Jobs eventually returned and embraced the culture rather than resist against it.
The key takeaway in this post is when introducing change, you must, must, MUST, factor in the collective perspective of those that will be impacted by the change, and everyone must participate fully to make it successful.
A few more tips:
Have a complete plan together prior to announcement. This promotes credibility, confidence, and consistency.
Communicate using the five P’s.
Foster employee participation.
Few things are worse than a half-baked plan to change a process, or to deploy a new software system. Most employees (in a normal business environment) want to buy-in to a new initiative if they can both understand what is in it for them and how it will benefit the company. However, to get across that grand divide of feelings to action requires the confidence and credibility that can only come from a well-formulated plan that lays out point A to point B. A great plan also promotes consistency of communication, purpose, and progress as everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Communication can be handled in a variety of mediums: company intranet, email, meetings, or videoconferencing, but in order to be effective it must have these five “Ps” which were developed by The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO):
· Purpose: why do we have to do this?
· Picture: what will it look like when we reach our goal?
· Plan: how will we get there, each step of the way?
· Part: what can (or must) I do personally to help us move forward?
· Prize: what impact on the organization and individuals will the change have?
These five “Ps” address what people want to know and what, how, and why the change will happen, as well as how it will affect them.
To foster employee participation, one of the best things a company can do is to acknowledge the positive and negative range of emotions that employees may have. Open forums and open lines of communication are two ways to do this, and it should be acknowledged that many employees will have significant anxiety toward change. One of the worst things that can happen is to attempt to implement change and then adopt a tone-deaf approach to listening to employee concerns. Another benefit of allowing employees to openly discuss their fears, resentment, and other emotions is they tend to not hang on to those emotions as long if allowed to vent and get them off their chest.
The next important aspects of participation include proper training and safety nets. Depending on the complexity of the change, extensive training may be needed and this is one area to not sell short. The investment up-front will make a world of difference over the long-term. Safety nets such as beta testing and trial periods also are good processes to include, as they allow a more real-world evaluation of whether the change will be successful.
I am a big believer in pilot testing with a subset of employees in different areas as a controlled experiment prior to a large deployment, and much information can be gleaned to tweak the change before it impacts the company.
Once the change is implemented, it is important to not forget to continue to engage employees and sustain the momentum into the future. It is said that only about 25 percent of change initiatives are sustained over the long term. For this reason, it is important not to declare victory too early and to continue to connect with employees to see how they are doing and correct any issue that needs addressed. A visible commitment from company leadership for the change initiative is also regarded as the most impactful aspect to success.
Hopefully this abbreviated synopsis of how to successfully introduce change into your organization has proven to be useful.
References
Christensen, Marx, Sevenson. (2006) Harvard Business Review. The Tools of Cooperation and Change. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2006/10/the-tools-of-cooperation-and-change
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