A credible and shared plan for change
Organisational change is an inevitable part of doing business. The longer the business continues and the larger the organisation grows beyond the original founding team, the more inevitable it becomes.
For change to succeed, limited development efforts must be able to be integrated into a coherent and feasible package. So it is not enough to produce a strategic change paper from a corner office or at a high-level management retreat without any links to day-to-day operations.
On the other hand, it is not possible to put everything between heaven and earth into a single plan and assume that the resources to bring about change will magically appear when the time is right.
The thinking that encapsulates resources for change is well illustrated in e.g. Malnight and partners (2005) Must Win Battles - Creating Focus You need to achieve your Business Goals. Although the work will be round decades old next year, from a change leader's point of view it hasn't gathered any dust.
A feasible plan takes into account the resources available to the organisation and the mental journey that needs to be undertaken to make the change successful. It is essential to identify the handful of issues whose achievement will make a real difference to the organisation's ability to function and to which the organisation's best efforts must be harnessed. We need to decide which battles to win, we can't win them all.
In other words, success requires making the right choices, involving the team and taking pragmatic (usually budgetary) constraints into account. If these things are not taken care of, what happens to Finnish motorists in the autumn when winter once again takes them by surprise - resistance to change arises from inadequately rooted implementation, and this should come as no surprise. Suddenly, a perfectly capable team becomes seemingly incapable of taking the whole thing to the finish line - whether the root cause is a gap in overestimation of resources, differences in the team's current understanding of the situation or management's ability to focus.
So what's your advice? How to free the resources required for development from the current core business, i.e. how to make the change pay for itself without additional resources and with interest?
Community change is always individual change
One of the key problems with change is that change is thought of as a mass movement - everyone starts from the same point and ends up at the same point. The reality is that it is rarely so one-sided - individuals have had their own habits and strengths in doing things, and have their own attitudes both to the way things are done now and to change.
The implementation of change should therefore take into account roughly four different aspects of an individual's work:
- Details. Do they have enough information about the need and reasons for the change to consider it understandable and acceptable? Only an understood and accepted need will lead to a change in action. If a person genuinely believes that the new way of doing things is inferior to the old one and does not understand why he should change, the desire to change will be very weak indeed. So, as a frontline person, you need to make sure that the need and the reasons for change are understood by everyone.
- Skills. Does the person have the skills to do the new thing? Often we gain our dominance in an organisation by doing something that others may not be so good at. We are asked for advice and are able to help others. If change takes away this sense of power and control, the change feels really bad and is emotionally resisted. So your job as a frontline manager is to identify whether each member of your team has the skills to do something new.
- Attitude. How does the person feel about change, the workplace and management in general? Do they lean forward, excited and ready to take on new things, or do they stand on their hands in the air, waiting to see what stupid things management has come up with? Attitude is perhaps the most difficult cause of resistance to change to tackle. There are always people who just don't want to do something or make a change on principle. This is where the so-called "peer pressure" comes in handy. If you can get others in the work community excited and supported, it's hard to be reluctant on your own. As a frontrunner, you need to make sure that the stories of successes and how trying something new has helped someone do their job easier/better/more comfortably start to circulate around the organisation, and embed the change in the culture.
- Motivation. Is the person's reward system such that it supports change? If you try to change something in such a way that the change leads to, for example, smaller bonuses, while the old way of doing things still guarantees bigger bonuses, you will not succeed. As a front-line person, you need to make sure that your processes, systems and rewards support the success of the change, not hinder it. You also need to enable the individual to be intrinsically motivated - do they have the autonomy to make decisions about their own work? Can they experience success and learning at work? Is the work meaningful?
For individuals to succeed in their own change as part of the change of the community, they need to be supported in developing knowledge and skills, strengthening attitudes and building motivation. But how can you, as a frontline worker, know what the problem is if someone is resisting change?
We'd love to discuss it further with you - get in touch and we'll be happy to open up our thoughts on the subject!
