Managing change will be necessary at some time during your organisation’s existence. The reason for the change may be unexpected, and will present challenges, but to ensure all your efforts are effective, you will need a structured process in place.
Long-term transformation includes four characteristics: scale, magnitude, duration, and strategic importance. All of these affect your organisation as a whole, but will involve change that occurs at the level of the individual employee. Not all your people are identical peas in your pod.
Senior executives know this, and often say they are extremely concerned about how their work force – their people – will react. Leadership teams that fail to plan for the human side of change often find themselves wondering why their best-laid plans have gone awry.
Methodologies will vary, but there is a set of practices, tools, and techniques that can be adapted to a variety of situations. Below are five initial guiding principles for change management. Using these as part of a systematic, comprehensive framework, you can understand what to expect, how to manage your own personal change, and how to engage your entire organisation in the process.
1. Address the “human element” systematically.
A formal approach for managing change should be developed early, and adapted as change moves through your organisation. This involves much data collection and analysis, planning, and implementation discipline. The change-management approach should be fully integrated into program design and decision making, and inform and enable strategic direction.
2. Start at the top.
People will turn to the CEO and the leadership team for support and direction. Leaders themselves must embrace the new approaches first. They must speak with one voice and model the desired behaviours. They also need to understand that, although your organisation may be one of unity, it, too, is composed of individuals who are going through stressful times and need to be supported.
3. Involve every level.
As programs progress from defining strategy and setting targets to design and implementation, they affect different levels of your organisation. You must include plans for identifying leaders throughout the company and pushing responsibility for actions down, so that change cascades through the organisation. At each layer, the leaders who are identified and trained must be aligned to your organisation’s vision, capable to execute their specific mission, and motivated to make change happen.
4. Make the formal case.
Individuals are inherently rational and potentially sceptical, and will ask to what extent change is needed, whether the organisation is headed in the right direction, and whether they want to commit personally to making change happen. They will look to the leadership and expect answers. The creation of a formal case for change and the use of a written vision statement are excellent opportunities to create or compel leadership-team alignment.
5. Create ownership.
Leaders of change programs must commit totally during the transformation, and create a critical mass among your people in favour of change. This demands ownership by leaders willing to accept responsibility for making change happen in all of the areas they influence or control. Ownership of this is often best created by involving people in identifying problems and crafting solutions. Success created by your own people will be willingly supported and continued by them
There are other issues to consider with managing change, including communication, culture, preparing for the unexpected, and coaching individuals through the process. We can help you with all of these areas at IiE, and you can find out how here.