Executive Leadership Services
Change Management
The area that determines “success” or “failure” in any large-scale initiative is often the most over-looked. An informal approach to addressing training, communications, or cultural barriers will prevent any type of measurable adoption at best. At worst, it can turn an organization off from ever shifting to the new applications and processes. Our approach is to formalize change with templates and processes that ensure no stone is left un-turned so all stakeholders are comfortable moving forward.
The success rate for major change initiatives is just 52%. A major reason is companies ignore the amount of change to individuals that is inclusive of ALL their responsibilities. What may seem like simple improvements, updates or process shifts, often is more complex because it does not account for multiple changes coming at employees from various directions in a short period of time. Leadership often does not prioritize which changes should be managed at what time, so stakeholders drown in too much and reject change – change fatigue.
Another common problem is change without justification. Organizations can sniff out reasons that don’t align with the firm’s best interests. Proper rationale behind the change must be true and communicated effectively. For example, when a CEO or CIO choose to implement a solution because they have connections with vendors who provide them favors, the resistance builds much faster.
If change management fails, it has a much greater impact than just the loss of the expected transformation and the associated benefits. You also lose the opportunity cost of all the time, capital and people for weeks, months or even years. This could amount to tens of millions that could have been invested elsewhere. However, even greater, is the loss of moral. Your most critical resources will stop believing in the organization and eventually move to places with a better environment.
Here is our basic change management strategy successfully executed with top organizations:
1. Assess each level of the cultural landscape
This requires a review of both the formal and inform aspects of a culture. The former includes the standards, decision-making rights, process flows, structure, and performance management structure. The informal aspects include the actual ways things get done day-to-day; how employees think, act, and their prevailing beliefs while in the corporate environment.
2. Build both a strategic and tactical plan that creates ownership from the top down
Capture the true strengths within a specific culture that can be leveraged across all areas and teams. Assign communications / messages to folks that others gravitate toward; not to the managers who have specific titles, but to those informal leaders that are trusted and can motivate others to do more. They may not always be managers, yet they can be spotted easily by measuring the impact their words and actions have on others.
3. Communicate coherently
It may be common knowledge that communication is a pillar of change management, but it is harder than it looks to execute a communication plan that is effective. You need to have the same exact message coming from different audiences, through different methods, and at calculated times to make the message stick. For example, you can’t have four out of five communications about data storage tell a user they should follow the new business process of avoiding local file storage locations, but the fifth message say it isn’t mandatory to store information on the secure cloud servers. They will naturally keep saving company data to their local hard drives because it is what they are used to. The other messages will have no effect.
4. Commit from the top down, invest in the individual and evaluate success
While there are many grass-roots movements in the social world that start at the bottom and funnel upwards like thorny weeds that refuse to die, this is a rare success story in today’s corporate world. Social media may give John Doe from the mail-room the same platform as a CEO on Facebook, but their actions are weighted differently in the office. When a Chief Executive, Chief Information, or Chief Financial Officer show their full-commitment to a new business process, the effect is exponentially more powerful than any training guide or communication. At the same time, change agents should be trained to pro-actively look for individuals who need an extra push to move forward. If there is push-back from teams or departments, change leadership should engage them directly and use a mix of carrots and sticks to prevent back-sliding to the old processes. This can take a lot of time and when there is a lack of progress, a team must objectively assess whether some people refuse to change, or the new processes are not as beneficial as expected.