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Change May Require More Than You Bargained For

Change management is now at the height of its life cycle. It is much discussed and sought after by companies both large and small. I often wonder, though, if all the implications of the change process are fully appreciated by those embarking on the journey of change.

The Prerequisites for Change

The fundamentals of the process rest upon a strategic understanding of where the host company wants to be in the next five years or so. Such a view must emanate from a profound understanding of both the external and internal environments. It requires paying attention to far more than the technical adaptations that are imperative for survival and competitive advantage. It requires a deeper understanding of the adaptive changes that must be made on the part of the leadership as well as at all levels within the organization. It requires that management ask itself uncomfortable questions about its role and the role of others in the organization. It demands tolerance for a high level of stress. It causes previously concealed conflicts and unproductive behaviors to be exposed. Above all, it requires the ability to deal with a high degree of uncertainty in a constructive, creative and productive manner.

How Do You Maintain Stability While You ‘Rock the Boat’?

The normal functioning of the organization cannot stop while everything is changed. The economic viability of the organization must be ensured, while change is being implemented at the deepest and most fundamental levels: the attitudes, expectations, roles and reward systems of an organization. There are no ‘quick fixes’ here. The process is long-term and will not succumb to pressure. Attempts to compress the change process into a shorter span of time will only result in the breakdown of present systems when the new ones are not yet in place. No doubt such radical changes can be made, but it really means totally closing down one entity and starting a completely new one. This, however, will only work if the leaders of the organization have undergone sufficient change in their own behaviors so as to beget a significantly different organizational entity. Maintaining stability while managing change is probably one of the most difficult leadership challenges. It requires walking the ‘razor’s edge’ between sustaining the appropriate degree of pressure to change, while offering support and opportunities to release pressure.

Change Means Putting People in Charge of Their Futures

The change process requires that management listen to front-liners with a different mind-set. It is all too easy to dismiss or squash criticism when we are at the top of the power-pyramid. It is, however, true that it is the front-liner who gets first wind of changes in the external environment and also of effectiveness of internal systems and management capabilities. Very often it is those who are most critical and those who dare to speak up that have the most promise of becoming leaders. Ironically, it is precisely these individuals who become most frustrated because they are constantly bringing up issues that top managers prefer to ignore because the subjects are uncomfortable or because the issues addressed threaten the established equilibrium of the company, or because the subjects broached cause some of the concealed conflicts between managers to surface. These persons, if they have the genuine good of the company at heart, or if they happen to be experts in the field they are critiquing, can become so unhappy if consistently ignored that the company eventually looses them to competitors. People at lower levels in the organization must be involved in the change process if it is to succeed.

The Vital Steps

The vital steps of any change process involve intensive communication, coaching and supporting and training in new techniques and systems. Communication is probably the most fundamental concept of the change process. Without sustained exchange of information on all organizational planes, change will be derailed or limited to a very small group of persons who do communicate. Communication is the key to keeping the change process on the rails and moving to the desired destination. The other basic requirement for success in any change process is training and development of persons at all levels of the organization without exception. This training and development, referred to from here on as education, can take a number of forms ranging from the very subtle process of educating through meeting and chatting to formal training and development modules. Without such sustained support in the acquisition of new skills, the change program will collapse because people will find the new ways too hard. Change must be facilitated by continuous and supportive communication and a climate that encourages learning as part of daily work life.

Conclusion

When you embark on the journey of change remember to take your entire workforce along with you. Some will undoubtedly excuse themselves and not complete the journey, but those who do will emerge much stronger and more united than when they started out. The leader must keep sight of the big picture and take the responsibility of guiding to the end.

Culture always wins. And if you don’t believe this, just take a look at all the organizational change that fails. It doesn’t fail for lack of solid business reasoning. If you look underneath all the well-conceived strategies and plans, you’ll run into the organizational culture that can quickly undermine all the best intentions.

Culture is the organization’s “personality” with beliefs, values, attitudes, language, work practices, behaviors and underlying assumptions. And like personalities, these elements are powerful and at times invisible.

If, in order to achieve successful change, one of the requirements includes a shift in the organizational culture, the first important step is the leadership team’s ability to understand the realities of the current culture, (the ‘real’ one, not the one displayed on the walls) and their role in shifting their own behaviors and mindset to match the new desired culture.

In my recent experience with the group of 30 executives, I was able to watch this phenomenon play out. I had the group “warm up” with a simulated experience using a card game to illustrate change which involved some cultural components. They did VERY well, and even utilized some excellent leadership teambuilding actions during the simulation.

Then I put them into a role playing activity based on a real company case study about a transformational merger that was stymied as a result of a cultural clash between the two legacy companies. Their assignment was to determine what needed to be done to mitigate this clash. They immediately went into “business mode” and came up with many tactical ideas – most involving strategic ideas that would help to “control” resistance, from new marketing plans, to systems implementations, to employee training. But not one team identified the kinds of changes that the leadership team would need to recognize for themselves. During the role play debrief, one executive stated that it was easy to behave skillfully in the simulated experience (card house) but much more difficult when the situation was “real” where they needed to move past their typical “business behavior” solutions. It was a defining moment for this team of executives, to discover for themselves how they had so quickly resorted to known business tactics in an attempt to solve the cultural clashes.

So what does this mean to those of you who are leading organizational change? How can you accurately identify your company culture and the importance of aligning the leadership team to own new mindsets and behaviors to ensure successful results?

QUESTIONS TO EXPLORE

• What is really valued in this organization? How is it demonstrated?
• How are decisions made and communicated?
• What skills and characteristics does the organization value?
• How do people from different departments interact?
• What kinds of behaviors get rewarded? What bad behaviors are tolerated?
• What kinds of stories do people tell each other?

ACTION TO TRY

Organizational culture change is necessary to support almost all organizational change efforts (strategic, structural, or process). Organizational change efforts will fail if organizational culture remains fundamentally the same.

Try to be an impartial observer of your culture in action. Look at the employees and their interaction in your organization with the eyes of an outsider.

What are they doing? How are they interacting with each other? How do they communicate with each other? What is important to accomplish? What gets rewarded?

You may be surprised at what you observe. It’s a good way to identify the cultural norms or the ‘real’ personality of your company. Then take a look at yourself as the leader and ask how others would view you as a role model for the desired culture.

Terri Hughes is the owner/principal of Terri Hughes, LLC, a leadership development & executive coaching business. She has been in the business of guiding change and developing leaders for over 25 years, primarily in the corporate space as vice president & director of leadership development and organizational change in a large retail corporation. She is a successful personal and leadership coach, and is a master facilitator.

Terri’s recent clients include leaders and teams in manufacturing, technology, retail, health care, government, small business and higher education industries. She works with individuals and teams in a variety of situational change arenas including: leadership behavioral shifts, new role transitions, career changes, and organizational changes.