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Resistance is Inevitable

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Great ideas, great people and great projects have fallen victim to resistance to change. Resistance is a
natural part of the change process and exists in many forms. Look for these structural and physiological
reasons people resist.

Fear of the unknown: When a leader announces a change, whether it is a new computer system, moving
to a cross-functional team environment or even a move to a new building, it can be scary. The
announcement of a change threatens this comfortable ‘today’ the employee knows and introduces a
‘tomorrow’ that she doesn’t’ know.

Threat to expertise or prominence: Threat to prominence is based on the perception that something
someone values will be taken away. A leader who values the size of the budget, the number of direct
reports, the title or even the location of the office may resist any change that threatens one or more of
these things.

Lack of Support: A motivated and hard-working innovator still may not be able to change because of the
lack of support around him. This lack of support or structure may include:
1. Lack of skills or information
2. Mismatched evaluation system
3. Lack of resources, rewards, or recognition
4. Lack of appropriate reporting or collaborative relationships

Working against the Brain: If employees have ingrained habits and are suddenly asked to make new habits,
the brain must work harder. This goes against the brain’s natural inclination to conserve energy. Many
books such as The Power of Habit are great resources for understanding the physiological challenges when
we ask people to work differently.

Recognizing the many root causes of resistance, improves understanding. Improved understanding leads to
better ways to address resistance.

Ways to get started include:

1. When there is fear of the unknown, do a better job communicating what the future looks like for
that person.
2. When there is threat to expertise and power, acknowledge what is going away but also reinforce
the positives and opportunities.
3. When support is missing, advocate for people and budget to address what is lacking. Explain the
risk of not addressing these gaps.
4. When habits are being changed, educate people about how to recognize habits and what it takes to
change them.

Dealing with resistance isn’t easy but it’s a central part of change management. Expect it, recognize the
type of resistance, and find ways to address it.

Successful Change in an Agile Environment

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Setting up infrastructure to ensure that change management tools can be optimized for an agile environment is important groundwork for ensuring that changes succeed when iterative agile work begins at full speed.
When changes are happening in rapid succession very quickly, it is important to have an infrastructure that allows the team to focus on the content of each change rather than some of the more structural foundations of change management work.
  • Clear team roles and responsibilities
  • Forums for leadership alignment and discussion
  • Mechanisms for documenting stakeholder impacts and communication delivery
  • Mechanisms for delivery of learning material
  • Feedback mechanisms that ensure employees have a way to provide quick input to the team.
Roles and Responsibilities
Clearly documented project with Unregulated contaminants team roles and responsibilities are particularly important in fast moving change environments. Letting each team member know who is responsible for performing different tasks, even at a high level, helps ensure the appropriate change management activities are planned and executed so employees are ready, willing and able to change. Establishing this foundation at the start of the change effort will enable the team to maintain the speed and efficiency that agile environments demand.
Leadership Alignment
Even when changes taking place are small, it is important that leaders are aware and supportive of the changes. At the start of the change effort, ensure that there are regular forums to share information about changes with leaders. These forums, used throughout the project, ensure leaders understand what is changing and how people will be impacted.
Stakeholder Impacts
Having a place where information about how each release or wave of change impacts people is stored and shared could be as simple as a collaboration software workspace such as OneDrive, SharePoint or DropBox. Making sure there is a place to hold the information, and that the people who need to see or use it know how to access the information sets the project up for success.
Communication
When changes are coming in a series of releases or waves, having functioning systems that efficiently and effectively get information out and back saves time and increases the value of the change management effort. Defining the key communication vehicles for the project at the very outset of the effort and ensuring the team and vehicle owners know that you will be using them, are important to ensure that people are ready, willing and able to work in new ways.
Learning
When changes are happening every few weeks or months, you need to plan up front for an easy and quick way to get materials to people who need them. Defining the learning or training approach, the format of the materials, and how they are released to people should happen as the change team starts on the project to enable the team to focus on the content of each release rather than formats and delivery processes. If you’ve been looking to buy a business in Fort Myers because you’re moving nearby, you can visit Truforte Business Group’s website to find some great looking options.

Because changes happen in such rapid succession in agile change environments, often the inclination is to keep looking forward to what the next change is rather than supporting people who have just experienced a change. It is important to have infrastructure to gather feedback after a change is released to help ensure that people don’t revert to old ways.

Assessing Effort to Manage the People Side of Change

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For years, people have asked us how we “scope” consulting work on projects. So we finally decided to create a tool that captures how we decide how much effort will be required to manage the people aspects of a change. The tool is called the Change Management Effort Assessment.  The tool will be included in the upcoming second edition of The Change Management Pocket Guide.

Sure, we would love it if you ran out and go the book, but you can think about these same ideas on your own to assess how much effort will be involved in managing the people side of an organizational change.

Of course, like any tool, it is not a magic bullet. But it provides the process and the critical considerations to define how much effort will be required to plan and execute an effective change management strategy.  When deciding how many resources to apply to a change management project, it is important to consider both the degree of the change, as well as the expected difficulty of managing the change.

The degree of the change is an assessment of how broad the change will reach, and how different the new ways of working are from the current ways. The things to think about when assessing the degree of the change are: how many people are impacted by the change, the severity of the gap between the way things are done today and the way they need to be done in the future, and the extent to which there are other projects or changes going on within the environment that will add complexity to the change.

The difficulty of managing the change includes many factors that make changes more challenging to manage. They include things such as the involvement of unions or legal issues, the volume and frequency of communications that will be needed, the level of training that will be required, and the degree of changes in performance measures and HR structures that will be needed to support the change.

Situations that involve a “low degree of change” and a “low difficulty of managing the change” naturally require less resources than situations that have higher degrees of change or more difficulty in managing the change. Based on the results of the assessment, managing change could be an activity that is managed by a team member along with their other project responsibilities, or a full change management team that is dedicated to managing the people aspects of the change.

Of course, every change is unique. A change that impacts 30,000 people around the world by asking them all to change one small thing that they do on a weekly basis has a high degree of change, and is very complex (think about the language and time zone issues, the different leadership structures that need to be involved, etc…). At the same time, a change that impacts only 50 people but changes their entire jobs from top to bottom also has a high degree of change, and is very complex (think about the changes in compensation and benefits that might result, the potential for letting some people go, etc…).

Don’t forget to use what you know about the organization, the change, and the people involved. But using a Change Management Effort Assessment will help you get a good head start on defining how much effort will be needed to manage the people aspects of the change.

If you want to see our version of a Change Management Effort Assessment, check out the Change Guides website (www.changeguidesllc.com) to find out when you can get a copy of the upcoming Change Management Pocket Guide.   And let us know how it is working for you!

What Kind of Person Manages Change?

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Change is tough for organizations, and helping people navigate through change takes a special kind of person.  There are of course leaders that need to champion and sponsor change.  But there are also people that need to actually manage the change and help people in the organization work through the transition.

There is a lot of hard work involved in helping people in an organization change the way they work.  So what are the characteristics of great change managers?

  1. They’re empathetic. The ability to continuously ask and answer the question “what would I want and need if I were in their shoes” is a critical skill for an effective change manager.  Having empathy and understanding what others are experiencing and what will help build commitment is the core of managing change. When it comes down to it, anyone who has a good strong sense of the golden rule (“do unto others as you would have others do unto you”) has the basic stuff to be a good manager of change.
  2. They’re good communicators. That may seem obvious, but it is really an important skill for successfully managing change.  Good change managers communicate simply.  They interpret complex messages and distill them down to simple, easy bits.  Effective change managers tailor their message to their audiences, and they use lots of different communication vehicles well.
  3. They are naturally influential and generate informal authority.  Effective change managers naturally draw others to them.  They don’t need formal authority to have influence over others and they are able to leverage their networks to make things happen.  They are persuasive and likeable.
  4. They have courage. It is not always easy being on the front lines of an organizational change.  Change managers are often times put in a position to be “representing” the interests of the people impacted by change with the people who are creating change.  That can put the change manager in situations where they need to say and do things that are unpopular.  They may need to tell leaders and or associates things that they don’t want to hear.  Change managers need to be willing to call things like they see them, even if it is unpopular and not typically expected in an organization.
  5. They are discreet and maintain confidences.  Change managers can be put in positions of having sensitive information.  During focus group meetings, interviews, or just hallway conversations, it is not uncommon for people to share specific information about specific individuals with change managers.  If a change manager divulges information that they have agreed to keep private even once, they lose credibility and trust.  It is imperative that change managers know how to keep a secret.
  6. They’re organized.  Some people assume that managing change is mostly art and little science.  But managing change usually requires tremendous exercises in logistics and orchestration.  Being organized is a critical skill for effectively managing change.
  7. A bias for action.  Change management has a bad reputation among people who think managing change is only about asking questions and analyzing people.  Managing change is both art and science.  While questions should be asked and assessments made, real change comes when action takes place.  If someone doesn’t actually do something with the results of assessments, the exercises are moot.
  8. They get their hands dirty.  Change managers can be speaking to executive committees in the morning, and stuffing envelopes in the afternoon. Good change managers are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get stuff done.  Anyone who is not able or willing to dig into the nitty gritty (editing a poster, developing talking points for leaders, editing an agenda for an important meeting) is not going to be as effective managing change as someone who is.
  9. They are subject matter experts in the field of organizational change management.  They understand the human and organizational dynamics of change, as well as the many methodologies that describe ways that change can be managed.  In addition to general change management understanding, great change managers have experience in several different change environments to see how change unfolds.  Having “stories” to share is always helpful when managing change.
  10. They are personally comfortable with ambiguity and change.  An effective change manager can navigate through ambiguity relatively well, and is more comfortable than others working in a changing environment.  Being part of a change project is by its very nature an environment of change.  But it is also true that most changes are not linear, stable activities.  There are ups and downs, periods of acceleration and periods of deceleration.  People who are not comfortable with the ebbs and flow and the ambiguity of change (scope changes, a new leader that enters the picture, changes in direction) will have a tough time effectively managing change.  An effective change manager quickly assesses a shifting situation and adapts to the new environment.  And they don’t get upset or anxious about it.

Changing for the Workforce of the Future

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Can you imagine fully half of the people who work for your company being either contractors such as the best roofing company in Denver, CO, temporary workers, or freelancers?  That may very well be the future we face.

A 2012 Economic Intelligence Unit Study shows that by the year 2030, 50% of the workforce will be made up of contingent workers.  The U.S. contingent workforce is made up of self-employed individuals, independent service firms, entrepreneurs and temporary workers. By 2020, 40 percent of American workers, or nearly 65 million people, will be contingent, and shortly thereafter that percentage is expected to rise to 50 percent.

Others confirm that the use of contingent workers is already on the rise, and will continue.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as reports from the Staffing Industry Analysts, a research and advisory firm focused on staffing and contingent labor, have demonstrated that the number of contingent workers has been increasing year over year for a few years.  And in June 2011, over 34% of the 2000 organizations surveyed by the McKinsey Global Institute said they plan to use more temporary labor in the next five years.

The trend is clear.  But are organizations ready for it?

Work in the future will be more collaborative, flexible, and goal oriented.  Temporary workers will need to be sharp, and stay sharp, to keep their jobs.  An organiztaion with more and more people flowing into and out of it will need to be radically different than today.

A current client of ours is working on a large project that requires a lot of consultants.  A full time staff person spends over 80% of her time giving out and tracking computers that are given to consultants.  Can you imagine if half of their workforce was contingent?  If the task of managing assets is so cumbersome now, the process and technology implications of a 50% contingent workforce would be astounding.

We have several large clients that are working on becoming more “digitally enabled” in order to meet the needs of their customers.  But with all we have heard from clients about embracing technology to meet the needs of future customers, we have not heard any talk at all about how to be more digitally enabled to meet the needs of their future workers.   The shift to more temporary workers will change how an organization works with its people in profound ways.

Current technology certainly makes workers more “plug and play” ready.  But it will need to make significant strides to meet the needs of a future more transient workforce.

Our clients will have to re-think how they manage people, how groups form and disband to tackle work, how people are on-boarded and rolled-off, how corporate cultures are built and maintained, how they attract and evaluate temporary workers.

They will also need to embrace technology and new digital technologies in an entirely new way. More digital maturity can help organizations build stronger connection to their staff… especially temporary staff.  Not only allowing access, but also targeting communication, facilitating relationships between roles, connecting people to other people and ideas.

Organizations that will win with workers of the future will be more mobile, and will be more agile by providing more personalized or customized needs for each temporary worker.  They will flex based on the work, the location, the worker, and the required interfaces with other people within the organization.

If you are thinking about where your organization will be in 20 years, think about your customers, your products, and your markets.  The demands they place on your organization will certainly challenge you to change.  But also think about your staff.  You might be surprised at the magnitude of change that meeting their unique needs challenges you to also.

Priority #1 During Change: Leadership Alignment and Sponsorship

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Studies over the years have continued to confirm what you may have already suspected… the greatest contributor to successful organizational change is leadership.  In a studies of hundreds of companies and their change efforts, “Strong Executive Sponsorship” was cited three times more frequently
than any other contributing factor to successful change  by Prosci (Best Practices in Change Management) in both 2005 and 2009.

If your organization is currently undergoing or contemplating a change, the focus should be on leadership.  There are two elements of leadership that should be fully understood and addressed:

  • Alignment – the extent to which leaders are “on the same page” about what the change is, why it is important, what it will mean to the organization
  • Sponsorship – the things that leaders are actually doing to demonstrate their support for a change such as contributing resources, attending key meetings, and encouraging others to work with the project team

Understanding the degree of leadership alignment and sponsorship around the change and identifying and addressing leadership issues will position the change for success.

Collecting information about leadership alignment and sponsorship that you need doesn’t have to be a big deal.  A few candid discussions and well conducted interviews can do the trick.

Where are We Going? A Team Needs a Shared Purpose

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We recently started working with an organization that is the victim of it’s own success.

A few years ago, this organization was in a phase of explosive growth.  Customers were knocking on their doors, recruiting could barely keep up, and earnings grew and grew.

While growth skyrocketed, they were challenged to field the calls as the phone practically rang off the hook, hire people fast enough to meet the demand, and not mess up their product in the meantime.  They developed new products on the fly when customers asked for new things.  They grew their customer base by switching to better card payment providers.  Their headcount ballooned.

Activities that were once done by a small group of guys who could work in a conference room were being done by hundreds of people in several departments and locations.

But, as the saying goes, what goes up must come down.  Actually, they are still kicking some serious you-know-what in the market.  But growth has slowed with the
economic downturn, competitors have cropped up that are giving them a run for their money, and the leadership team has realized that they have become disconnected from the business and each other.

The executives have been so focused looking down to meet the needs in front of them, that they have not done a terrific job of looking forward to the future (where are we going?), or sideways (how does what I am doing link to what you are doing?).

In the rush of the boom times, the executives started to view their peers as barriers rather than as enablers or supports.  They spent as little time together as possible, and when they did get together they became frustrated with each other and got hung up in tactical
details of their business.  They operated in silos.  They developed some level of
frustration with each other.  And they started to think that this group just didn’t trust each other.

While their business results are far from terrible, they are certainly not what they used
to be.  Leaders realize it is time for a change before it is too late.  If this organization is going to thrive in its next phase of maturity, it needs to figure out what the heck it wants to be, and how the executive team is going to take them there.

As the executives have been thinking about how they plan for and execute a long range plan that will take their organization into its next phase of growth, it has become clear that they are all coming from different places.  It was no wonder they aren’t operating well as a team.  They don’t even have a common definition of what it meant to win the game. You can also achieve winning outcomes in these games by placing bets on platforms like 겜블시티, where your chances of success are just a wager away.

The fact that they all have different expectations about what it means to win and what role each of them and their organizations should play in winning, reinforces siloed behavior and erodes the interpersonal dynamics in the team.

If I think we win our game by scoring lots and lots of goals, but you think we win by making sure the opponent doesn’t score more goals than we do, we are coming at the
game from a different mindset.  If we are both be on the field but playing with a different strategy, then we are doing things that we can easily mis-read as either undermining or incompetence.

A group of really strong people with a shared purpose can lead an organization almost anywhere.  A group of really strong people with different ideas about their shared purpose can lead an organization pretty much nowhere.

This group doesn’t need trust-falls or hand holding.  They just need to agree on a few basic questions.  What do they want to be?  What customers will they serve and what products will they offer?

When the executive team can answer those questions and agree to stick to their decisions, they will see that the next phase of growth and maturity for their organization can be just as exciting and enviable as the last.

Change is a marathon, not a Sprint

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We have a client that is smack-dab in the middle of a significant change effort. The team is getting tired. They feel like they have been beating the drum forever. They can’t understand why people don’t just GET IT and CHANGE.

But change is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s easy to get mired in the details and lose sight of the success that is slowly building.

When stepping back and looking at what they have actually achieved since getting started, the situation looks a litlte better. They still have a long way to go, but progress is progress. Every step counts.

Take time to focus on what is going right. Remember that persistance is a key characteristic of a great change leader. If things are not going well, then update the plan. Find a way to work around obstacles.

And for all of those things are going well, even if a litlte slower than you would like, keep at it!

The Final Countdown… are we Ready for this Change?

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You have prepared for weeks, months, or maybe even years.  Now you are ready to implement the BIG THING that you’ve been working on.  The THING that promises to transform your business – the way you deal with customers, the way you sell your products or services, the way your processes work, your enterprise applications, etc…

But you start to get nervous just before you flip the switch from the old ways to the new ways.  You start to wonder, “Are we REALLY ready?”  You will likely think to ensure the basic process and system elements of the change are in place, but don’t forget to take one last look at the people elements of the change.  More than one organization we know has remembered to make sure that all of the new PC’s had been set up, but then forgto to make sure that people knew how or had incentives to use them!

For the implementation of a change to be successful, you and your team should be able to affirm that all of these items have been completed:

  • We have communicated to all employees the reasons and goals for the project
  • We have communicated to all impacted employees any individual job impacts and related changes in skills and / or performance expectations
  • We have clearly articulated to all employees what is and what is not changing in the their areas
  • We have communicated what success looks like for the employees (i.e. our expectations of them)
  • We have communicated the details of implementation / change preparation activities and the support available before, during and after project implementation to directly and indirectly impacted employees
  • All impacted employees have attended the recommended training classes
  • Where there are competing priorities, we have clarified what employees need to do support the change objectives
  • We have established a functioning feedback process so employee issues / concerns related to the project can be identified and addressed
  • We have communicated required changes in goals and performance measures to support attainment of the project benefit goals
  • We have created / reinforced key accountability for staff to demonstrate leadership support for the project
  • Staffing plans have been developed to account for absent employees while at training
  • Supervisors of impacted areas understand the increase / decrease in staff necessary to support project implementation (e.g. new systems, lower individual productivity)
  • Cut-over schedule(s) have been communicated to all impacted employees and their supervisors
  • A site-wide communication process has been developed to collect and manage issues during project implementation
  • Leaders have reviewed and approved vacation schedules (i.e. critical employees cannot go on vacation during project implementation or during training).

When you can emphatic agree with each of these statements, you are well on your way to building a successful sustainable change in your organization! You can also check read more… here  Go make that BIG THING happen!

Leading the Change and Smiling for the Cameras

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Leadership comes in all shapes and sizes.  Some of it is innate, some of it is learned; some of it is clearly definable, some of it is more esoteric; some of it is easy to recognize, some of it sneaks up on you. 

Studies have consistently confirmed that the greatest contributor to successful organizational change is leadership.  In repeated studies of hundreds of companies and their change efforts, “Strong Executive Sponsorship” was cited three times more frequently than any other contributing factor to successful change. 

Why does leadership have such a huge impact on change?  Because people support what they think their leaders support. If they don’t think their leaders are really going to make a change happen, they figure they shouldn’t waste too much time or effort thinking about it.  They figure they have an “out” to just ignore.  If they duck down in their cube long enough, all of this change stuff will blow over.   For organizations that have tried to change in the past and failed, people feel even more justification in believing they can wait it out and nothing will come of it in the end.

But how do people really know what a leader supports?  Certainly anyone in a leadership position is going to be telling their people that the big new thing is going to be great for the organization and the people.  But people develop their perceptions about what leaders support not only through leaders’ words. Leadership action is even more important.  Acting in ways that are consistent with words is the magic combination that moves people to act in new ways that leaders define.     

It is like the leader is the celebrity and the employees are the paparazzi.  People are watching what leaders do and say, and they are filtering all of that information to figure out if they should be on board with a change or not.  Talking the talk is useless if walking the walk doesn’t follow.

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