Building Change across the Organization

“Change is a constant” has become a standard phrase in business today. To handle this, emphasis on Change Management and Change Capability and Capacity is increasing, starting with the most successful businesses.

Building and Supporting Change Management across the Organization

In building and improving change management across an organization, there are some trends that need to be avoided to ensure that the organization successfully achieves change:

·       First, we Train: As Prosci? ADKAR advocates, training comes after awareness and desire for building out Change Management. The mindset in some organizations is that as people across the organization are trained about Change Management and its merits, they will automatically understand the value of Change Management, will support it and will walk out of the training ready to implement company-wide Change Management. It doesn’t work that way. Some will get it, some won’t. But if we treat the endeavor as a project, we would start with why the company needs Change Management and why should the individuals want this. Then train the people.

·       Moving away from the easier command and control: Most people understand that the hierarchical, demanding organization doesn’t work anymore. But command and control does still exist to some degree in some organizations or sometimes more in the mindset of the leaders. We still have people who can remember this method of leadership and long for those days again – it was easier to tell people to do something versus motivating them. It seems much less painful to just tell people they must change. A company was rolling out Change Management across the business when a sponsor of this effort said: “why do we have to do this – we pay them don’t we?”. This sponsor wasn’t really sponsoring change management!

·       Change Management is about people, not paperwork: Another way to start off Change Management is to obtain CM tools and use a popular methodology. This can lead to Change Managers sitting at their computer all day filling out too much paperwork.Getting out in front of the stakeholders who must change is key to success in making change. There is very meaningful analysis and documentation required for best practice Change Management, but the best change managers know the right balance of planning and true collaboration and communication with the people leading or going through change.   

·       Reinforcement cannot be ignored. The new shiny change is in place so the Project Manager and team can celebrate success and move onto other change initiatives before the stakeholders have adopted the change. Some change initiatives have failed after the project team declared victory. The key is for the stakeholders to adopt the change and it becomes embedded in the culture. This requires a reinforcement plan, including follow-up communication and monitoring and metrics to ensure new behaviors.

Beyond Change Management: The Agile Organization

Change Saturation and Fatigue are everywhere today. The two main paths to handle this are to look at the portfolio of change and move projects in and out where there are too much changes taking place for groups of people. Many businesses say this is not acceptable as constantly changing and improving is key to competitiveness For this reason, more companies (especially leaders of the industry) are interested in building change capability and capacity across the organization. This requires changes in the culture, workforce and mindsets. As the speed of change continues to increase rapidly, Change Management Experts will help companies build Agile Organizations.  

"In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety." Abraham Maslow