Create a culture of Change - Reduce risk and cost of Change

Did you ever noticed how much efforts and energy are being put into the launch of transformation projects, when you need to create the motion that will lead a strategic move towards success, from the very early stages of the project to its implementation. Keeping awareness among the organization, involvement and dedication of every single employee . Change is made particularly difficult by human nature itself; although we are constantly changing and adapting to our environment, human minds are by nature highly resistant to change.

All the purpose of Change Management is to reduce frictional behaviors, useless spread of energy in unwanted directions and to keep everyone focused while in a moving and disorientating, thus stressful environment.

-> This is exactly why we put so much time and efforts in initiating and conducting change. There are however three easy steps you can follow on the long term and that would have your organization be more flexible, adaptable and in the same time, making changes less costly, less risky and way more efficient.

3 steps for creating a culture of change:

    1 - Incarnate change: The ultimate leadership challenge

    2 - Embody change: Because you're not a Superman!

    3 - Empower change and enable motion

Preamble: Create a culture of Change / Reduce resistance to change

We are confident in what we already know and master!

Change and transformation implies a level of uncertainty and this is exactly the point when we are leading change, in some way disrupting us in what we do, in how we do it and leaving us with a resentful feeling of being unsafe not knowing what our tomorrow holds.  For these reasons, most of transformation projects will start by setting up rules, reporting and communication streams, understand and plan the project, identify pitfalls etc.

Don't get me wrong, in this process it is not only employees fearing change, it applies all the way down from executive levels down to every single component of the organization.

Creating a company culture of change will certainly increase agility of the organization, making the transformational process familiar and turning your organization into a change-friendly war machine. Hence, you will significantly reduce the cost of initiating change, have an installed framework and mastery of change management implications, i.e. risks, factors of success... And you'll have a much better knowledge and understanding of "who" your company is.

1 - Incarnate change : The ultimate leadership test

No, you don't have to be a 20 year's old geek fashionista to incarnate change!

You are the leader and your role is to inspire others. I don't know any better way of being inspirational to others than being inspired oneself, I mean deeply and truly convinced about what you want to convince others they should be doing. You, as a leader will face your biggest challenge when fighting self-satisfaction; you are right to be proud of what you've done so far, but never  should forget when you started and what made you successful, how you got over difficulties in the past and keep in mind at all times survival in an everlasting adaptation process. If you believe in sales, or if you believe in customer orientation, or in performance, you are completely right, however maybe just try to believe even more in others than you would in yourself and show them the way they should be following.

Also, beware of not falling in the common trap of saying you want things to change, this doesn't make anyone incarnating change, but rather put yourself in a position of listener, prove openness to ideas and critics, be curious about your organization and your customers, they are very likely to tell you things you don't know and that's priceless. To incarnate change, you have to be the one identifying and  igniting opportunities to change. Acting that way will in effect save you a lot of efforts and money, and I mean really a lot.

To illustrate this, I came to work on a major transformation project, including a merger of 2 large companies, where the leader was actually in a position where he was forced into the process and was everything but convinced, thus not convincing others at all. You may call it poor leadership, I won't tell you're wrong. However, you business leaders should always try to think a step forward of your business and avoid as much as you can to get into a situation where it is not your choice, because then it will become really tough to convince yourself and in turn to convince others. In the end, the project conducted to incredibly high costs and we spent a lot of time just on launching and postponing and re-launching projects, having created a culture of "we would like to create a culture of change" that eventually lead to demotivation and confusion. In an ambiance of under-efficient and perpetual indecisiveness, I've witnessed the employees either quitting or simply lowering arms, waiting for the storm to pass. Be convinced!

2 - Embody change: Because you're not a superman!

Now you hardly convinced yourself your organization should conduct change, comes the moment where you need to identify your change management framework and this starts by nominating a change leader.

As a matter of fact, you are the business leader and it's up to you to determine; if you have nothing else to do then you can become the change leader. I would however question seriously about you having nothing else to do, you are leading the business after all. Since this is your role as a leader, delegate change management to someone who has expertise and is fully dedicated to conducting change. This doesn't mean you will be left aside of the change process, it means that you sit in the sponsor's chair and this already should be more than enough to keep you fully informed, involved, and concerned at all stages of any project you would set up with your teams.

Your second step is to position the newly nominated change leader in your organization. Who should he be reporting to and in which department should he be placed? As you may guess, change is by essence very transversal and cross-functional, impacting your company as a whole. I've seen examples where change is assigned to HR, or focused on IT or Operations. Sometimes change was driven by the sales director. In effect, these situations mostly led to change being applied unequally among the organizations, every department naturally focusing on what is their objective in change management, inducing a biais of understanding and objectives. I mean, I don't disagree with that, you know your organization better and there is no unique recipe that leads to successful strategy (if you know one that works 100%, just let me know!). Again, it's your job to identify the driving forces in your organization.

However, this is my opinion, why not consider to position the change leader very close to yourself. Your fellow board members are like you, they are busy on their areas of expertise, so why not consider to position the change leader within the CEO office or anything approaching where he could supervise globally and report to the most concerned person, yourself.

Embodying a change leader is essential, even though this will actually create a so called cost, you should consider it as an investment in the future and a significant move towards increased cost efficiency for projects to come. 

3 - Empower change and enable motion!

You are now convinced by the unavoidable need to permanently change and adapt to a permanently changing environment, you have identified and actually nominated your change leader. It becomes time to gift your organization with the means that will actually allow to create motion and deliver consistent evolution.

Everyone familiar with project management will know about the following, you want to enable your change leader and you do this by (1) defining a clear mandate, (2) providing the necessary transversal or cross-functional human resources, and (3) allowing a global budget for the projects. You will then (4)define clear objectives and (5)assign these accordingly to the change leader and the respective areas concerned by change. You want to make sure everyone is involved and concerned by successful transformation and dedicated in building together the future of the company.

(1) Define a mandate in which are clearly specified delegations of responsibility and obligations of all stakeholders. The mandate shall be composed of 2 parts; the first part, formally defining a general framework and application, and the second one, more informal, that should be defined case by case for every project. Beware that whatever the mandate, it should be acknowledged and shared by all parts, so to avoid side effects of low cooperation amongst the stakeholders.

(2) Provide sufficient and relevant workforce, and the competencies shall be definitely transversal. Whether you decide to go for a dedicated team, to build-up a cross-functional team out of existing resources from different entities, or nominate change champions is entirely up to you. As a matter of fact, it seems more reasonable to create a balanced mix of dedicated workforce and business experts. In addition, it may be required to regularly assign external resources, such as expert consultants or trainers.

(3) As for any project, there has to be a budget for anything to happen. How much you invest in a project is closely related with how much you want the project to impact your organization. However, since you are yourself convinced by change, this shouldn't be an issue, is it?

As in the previous (2), there's basically 2 different scenarios. First scenario, all the budget is allocated to the change leader and he distributes accordingly, or in the second scenario, the budget is entirely distributed among the business lines and is dedicated to Change project. In the former, there is a possibility that budget allocation creates major disruption in the business, thus causing inefficiency and creating risk, and in the latter it is highly probable that budget allocations are used individually by each business line towards its very own objective, thus not focusing on resolving the global objectives. Again, here a mix of both might be the best solution. Always bear in mind that any of your Executive is very unlikely to allow a part of his budget to solve another Executive's line problems. 

(4) & (5) Determine objectives, distribute and share responsibility among the entire organization. Define the right set of objective is actually trickier than it seems, simply because it is important to differentiate business-as-usual achievements from those brought by change & transformation, including a wide range of both positive or negative side effects. Transformation projects should always include a strong business planning, that's where you would get the most relevant objectives from. Finally, you want to ensure the new objectives are everyone's responsibility and therefore you need to spread responsibility over all the business lines, this way you may reduce unwanted outsiders and uncooperative behaviors.

A few words of conclusion

Now you are almost good to go. Conduct the three steps implementation of the "create a culture of change" project carefully, the step by step process is essential and will subsequently be most efficient when handled that way. It is of course entirely your choice not to do so, or not even to do it at all, after all it is your future you hold in your hands. Don't forget though it is not only your future, but the perspectives of every one involved in your company, putting his time and efforts to make you successful, who believes in you, you won't let them down.

Please also allow enough time to this major and crucial change; it takes time to create a culture and even though business perspectives are more likely to be short term, this is really an investment in the future. A once for all effort so you just save yourself sweat and tears on every forthcoming strategic moves. Build confidence in your organization, that it is becoming a professionally managing  change and see confidence spread among every single person who is working with you.

Frederic Hugo Hoffmann, MBA

Frédéric specialized in initiating and developing new activities within organizations, leading organizational change and innovation.

Read more from Frederic:

- Why we shouldn't be scared by change... and why we are!

- Thriving business momentum: Potential performance analysis 

- Career: Executive education, highway to success?

- Career: are student jobs really unimportant for high profile professionals?