Managing Organizational Change...

As an organizational leader, one constant issue that you will face in your organization is change. Sometimes these changes may be driven by you as a leader, and other times it may come from ideas from within your team or due to external pressure from competitors, regulators, customers or the general business environment. No matter where it comes from - change is inevitable, and needs to be managed properly. Often times when key changes are being made in our businesses, we pay a lot of attention to implementing the change itself - purchasing new equipment, setting up new technology, etc., and pay little or no attention to managing the "people" side of change - ensuring the readiness and willingness of your employees and other key stakeholders to go along with the change. Where this happens you run the risk that your change project will fail - taking too long, costing too much or just failing altogether. As the business leader, you need to manage change effectively, and best practice in change management suggests that you pay attention to these simple steps:

• Understand what drives change: Every time you have a new change to implement - new policies, procedures, products or even new technology, you must understand some foundational principles about change and reflect them in your approach. Changes will not just happen because you have willed them to be so, or issued an executive order. People may respond to your change, but you want more than that, you want the change to be successful. 

Great scholars and scholarly works on leading change suggest that there are five factors that must be in play before individuals can change, and your role as a business owner is to evaluate these five factors and build plans to address them. The factors bear the mnemonic - ADKAR which stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. It simply means that for the individuals in your organization to embrace and positively drive any of your change initiatives they must be: 1) Aware of the Need to change - they must understand that the previous ways had limitations, and that there is a need to make some improvement; 2) Desirous of change - they must have a personal desire for the change to happen, they must like the fact that the new policy has come, and that the policy will be good for them; 3) Knowledgeable about what it takes to change - sometimes change projects require people to gain knowledge, for example knowledge about how to use a new computer software that will manage store sales, the employees will need training to gain this new knowledge; 4) Ability to change - beyond knowledge, your employees must have the tools and resources as well as the enabling environment to change. So if you are implementing a new communication system that requires everyone to connect on-line, you must provide internet access to your employees; and 5) Reinforcement to support the change - once the change has started to take effect, your employees will need positive reinforcement to encourage those who have implemented the change properly and negative reinforcement for those who are not moving along with the changes. So, the challenge for you as you drive your next change initiative is to reflect these elements of ADKAR in your approach and plans.

• Measure and Track Readiness and Willingness: When you look at the ADKAR elements, a number of them speak to the willingness (DESIRE) and Readiness (Knowledge and Ability) to make change happen. It is therefore very important that you gauge each stakeholder's willingness and readiness to change. You can do this through questionnaires, surveys, focus group meetings, skills tests or just one-on-one meetings with your employees. Such an assessment will help reveal the general and specific things that need to be done to increase willingness and desire. Perhaps you may need to highlight more advantages to your employees, communicate more or provide more training to help them implement the change - all of these and much more will be revealed when you carry out a proper assessment of willingness and readiness.
• Develop a Change Management Plan: All your observations from your assessments of willingness and readiness as well as the overall goals of your project should help you in developing a change management plan. The change plan is a simple document that highlights the various steps that you intend to take to help your employees change by working on the different elements of the ADKAR model. Your plan will consist of the action steps, the timelines for implementation, and the people that will be responsible for each item. As you develop and implement more plans to drive change in your organization, you will begin to get a sense of what works and what doesn't especially based on the specific circumstances of your organization. By not having a plan and just hoping that things will work out, you are almost guaranteeing the failure of your change project. Even well planned change initiatives suffer some setbacks - imagine what will happen without a plan, altogether.
• Manage Resistance: As you begin implementing your initiative and putting your change management plan into action, you should be prepared to identify and manage people who may still be resistant to change or may even begin to knowingly or unknowingly sabotage your change efforts. Your resistance management approach should be to constantly identify people, processes or structures that are impeding the progress of your project, and engage them actively. For example, if you have implemented a computer-based inventory system, and for some reason, one of your employees is still spending additional time keeping records manually, you need to identify the cause of resistance, e.g. fear or apprehension about computers, lack of skills or confusion in the process or procedures laid out. Whatever the reason for resistance, you must dig deep and eliminate it. In the words of leading change management scholar, John Kotter, you must "remove all obstacles to change".
• Err on the Side of Over-Communicating: There is one thing that most people who have succeeded in leading change projects will tell you - never relent on communicating. Communicate the change vision from the beginning, communicate the specific changes required by individuals and groups, listen to your stakeholders and understand their concerns and challenges, communicate quick wins as the project gets underway; communicate with feedback to those who seem resistant to the change. Just keep communicating! Your communication strategies and plans will help you get your people better informed of the project and what is expected of them. The lack of effective communication will stifle your project, cause confusion, and ultimately lead to its failure.

Like the saying goes - the only constant thing in life is change. For your organization to achieve your goals, you will implement many changes along the way. You can save a lot of time, energy and resources fighting out fires during these projects by paying attention to managing the "people" side of these projects from as early as possible. This way you will significantly enhance the success of whatever change projects you are implementing.