When change needs change

Most change efforts fail to deliver, consistently, over decades, up to 70% of all initiatives. This is common knowledge, and it translates into billions of dollars of losses every year worldwide, while producing cynical and frustrated managers and sick-of-it-all-coworkers, as most by now have gone through at least half a dozen of failed attempts, while being exposed to hordes of consultants. Consultants, did you know employees call you toy boys? As each new one comes in with an often reinvented wheel and a six-hundred pack of slides. Any new approach or tool, even the good ones, are at risk of becoming the next piece of junk on that landfill of negativity.

Only last week I spoke a high ranked manager in The Netherlands who was supposed to go on what they call in The Netherlands a Heidag. It means they go outdoors and do something that is supposed to improve team relationships. She doesn’t believe in that anymore after a few dozen Heidagen over the last 30 years and was explaining to me her strategy to avoid going to yet another waste of time. Another lady, another company, mid-level manager, told me she was really pissed off about, and I quote: idiots who think they can improve something with this agile nonsense. And, to observe the rule of three, a young man, part of a freshly-created change management unit in a Spanish company this time, told me he is sick of his manager who is only busy micro managing the team, asking for pitches no one will ever use as they make no sense. Yes, that’s a change management unit manager!

I listen every week to these people, managers and employees alike, for decades now and these stories never end because the root cause of these problems are never addressed. Even while I write this, a friend from Belgium and another one from Denmark send me messages on linked-in about, and I quote once more: “fu**ed up idea to steal a weekend day on junk like Agile”. Sorry if you are into this currently in-vogue tool, but that’s what coworkers and managers alike often think, but only speak out loud to friends.

And the sad thing is that many of the methods, tools and toys are not that bad if only they were used properly and at the right moment, for the appropriate situation and with workers and management properly prepared. And what’s so hard about that? What if we would simply ask all coworkers what they feel and think?

I know, a crazy idea. But what if?

Last Thursday I was delivering a Master Class at LaSalle University in Barcelona for a group of MBA engineers interested in breaking that eternal spell. I gave them the high-level hard numbers:

·        70% of change fails, according to McKinsey, Kotter, IBM…,

·        Only 13% to 17% of employees are engaged, says Gallup,

·        only 3 out of 10 employees trust their managers,

·        staff turnover in USA is 19% per year, as stated by the USA HR Association,

·        people will leave for less than a 10% salary raise or just to get away,

·        Talents can’t be found, attracted or retained anywhere and millennials give sh** about the company they work for,

·        Early death by work stress is as high as from Tobacco consumption, as revealed by a study from University of Navarra, Spain.

In short, 500,000 thousand million dollar losses in USA alone and tens of thousands of people die every year due to work related illness. How does the next change fit into this?

 I asked these engineers if seriously anybody still wonders why change projects fail. It think it’s pretty cool that 30% deliver results!

I shared a few considerations with them.

First consideration: People who are asked to do something different will go through a well-known and understood emotional roller coaster, the Kubler-Ross Change curve, which includes denial, despair, and resistance. How is change supposed to work if mood is structurally far below any acceptable level? It’s the early kiss of death for any change project. I captured this in the slide below.

Second consideration: Companies do not know in what shape or mood their teams are TODAY, or last week, or ever. The best case is that they stare at a few slow data from a motivation survey a year back, without really knowing what to do with it. And they are right to wonder. These are useless data, as the tool is too slow, too late and measures the wrong parameter. In this century you’d better make sure you have warm data about how your people feel, daily! Few managers realize they need to measure this and even less that they need a Meta KPI if you want to have a change starting point at all. And your employees’ mood had better be in a safe range or kiss the project goodbye.

And even if managers knew, there are no methods, tools or consultants who use a structured approach to measure real time and correct any deviations on the fly. That is besides us of course. We have developed RealTimeChange? because it brings the change that change needs.