Under any system of change management, leaders must define achievable short-term goals to support the long term vision. If communication is an area for improvement, celebrating the implementation of more regular, efficient meetings reinforces the positive habits.
Tying compensation to achieving results is also an important strategy for creating momentum behind change efforts. The implementation of a quarterly theme is another strategy for building excitement around strategic goals and change efforts.
Overcoming organizational inertia requires forward thinking and consistent incentives. Tying progress to rewards, whether symbolic or compensation based, demonstrates a commitment from the top and elicits loyalty from employees for change efforts. Bottom Line: Celebrate the success of change efforts early and often to maintain urgency and create excitement.
Not anchoring changes to Company Culture. The final and most difficult barrier to implementing lasting change is incorporating changes into your organizational culture. Even with urgency, leadership, and vision, change efforts will fizzle out and fail unless adopted as organizational norms and habits.
This begins with a clear expression of organizational culture that reflects the desired changes. While an organization may have developed a list of core values in the past, seeking change requires a reevaluation of whether the same values reflect this transformation.
A clearly defined set of core values that embody change efforts provides a cultural roadmap for change. Walking-the-talk next means taking actions that reflect the updated values in a meaningful way. As start-up Psychologist Dr. For employees, decisions around hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation become the reinforcers of cultural values. Incorporating values into personnel decisions, using something like the performance-value matrix, is the best way for leaders to demonstrate their commitment to change efforts and encourage employees to embody this change.
Finally, and most critically, as changes take effect, leadership must consciously attempt to demonstrate to employees and other stakeholders that change efforts are making a positive difference. A weekly announcement highlighting progress and quarterly celebrations around goal achievement can help reinforce the effectiveness of change efforts and keep them front of mind for employees. Bottom Line: Lasting change only comes from cultural shifts.
Shift culture by using incentives to reinforce values. Transforming an organization can take years, but the results can be immediate. Because every issue or problem within a given change initiative either gets prevented, solved, or caused by the skill of the change leaders in charge.
Leadership development is a part of virtually all large organizations, but change leadership development is sorely missing. The net is that leaders tend to run change initiatives like they run their organizations, and the two are vastly different. Consider, where can your leaders go to get the development they need to become stellar change leaders? Equipping leaders with the ability to solve complex challenges and catalyze transformation in themselves, their organizations, communites and cultures.
Subscribe to receive notifications. Recent Posts. Organizational Change Change Leadership. Written By Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson On Jul, 11 4 minute read. Subscribe to our newsletter We hate spam. Submit a Comment. Subscribe to our newsletter Click here to subscribe. Stay up to date. Because there seems to be an almost universal human tendency to shoot the bearer of bad news, especially if the head of the organization is not a change champion, executives in these companies often rely on outsiders to bring unwanted information.
Wall Street analysts, customers, and consultants can all be helpful in this regard. In a few of the most successful cases, a group has manufactured a crisis. One division president commissioned first-ever customer-satisfaction surveys, knowing full well that the results would be terrible.
He then made these findings public. On the surface, such moves can look unduly risky. But there is also risk in playing it too safe: when the urgency rate is not pumped up enough, the transformation process cannot succeed and the long-term future of the organization is put in jeopardy. One chief executive officer deliberately engineered the largest accounting loss in the history of the company.
Anything less can produce very serious problems later on in the process. Major renewal programs often start with just one or two people. In cases of successful transformation efforts, the leadership coalition grows and grows over time. But whenever some minimum mass is not achieved early in the effort, nothing much worthwhile happens. It is often said that major change is impossible unless the head of the organization is an active supporter.
What I am talking about goes far beyond that. In successful transformations, the chairman or president or division general manager, plus another 5 or 15 or 50 people, come together and develop a shared commitment to excellent performance through renewal. But in the most successful cases, the coalition is always pretty powerful—in terms of titles, information and expertise, reputations and relationships.
In both small and large organizations, a successful guiding team may consist of only three to five people during the first year of a renewal effort.
But in big companies, the coalition needs to grow to the 20 to 50 range before much progress can be made in phase three and beyond. Senior managers always form the core of the group. But sometimes you find board members, a representative from a key customer, or even a powerful union leader. Because the guiding coalition includes members who are not part of senior management, it tends to operate outside of the normal hierarchy by definition.
This can be awkward, but it is clearly necessary. If the existing hierarchy were working well, there would be no need for a major transformation. But since the current system is not working, reform generally demands activity outside of formal boundaries, expectations, and protocol. A high sense of urgency within the managerial ranks helps enormously in putting a guiding coalition together.
But more is usually required. Off-site retreats, for two or three days, are one popular vehicle for accomplishing this task. I have seen many groups of 5 to 35 executives attend a series of these retreats over a period of months. Companies that fail in phase two usually underestimate the difficulties of producing change and thus the importance of a powerful guiding coalition.
Sometimes they have no history of teamwork at the top and therefore undervalue the importance of this type of coalition. Sometimes they expect the team to be led by a staff executive from human resources, quality, or strategic planning instead of a key line manager. No matter how capable or dedicated the staff head, groups without strong line leadership never achieve the power that is required. But, sooner or later, the opposition gathers itself together and stops the change.
In every successful transformation effort that I have seen, the guiding coalition develops a picture of the future that is relatively easy to communicate and appeals to customers, stockholders, and employees. A vision always goes beyond the numbers that are typically found in five-year plans. A vision says something that helps clarify the direction in which an organization needs to move.
Sometimes the first draft comes mostly from a single individual. It is usually a bit blurry, at least initially. But after the coalition works at it for 3 or 5 or even 12 months, something much better emerges through their tough analytical thinking and a little dreaming.
Eventually, a strategy for achieving that vision is also developed. In one midsize European company, the first pass at a vision contained two-thirds of the basic ideas that were in the final product. The concept of global reach was in the initial version from the beginning.
So was the idea of becoming preeminent in certain businesses. But one central idea in the final version—getting out of low value-added activities—came only after a series of discussions over a period of several months. Without a sensible vision, a transformation effort can easily dissolve into a list of confusing and incompatible projects that can take the organization in the wrong direction or nowhere at all. In failed transformations, you often find plenty of plans and directives and programs, but no vision.
In one case, a company gave out four-inch-thick notebooks describing its change effort. In mind-numbing detail, the books spelled out procedures, goals, methods, and deadlines. But nowhere was there a clear and compelling statement of where all this was leading. Not surprisingly, most of the employees with whom I talked were either confused or alienated. The big, thick books did not rally them together or inspire change. In fact, they probably had just the opposite effect. In a few of the less successful cases that I have seen, management had a sense of direction, but it was too complicated or blurry to be useful.
Recently, I asked an executive in a midsize company to describe his vision and received in return a barely comprehensible minute lecture.
Buried in his answer were the basic elements of a sound vision. But they were buried—deeply. In the first, a group actually does develop a pretty good transformation vision and then proceeds to communicate it by holding a single meeting or sending out a single communication. Having used about. In the third pattern, much more effort goes into newsletters and speeches, but some very visible senior executives still behave in ways that are antithetical to the vision. The net result is that cynicism among the troops goes up, while belief in the communication goes down.
Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible.
Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured. This fourth phase is particularly challenging if the short-term sacrifices include job losses.
Gaining understanding and support is tough when downsizing is a part of the vision. For this reason, successful visions usually include new growth possibilities and the commitment to treat fairly anyone who is laid off. Executives who communicate well incorporate messages into their hour-by-hour activities.
In more successful transformation efforts, executives use all existing communication channels to broadcast the vision. They turn boring and unread company newsletters into lively articles about the vision.
They take ritualistic and tedious quarterly management meetings and turn them into exciting discussions of the transformation. The guiding principle is simple: use every possible channel, especially those that are being wasted on nonessential information. This is often not easy. A year-old plant manager who has spent precious little time over 40 years thinking about customers will not suddenly behave in a customer-oriented way.
But I have witnessed just such a person change, and change a great deal. In that case, a high level of urgency helped. The fact that the man was a part of the guiding coalition and the vision-creation team also helped.
So did all the communication, which kept reminding him of the desired behavior, and all the feedback from his peers and subordinates, which helped him see when he was not engaging in that behavior. Communication comes in both words and deeds, and the latter are often the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with their words.
Successful transformations begin to involve large numbers of people as the process progresses. Employees are emboldened to try new approaches, to develop new ideas, and to provide leadership. The only constraint is that the actions fit within the broad parameters of the overall vision. The more people involved, the better the outcome.
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