Making real business change happen
Change Management? – There’s no such thing!
Change management, it’s a phrase that everybody uses - but the problem is there’s no such thing. It’s an oxymoron, like military intelligence (or for some companies, customer service!).
At best it’s a ‘comfort label’ - intended to give the illusion that the change initiative or programme being launched is well understood, fully developed and under control – and intended to create real change! One client recently compared ‘managing’ to ‘leading and delivering change’ as the difference between walking and a toboggan ride!
Talk to anyone in business about change and the same well-worn sayings will emerge:
- It’s very difficult and hard work…
- It takes a long time…
- We’re always changing, there’s no end to it…
- It’s all about communication, communication, communication…
- It’s a bit of a poisoned chalice, career wise…
- It’s very expensive and risky…
- It’s very hard to get people to engage with it…
Talk to senior management about the need to make changes – typically due to poor performance issues, cost overruns, risk issues, a failing IT ‘project’ or service problems - and some different perspectives emerge. These tend to fall into three categories:
- We’re already working on it
- Now is not the right time, or
- There’s no real need, we just need to tighten up here and there
Each of these viewpoints are expressed in a variety of ways:
- It’s in hand; we’ve Fred and Mike working on it - part-time…
- We can do this ourselves - alongside our everyday activities
- We’ve got a project manager… or a ‘new’ project manager
- I’ll manage my bit of any changes myself… we don’t need a programme to do it
- We’re getting our people to redesign the processes themselves; after all they’re the experts…
- We’ve bought some process mapping tools…
or,
- We can’t make any changes until we have a new IT system(s)…
- The IT people are handling it…
- We need a proven methodology before we can start…
- We need to move slowly on this and be sure of each step before we move on…
or even
- We need to get everyone’s full agreement before we can begin…
- It’s high risk and will cost too much…
- We don’t really need to change, just some fine-tuning…
- Our IT systems won’t let us change…
These views are often expressed despite serious and obvious problems being experienced by the business.
I believe that each viewpoint represents reluctance or outright resistance to change. Over the last few months, I’ve tested these and other typical views with a number of our clients who’ve been through the change lifecycle. Their response is invariably recognition and amusement, usually followed by some anecdotes of personal experiences that support whatever views sparked the most humorous responses, (although often only humorous with hindsight).
The reality of business change is that few change initiatives succeed in achieving the goals that are set for them – especially at the first attempt, (or second, or third…). In that sense and as a reasonable conclusion, making change happen is difficult. The reasons for it are, however, not perhaps immediately obvious.
Where are you now?
Consider the business you are currently in – How does it currently operate? How do things get done? Who determines what gets done and when? How would you describe the culture or atmosphere of where you work? How do you feel when you are at work? How well organised is it? Do your IT systems work well and help you get your job done? What are relationships like between different parts of the business? What is your honest assessment of your boss and the leadership team? Are you being managed or led? How do customers feel about the product or service you provide and the after-sales service you offer? How reliable are your suppliers? If this was your business, what changes would you make? Do some of these questions make you feel uncomfortable?
The likelihood is that, unless you’re planning to leave soon, some of your answers are positive and some less so – but overall the situation is probably vaguely positive and stable. If the balance were too negative, it would be intolerable and you would either leave or start to push for some serious change. (Another alternative is to ‘switch off’, become demotivated and remind yourself that at least work is only seven miles and twenty minutes from home.)
This is the situation most businesses and their staff find themselves in at any one time. Until the negatives significantly outweigh the positives (or the tolerable) and the need for change becomes insistent (or publicly visible), few people are motivated to push for change. In reality, this position doesn’t occur across all of the business, all at once – some parts of the business get into difficulty while others continue to enjoy an imperfect stability. Most staff would say that ’things aren’t perfect, but at least they’re predictable’.
Change or Compromise?
Change, on the other hand, represents uncertainty, unpredictability, a threat to the status quo. You don’t know what the outcome might be. Your job might change altogether, you might have to work somewhere else – even if it’s in the same building. You might get a new boss or be allocated to a new team. You might not fit in, have to learn some new skills or even fail!
The degree to which any of these considerations is important and unsettling depends on a range of factors. Two key factors are the degree of influence, power/status and control you think you have over the situation and how much you perceive there is to lose. In a leadership role, you have the views of, and impact on, others to consider. The further up the organisation you go, the more of both there is to worry about! This perception supports the oft stated belief that it’s middle management who are most resistant to change – as most believe that the senior team still have control over the situation. In reality, this is rarely the case.
The senior team can tend to be a bit removed from the gory details of how the business actually works at the ground level. After all, that’s not the senior team’s job. The senior team is there to keep the overall organisation performing well in terms of the customer and the market – encouraging growth through adaptation, cost reduction and performance improvement wherever it’s required. That’s what you’re accountable for at the top. However, the bigger the company, the more removed you can become from its everyday activities and the reality of how it works...
Much of the real power to get things done and the knowledge of how the business actually works (and needs to work) lies within these layers of middle management. Unfortunately, what often is not delegated is how and when budget and resources are allocated between the various middle managers – and as a result unwise compromises occur – usually based on the internal balance of power rather than actual business need. Front office functions tend to wield more influence in these circumstances given the immediacy of the results they can produce.
The senior team rely on the layers of middle management to turn high level needs for improvement and cost reduction into the tactics and actions that get the results required – and to provide feedback on how well things are working. (This latter expectation can create difficulties if any bearers of bad tidings are seen to have failed and are then ‘punished’.)
Adaptation & the Quick Fix
Adaptations to meet changing business needs are done on an ad-hoc and sometimes daily basis to meet short-term issues. IT systems are developed and maintained long past their point of security, functionality and reliability. Additional paperwork is produced to act as ‘quick’ workarounds - but these invariably become permanent new ways of working. The justification is that it is the least cost, least fuss approach in the short term – ‘let’s just get the job done’.
The real impact of this on the business, over time, is increased cost, staff numbers, transaction times and complexity - coupled to a corresponding loss of flexibility, performance and responsiveness. A clear sign of this is that it often takes new staff significantly more time to learn how to do the workarounds than it does to learn the core job. Over time, these issues accumulate and, like hardened arteries, the overall performance of the business starts to seriously suffer.
External to the company, new market entrants, existing competitors, shareholder expectations of growth and additional regulation continue to raise the bar on the performance and cost reduction targets required just to stay in business. Often, the result is a culture of longer hours and hard work just to keep things going, it’s the staff who take the strain and bridge the gap until they can collectively do no more.
Eventually, doing more and doing it faster just seems to cause more problems. Complexity now takes over, significantly increasing the rate at which errors occur, performance reduces and costs rise. At this point, the scope for adaptation within the company and its current structure is used up and the only real solution is in-depth structural change or a gradual decline to extinction (and sometimes a not so gradual decline).
The irony is that at this point, there are likely to have been many heroic efforts and achievements made, promotions gained and reputations built by key staff who now form part of the ranks of middle and senior management. These efforts, attitudes and achievements have developed beliefs about the best ‘adaptation’ based ways to respond to the new challenges being faced. Unfortunately, this occurs at the time when these previous strategies have stopped being effective for the situation that now exists. This is where the ‘we can manage our way out of it’ approach runs out.
The Choice of Change
If you wait until the scope for adaptation within the current organisation structure is gone, the business will have paid a heavy price in terms of its people, their morale and the business’ future in the short to medium term. The long term future is under real threat.
At this point, the organisation is working flat out just to keep itself in business, every resource is in heavy demand and internal flexibility and motivation is at an all-time low. The appetite for the additional burden of a new change initiative is poor – and you have few real business choices left; change or die as a business, (denial of this is a version of choosing the latter).
Both the leadership team and the people in the organisation feel under pressure. Everyone knows something needs to happen. Customer and market pressure for improvement increases. There’s plenty of scope for quick fixes, associated frenzied activity and ‘ready, fire, aim’ projects. Now is the time to go round the loop of managing ‘change’, when in reality no such activity occurs, no real change occurs - its only attempts at adaptation within the current organisational structure, processes, systems and business framework.
Popular suggestions at this stage for ‘change’ are typically a new IT system or two, developing (but not implementing) a new strategy or business model (‘cause that takes time and lots of activity) or outsourcing - or perhaps a joint venture if outsourcing seems too much like losing control of the situation. There is also scope for deep denial or doing the ‘ostrich’ or the ‘just hoping that something will turn up’ approaches or some combination of all of these.
Where the scope for gradual decline exists, many organisations can spend years going round wonderful variations of all of these. One company I know of are on their eleventh attempt at avoiding making the levels of change required. The only way forward is to embrace the need for real change.
The Challenge of Leading Change
Ok, so you’ve now decided that change is the only real option, now what? The choice of problems is wide and getting wider and more pressing daily. There are real (and perceived) risks in moving forward with the levels of change required. You need to find a way forward and somehow pull everyone together to work and push in the same direction – but there are uncomfortable choices to be made.
You can’t make these changes by committee or by steering group; you don’t have the time (you tried that last time). Some of the changes required won’t please everyone (anyone?). The balance of power in the organisation is going to change and the senior team members and their execs are already sensing this and starting to jostle for position and power. Boundary and turf skirmishes and other forms of suppressed conflict are flaring up every other day.
Everyone has their own view as to what and how it needs to be done - but no one seems to want to really engage with the change process (if you have one?). If you enforce a solution, you will lose any real support and motivation – if you don’t, then no real progress will occur.
Every way you look at it, there seem to be multiple dimensions involved in the changes required but there’s nothing tangible that you can get to grips with or that people can agree to. On the other hand, everyone loudly disagrees with anything that’s suggested, especially if it involves changing the current setup or making real changes ‘on the ground’. Congratulations, you’ve just entered the Change Leadership Challenge phase of making real business change happen.
In the coming months, Paul and the Making Real Business Change Happen series will take you through some of the real issues, challenges and solutions required to make business change happen.
Taking a new step, uttering a new word
is what people fear most.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Author: Paul Di Carlo CEO of The Kairos Group
