Leading organisational change head on

Change is always an arduous process. Think about doing one small change in your personal life. Losing weight or waking up early would be a few examples of personal change one would consider. Some would do it for a week or two and give up and some would strive for greatness and meet the challenge head on.

If personal change is so hard, you could imagine how hard it is to influence change in an organisation which compromises of people from multiple ways of life working as a single organism(or at least trying to).

The author John P. Kotter from the book Leading change highlights steps to leading change. We will not go through all the steps but only the ones that I thought need discussion while pulling out examples from my own experience over my tenure in the industry in some cases.

In this short writeup we will look into different ways an organisational change can be planned and executed in a non-intrusive manner. It will definitely be a journey the same if not harder as Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee’s venture into Mordor to destroy the one ring that rules them all.

Establish a sense of urgency

Nothing really gets done if you do not feel a need to change. Complacency is one of the key drivers for not creating a sense of urgency. It is a factor that starts small and then without even knowing it, would turn into a complacency pandemic within your organisation.

This quote puts it so eloquently about how bad complacency is for an organisation.

I would go a step further and say Success breeds hubris which breeds complacency within an organisation. When you are at the pinnacle of success you tend to take your foot off the pedal and go into an auto-pilot mode. This is the best time your competitors would take advantage of move in with their own plans on getting their own market share while you sit back, relax and sip on that delicious martini.

This one company I worked for sometime back was in the same boat. They had a few back to back successful years which put them in their comfort zone. Hubris crept in and they thought they were invincible. The next year, the goals for each department/managers were not quite as aggressive as the years before. This went on for years and the management did not really care about what was going on in the operational level. There were many customer complaints coming in which needed some form of change to happen. But everything was hunky-dory since the goals set for managers were so low that every year it was like they were achieving their organisational goals.

But as time went on they saw that their competitors grew stronger since they did certain things better than what this company was doing. The competitors were listening more to the customers and thereby getting more market share.

To trigger a sense of urgency they did a few things. For one, they decided it is time to set higher targets for each department with set responsibilities and repercussions if the targets were not met. This puts people in a fight-or-flight mode which helps them to dig deep and find the best way of working. They also started listening more to their customers and feeding this back up the pipelines so that it reaches all parts of the organisation.

In the end, the organisation managed to get back their competitive edge in the market. Listening to their customers was one of the key things that worked for them as they understood the issues ground up and how best they could fix it rather than being completely oblivious to operational activities.

Creating the guiding coalition

Think back to a time when your reporting manager changed and then you get this new person who starts barraging you with new rules and ways of doing things as that is what has worked for him/her in the past. Would you go all in and believe every word that this person says? Your answer would probably be a big fat NO.

In introspection, why we do what we do is tightly related to how much we believe a person. If someone you barely knows gives you advice and the same is given to you by a member of your family, which one do you think you would take to heart? Family of course because you have had a tendency to trust and respect them. This is what a new person who moves into a new managerial position should yearn for first. No one will trust what you are saying if they do not know you.

Part of creating a guiding coalition is to group together a set of people that the rest of the organisation trusts and respects while also being the key decision makers of the organisation. When you have a group that spans different areas of your organisation, you can move towards your shared vision of change by communicating effectively to different parts of the organisation that trusts and respects you. A few key attributes of the members of this group are Position power, Expertise, Credibilityand Leadership.

I believe those points are quite self explanatory so I will not dig deeper. Once you have this group, leading an organisational change, you will be assured of less resistance to change by the people in the organisation as the sense of trust and respect towards them are higher.

Do not forget the guiding coalition in the Lord of the Rings.

Developing a vision and strategy

Do we really need a vision? Do you know what the vision of your company is? Can you by any way related to it? Let us look at two vision statements to gain more clarity around why we need a good vision statement.

So the first one made me feel like I was in the movie Inceptionjust by reading it. It says nothing about what the bank wants to do, very vague and would not related to anyone in that organisation.

Now if we read the second statement, that is more quantifiable. You get a sense of direction the company wants to take and it provides enough credibility to be believable and achievable.

This is why it is of utmost importance to have a strong vision statement to guide organisational change. There are some key characteristics that need to be considered when formulating a vision statement;

Imaginable : It needs to paint a picture of what the future will be if the change is successfully implemented

Desirable: Need to cater to the long term needs of the employees, customers and others who are invested in the company in any form and shape

Feasible: Needs to be realistic. You cannot say I want to be Superman when right now you are still Clark Kent where you have a long road ahead.

Focused: Needs to clearly state out where we are headed

Flexible: Make it general enough so that it can be tweaked without much change

Communicable: Dumb it down so that it is easily identifiable and relatable to everyone as a whole (The elevator pitch theory)

Communicating the change vision

Having a strong vision would work by itself if it is not communicated throughout the organisation in a consistent manner. Different sections of the organisation would need the vision statement communicated in a way that is congruent to the way they think.

Although not by its entirety, poor communication of the vision can be attributed to managers not delivering the message to their entire division. Managers often tend to only divulge information that they believe would be important to their subordinates while filtering some important information just because their perception is that their subordinates would not understand the whole vision. The reality is that managers like to provide show term routine information whereas the long term vision and direction is often left out. Communicating the vision is not easy.

You need to find a common ground by which everyone can be related to the organisations change vision that needs to take place. If everyone is not on board, then people will work in disparity causing friction along the way. A few effective ways of communicating the vision effectively would be;

Simplicity: As the old adage goes, If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Metaphor: Sometimes the best way to explain something is by giving an example or analogy

Multiple forums: You can make use of multiple different communication pipelines you already have within you company such as memos, newspapers, bulletin boards to reach a wider audience

Repetition: Sometimes repetition helps you remember something and ingrain it within yourself. Repetitive communication will help inculcate the vision into your team.

Leadership by example: This is where leaders vs managers come into play. As the famous quote goes, Talk the talk … walk the walk

Two way communication: As opposed to managers, leaders know that communication needs to be a two way street. You cannot just say something and expect your team to follow it. You need to be able to listen to their point of view on the topic as well

Empowering employees for broad-based action

Empowerment will not work if you are not willing to relinquish power and authority. There needs to be a sense of trust and respect within teams in order to empower them to do the right thing at the right time. There is a very good example of this in Toyota where any employee in the assembly line has been given the authority to press a big red button that stops the assembly line if any defects are observed. This kind of empowerment gives a sense of belonging to the employees because they are now themselves responsible for quality deliverables and know they have the power to take proactive measures to fix it when things go wrong.

I was working for a company sometime back where we had a burnt toaster machine on the floor(Yes this example is quite trivial but do read on). To get this resolved, there were so many hoops one had to jump through. It was approval after approval after approval. What a nightmare that was. The sad reality was, it never got resolved and burnt toast was the new norm.

In some instances, people cannot be empowered to do the right thing as they lack the skills needed. This is a case of planning out a proper training agenda to up skill individuals. The employees are the bread and butter of the organisation and valuing them as individuals as opposed to just a resource will make them want to contribute better to the change vision of an organisation.

Generating short-term wins

There are so many instances where I have seen a company approach an organisational change with a big bang, do it all or none manner. What many do not understand is that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Change is such a sensitive topic and dealing with it as a whole rather than breaking it down to its core will just put pressure on everyone and nothing gets done in the end.

Some have a common misnomer that you will lose your overall vision if you break things up. Take for example a personal goal of say trying to lose weight. Would you like to celebrate your achievement by say checking your weight every two weeks or would you want to go at it for 3–4 months before you first check on your progress? You would probably like to have the regular short term progress check so that you can adjust things if needed.

This is the same case with organisational change. Sometimes a change can look like an insurmountable task. But if you take the time to break it down to manageable tasks, then you can celebrate short term wins when these tasks are accomplished. This sends a message to everyone in the organisation that this change is actually possible. That sense of achievement will help keep everyone moving in the right direction with the right mindset.

Conclusion

Driving and leading organisational change is no easy task. There are many moving parts that first need to be understood before a proper plan gets created. The steps discussed would definitely help as a starting step but is by no means everything that would lend itself to a successful change. Every organisation is different to each other even if they operate in the same domain. Identifying and understanding the people, the real assets of any company is one of the key elements in driving a change. Once you have the buy-in of your employees, everything else is a matter of persistence and perseverance to get it through the hill.

Change never ends, however it is always good to celebrate smaller wins while keeping your eye out for future changes that might be beneficial for the company as a whole. I leave you with Frodo Baggin’s expression which I hope you would have too after driving one organisational change. Reset and continue as change is the only constant in life.