These are the five imperatives for successful change. But first, You have to have management, commitment and charter for an organizational change. Without that, nothing else works well.
There's a set of very specific leadership and change skills that are required. They're very specific to change. You need to have an understanding of the current state of the organization, you need to understand the past in the organization, and the individuals. And you need to understand the sources of resistance by stakeholders in this change.
The first is this idea of management, commitment and charter. Change can be tough. And by tough, I mean, as you get into the change, there may be obstacles that you weren't prepared for. Things will not go the way that you planned. In fact, they rarely do. If the organization's management isn't committed to seeing it through, people will know that they sorted it out fairly quickly. And that will only increase resistance. If you get into a change, and there's waffling, the chances of that change actually being successful go down dramatically. What management needs to do is to both say commitment, but also show commitment. And by that I mean that there are resources allocated, most notably time, to manage and communicate about the change.
We also need very specific leadership and change skills. First and foremost of is an understanding of the change curve, and understanding both where your employees are on the change curve. And I mean that both individually and collectively for your employees, but also, where are you on the change curve. Because you can really only lead from where you are on this curve.
There are many renditions of the change curve. The one I use is fairly simple. It shows four stages. Understanding this can really help with how you interact with your team. The change curve itself was first popularized by Elisabeth Kubler Ross, in understanding our human reactions to change. And I think she had nine different stages, primarily dealing with loss. And these four tend to stand me in good stead in terms of dealing with organizations.
Each of us will move through these four stages:
We move through the stages dependent on many factors at different speeds. If I've had poor experience with change in the past, where the change has not gone well for me, I may tend to be a little more stuck over on the resistance side. It just depends entirely on your experience in the past, as well as what's surrounding you in the way of change communication. But this is a really great model for managers to use to help with personal transitions of members of your team. And also to understand where you are. Also, understand that your organization won't go through this on mass. Different people will be at different places at different times. And you just have to recognize that and be able to communicate with different people in different places on the curve.
This curve is not a one way. It is very possible and common to explore for a little bit, not see what you like, and slide back over into resistance. And then you, as the leader in the change, have a job of moving people back to the other side. It's much easier just to keep them there once you get them there by helping them see how this is possible, and good for them.
I'd say if you weren't familiar with it, this will stand you in good stead. Know where your team members are and take steps as a leader to try to move them to the next stage.
We also have to look at understanding present culture. Now this is important because it will help you understand where resistance is likely to show up, what communications are likely to be needed. If you look at a culture and you see that primarily the culture is based on trust and respect, people tend to be forward looking or risk taking, these are things that all bode well for successful change. If you are, again, doing any M&A activity, this needs to occur in the due diligence phase. It will go a long way towards making the deal work as opposed to just making the deal happen. You need to look at individual culture to the extent that you can.
What is the company culture? Not just what's on the wall, on the eye on the poster, but what are the behaviors in the organization, which is really what the culture is. Also if you're dealing with anything that is geographically dispersed at country culture, and there are many good resources for this, including Hofstede's work, the idea is that countries have cultures that are different from each other, like the eight or nine different dimensions. Not every individual will fully represent their company culture, but this gives you a place to begin to be curious about what's going on in the organization and to ask questions. And with that, you will get information, and you will know what to do to help make your change be more successful.
One of the things that is really important here about understanding the present culture is one critical but often overlooked competency, and it took me a long time to figure this out in organizations. It is a competency called tolerance of ambiguity. So if you think about change, change is all about doing things. Things will be different. Whenever you're making a change, there are a lot of unknowns. We always try to communicate the knowns, tell people when we'll be back to them with answers to the unknowns as we uncover or explore those. But in the meantime, people need to be able to tolerate the ambiguity of not knowing everything. So when people are unskilled in tolerating ambiguity, it means that they're not comfortable with change or uncertainty.
We may all know people, I hope that I am one of these for which change is often seen as a positive, because I've had a lot of change experience in my past that went really well. So something is changing. For me that means it's not boring in the same, I'm likely to light up with that possibility. But that is not true for everyone. If you have people, either in your organization or the organization you're considering merging with, it's important to know if you give them a fuzzy problem, how do they react? Are they less productive under ambiguity? Do they like to do the same things the same way time after time? Those are clues that people will not be comfortable with change. On the other hand, if they are comfortable shifting gears, if they can decide to act and how to act without having the whole picture, when they aren't upset when things are in the air, then they can comfortably handle the risk and uncertainty that comes with change. If you're experiencing an organization, or a person who is not skilled at this, you might look at some of these causes to help think about how to deal with it.
It is imperative to understand the organization's past efforts regarding change. Failed change brings up resistance. We get good at resistance. It's very difficult to break through when that takes place. And you have to put a lot of effort into understanding why the change has failed in the past, or can the organization understand why the change failed in the past, and then helping individuals understand why this time is different. And if there has been a lot of failed change, you can't over communicate about why this time is different. You can't spend too much time hoping employees understand why this is a good thing for them.The big takeaway here is just that experience with past change greatly influences your odds for success.
We need to understand the stakeholder resistance because a lot of people get stuck over there. And always the answering the question, what does this mean to me, that is positive enough that I'm going to take a risk to change my behavior. Because what you're asking people to do is to do things differently. It's risky for people to do that. They may not do it; they may not be able to do it, it may not work the way that you think it will be. You really have to help them understand. This is what you need to be doing that will help you be successful and why it is good for you. You need to communicate often about this and make sure that that communication is at least two ways. You're not just telling people, you're also listening to them.
It's so important to create quick wins for people to help get them through the resistance phase. If we look at the change, whether it's small or large, we look at quick wins, whether you have them, don't have them or have many of them. You can see that if you don't have quick wins, it's really a roll of the dice. If you have quick wins, you're really getting people, just a nudge to get over into the next commitment phase. If you have no quick wins and a big change, it is a pretty slim chance that this change is going to be successful. But if you have quick wins and you have a big change, you're more than likely going to have liftoff to be able to get to the commitment phase.
I like to say ideas are easy, commitment is not. How do you lead with buy in from your organization? You as senior leaders will be able to see these possibilities as opportunities more easily usually than other people in the organization. Because you have experience and you can also see the breath of what all is going on, you will understand the need for the change more than others. But it is super important for your organization to be able to see these possibilities as good things so that they can bite into them.
Often, change will fail not because of the merit of the idea, whether it was a good change or not, a good idea or not, or even if your team was capable of doing it, it really has to do with whether or not all of the steps were there in the run up to the execution of the change.
John Kotter, from the Harvard Business School, says 70% of all organizational change efforts fail. 70%. That is a lot of wasted time, money, energy, a lot of good possibilities gone by. And one of the reasons for that is simply that we don't get enough buy in from enough people for these initiatives. All of this takes time. But it's important, and in fact, imperative when you want to move into good change execution.
Learn more about Karen
Karen has worked with clients including Aetna, AWS, Pfizer, JPMorganChase, and BMC Software, as well as Inc. 5000 startups.
She is also a board advisor, keynote speaker, and the author of No Dumbing Down: A Guide for CEOs on Organization Growth. As employee 104 at Compaq Computer, Karen helped lead the then-fastest growing company in American history, growing it from $0 to $15 billion in revenue.
Karen is a contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, and to Harvard Business Review and has been quoted in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Karen has a B.S. degree in engineering from Texas A&M University and graduated from the ODHRM program at Columbia University. She has served in an advisory capacity to startups, Rice University, Texas A&M University, and on the executive board of The Alley Theatre.
She resides in Jupiter, FL, although she can most often be found aloft in seat 2C.
