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| Home - Industry Article - Nov 05 Issue |
A Moving Method for Leading Change More Effectively
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Phase II: Engaging and Enabling the Whole Organization
Once the climate for change has been established, leaders must find ways to engage and enable the whole organization. The core objective of this phase is to get all of the stakeholders involved in the change by demonstrating leadership. There are three components to securing this involvement:
Step 4. Communicate for buy-in: In successful change efforts, the leaders communicate the vision and strategies via simple, candid, and heartfelt messages. This helps to engender the trust, support and commitment necessary to achieve the vision. In addition, this communication should be carried out through multiple channels to ensure that all levels of the organization are reached by a consistent message.
Step 5. Enable people by removing obstacles to the vision: In the best scenarios, leaders help people to carry out the vision by removing barriers - whether it's a disempowering boss, inadequate information and information systems or self-confidence barriers in people's minds.
Step 6. Create short-term wins: In cases of great success, people are helped to produce short-term wins that are visible, timely and meaningful. These well-publicized, incremental victories are critical to maintaining momentum because they reward hard work, produce a feeling of accomplishment and promote a sense of optimism. They also generate strong visible proof that the change is moving forward, which lays the groundwork for larger behavioral changes.
As in the proceeding phase, the see-feel-change model can similarly be applied here. For example, one change leader, who happened to be an aircraft plant manager, went beyond simply talking to his people about his vision of producing better-quality planes without missing delivery deadlines. How?
He halted the normal assembly-line production process so that everyone had to stare all day long at a gigantic plane that no longer moved. At the same time, he supported this dramatic action by communicating his rock-solid belief in the practicality of the vision--that his team was perfectly capable of finding ways to improve quality without delaying delivery.
Prior to halting the plane, employees had become accustomed to a static routine, where things were done certain ways because that was simply how they had always been done. However, the manager's bold actions shocked people out of their complacency (i.e. What must we do right now to get the plane moving again?), while simultaneously helping them to visualize new possibilities (i.e. How will our customers react if we succeed? In what ways will our jobs become easier?). The end result was that employees began to develop all sorts of new strategies for leaping ahead in procurement, logistics and quality control.
Phase III: Implementing and Sustaining Change
The final phase centers upon insuring that the change is lasting. For many companies this phase is often the most challenging because organizations have a tendency to return to what was comfortable. Change can rapidly be reversed when leaders take their eyes off the project before the new behaviors are ingrained in the organization. That's why the final two steps emphasize the importance of keeping urgency up in order to sustain the implemented change.
Step 7. Don't let up: As the old adage goes, "It ain't over 'til it's over." In the best cases, change leaders don't let up; they monitor, measure and reinforce behavioral change until a complete transformation vision becomes a reality.
Step 8. Make it stick: To make change last, new behaviors must be nurtured so that they become "the way things are done" in the organization. This is accomplished by modeling, recognizing and rewarding individuals who demonstrate the new behaviors so as to weave the "new way" into the fabric of the organization.
For example, a business unit CEO at a manufacturing company had a clear and comprehensive vision of what a new real-time ERP system could do. To him, the goal was not just to implement the system, but also to maximize its value by getting everyone to use it as an everyday business tool for managing supply chain and production processes.
To ensure that his vision became a reality, he first learned how to use the system himself, so he could understand its full capabilities. Also, he gauged buy-in by asking his plant mangers questions that could only be answered by using the new system.
What he found was a mixture of acceptance: Thirty percent of the managers were fully using the new system; 40 percent were partially using it; and 30 percent weren't using it at all. To address this situation, he asked the field leaders who were using the system to focus on getting the partial users completely up-to-speed.
He then worked to bring the non-users on board by communicating his expectation that "this is the way things are done now" at the plants. For instance, he'd call and ask questions, such as: "Why is inventory growing the way it is? Why do we have over-runs on these products? I saw that XYZ didn't ship: What's going on?" Most of the reluctant managers ultimately accepted the system, while a few holdouts left the company.
Behavior as the Common Denominator
Although there are points of overlap and times when activities will occur simultaneously, the three phases-and the eight steps that comprise them -represent the basic pattern associated with significant useful change. The common denominator at every stage is the need to change the behavior of people, which is most effectively accomplished by employing the see-feel-change pattern to strike emotional chords within the organization.
Today's business leaders find it so difficult to change people's behavior because they predominately rely on the entrenched analysis-think-change pattern. This is the model that most of us have learned in business school-data about the problem is gathered and analyzed and logical arguments are presented via reports and lectures; people change their thinking based on these "hard facts"; and their new thoughts motivate them to take action.
Software engineers, computer programmers and IT executives, all of whom are typically steeped in analytical training, are perhaps even more apt to follow this pattern and to overlook the emotional side of change. Although analyzing and reporting may come naturally to software professionals, learning to demonstrate challenges and opportunities visually as well as to evaluate them logically is the single most important thing they can do to improve their change leadership abilities.
Dan S. Cohen is a partner with Deloitte Consulting, LLP. He focuses his consulting activities in the area of large-scale organizational transformation and was responsible for the development of Deloitte Consulting LLP's "Consulting Global Change Leadership" methodology. He is also the co-author with John P. Kotter of the international best seller, The Heart of Change, and his latest book, The Heart of Change Field Guide: Tools and Tactics for Leading Change in Your Organization, where Cohen delves more deeply into the subject of change and gets to the core of how to actually make change happen. For article feedback, email him directly at dcohen@dc.com
 
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