The tough work of change management is the critical piece in successful change projects. This tough work is often neglected by change leaders and change agents, who place too much emphasis on high-level change planning and not enough emphasis on implementation.
Based on more than twenty years of Dr. Carol A. Beatty’s research, The Easy, Hard & Tough Work of Managing Change walks you through the change management process, from start to finish.
This free e-book takes the complex concepts of change management and makes them as simple as possible, offering frameworks, guidelines, checklists and key questions to ensure that all of the important issues in a change initiative are not neglected. Case studies and examples enable the reader to work through these concepts and apply them to their own change initiatives.
Dr. Beatty draws conclusions about the key success factors of planned change, based on her change management research in hundreds of organizations and relevant literature.
In this e-book, you will learn:
- How to choose the right people with the right skills to plan and implement a successful change project, including a change champion, a steering committee, an executive sponsor and implementation teams.
- How to create a sense of urgency for the change throughout the organization.
- The steps to create an inspiring change vision that will truly motivate people to buy into the change.
- How to create a complete roadmap for implementing your change successfully, using a framework and key questions.
- Ways to deal with resistance to change, convert resisters and create support for the change.
- The essential role of communication during change, including a communications model and advice to help you develop your own communication plan.
- How to find a change leader with the skills and attributes of a true change champion.
When Hunter Harrison joined the recently-privatized Canadian National Railway (CNR) in 1998 as Chief Operating Officer, the company was generally acknowledged as one of the worst railroads in North America, highly indebted, perpetually in the red, and losing market share to the more efficient, flexible and newly deregulated U.S. railway and trucking industries. Recruited by Chief Executive Officer, Paul Tellier, for his skills and experience at Illinois Central, Harrison along with Tellier moved swiftly to transform CNR into a “scheduled precision railway” and to introduce needed efficiencies. Soon thereafter the company shed over 11,000 employees and thousands of miles of track.
Most experts would agree that communication is a vital ingredient in successful change initiatives, and there is much research to support this assertion. My own research revealed a very high correlation between change success and communications efforts (Pearson correlation r = 0.567, significant at the 0.01 level). Furthermore, it has also been shown that ineffective internal communication is a major contributor to the failure of change initiatives.(1) For example, Sally Woodward and Chris Hendry surveyed 198 employees in U.K. financial services institutions undergoing change and asked them to specify the barriers to change.(2) Two of the six barriers identified were: lack of adequate communications (not being kept informed, receiving conflicting messages, wanting to understand but not being given explanations) and lack of consultation. In my view, expert communication is indispensable when persuading people to support change. Some researchers even claim that the essence of change is communication; that is, that communication produces change rather than merely serving as one tool in its implementation.(3)
Introductory Case Study: Transition to a Flexible Work Environment
After you know who will lead a change initiative, why the change is necessary and what future you are trying to create, you come to the “how”—the activities you must plan to implement the change successfully. This is tough work because of the countless details that must be thought through and included in a change rollout plan. Forget something crucial here, and your change may be in jeopardy, as is highlighted in the following case study.
Most experts advocate creating a vision as a necessary step in any change initiative. But managers have a tough time following this advice. Change vision statements are often too long, too confusing or too generic to motivate action in the direction of the change. It’s tough to condense the vision into a couple of sentences or paragraphs that sing, but it is worthwhile to try. For example, Google’s pithy vision statement has long provided a guiding star for employees to follow: “To make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.” Contrast it with the following vision statement from an actual Fortune 500 firm that shall remain nameless: “Our vision is to maximize shareholder value by enhancing financial performance and providing long-term profitable growth.” Very few employees are going to spring out of bed each morning full of enthusiasm to “maximize shareholder value.”
The statistics about the implementation of change in organizations are dismal. For decades now, business writers from all walks of life have been bemoaning the large failure rate of change projects. For example, one study reported that 70 percent of critical change efforts fail to achieve their intended results.(
The literature on change management contains a lot of advice about formulating a change idea and planning it at a high level but much less on how to implement the idea once it has been created. For example, although strategy implementation is viewed as an integral part of the strategic management process, little has been written or researched on it. Likewise, in the public sector there is a great deal of advice on how to formulate public policy, and many academic courses teach this. But try to find a course or a book on getting that policy implemented successfully, and you will find very little. Why should this be so? I believe that implementing a change is a lot tougher than planning it because you actually have to deal with people instead of just things and concepts. Concepts do not resist or argue back. But this is not accepted wisdom. Senior leaders often believe that a great change idea should be easy to implement, that anyone can do it. So it is less glamorous and attracts fewer accolades.
Two groups are crucial to any change project: planners and implementers. The planners, typically more senior than the implementers, must answer some important questions before they hand over the initiative for implementation. When these questions are not dealt with adequately, the initiative can get off to a shaky start.
The first thing people want to know when a change is proposed is why this change is necessary. If you don’t have a very good answer, then they will not buy into your change initiative. Statistics show that having a good percentage of supporters at the outset of a change initiative is strongly associated with success.