There Is No In Between Place To Land When Change Is Your Goal
You don’t know when or just exactly how you came to the conclusion, but it’s stark and it’s real. Maybe sales growth is sluggish at best or a lot of key accounts are shrinking. Or maybe too many of your best and brightest have been leaving lately.
Whatever the signs, you know your organization needs change and more than likely it’s already overdue.
You’ve read and heard all about empowerment, communication, commitment and all the other remedies for whatever it is that ails you as a business. You might have even tried implementing some of these remedies with limited success. In any case, the same old same old is starting to get to you. You want to move forward, stir things up, and energize the place but you want to do it with purpose.
Make no bones about it, change is difficult and to be successful it has to be abrupt and dynamic. You have to move people out of their "comfort zones" before you can get them to even consider change. Don’t buy into the notion that it can be phased in or that it can be gradually implemented. Little tweaks and small nudges never result in real change. Real change demands change at every level of an organization and in the very way people act and react to customers and co-workers.
So, how do you make change happen?
If change is what your company needs, there are a few key steps to get you started. How far you take it and the success of the effort will depend on how well you prepare and execute. Here are four relatively simple, but dynamic, steps any organization can take to get change started.
1. Think Before You Leap
To begin, don’t do it alone! No single executive or member of the management team changes an organization. Change is a team sport. It requires collective wisdom, synergistic execution, and a united front. Your management team needs to embrace the concept of change before you decide how, when and where it’s going to happen. They need to free themselves from the organizational yokes of position and power and prepare themselves for a kind of intellectual slam dance.
Focus everyone in the organization on determining the precise needs and demands of your customers and your customers’ customers. Orchestrate the learning process and manage the collection system aggressively.
Since there is no way of knowing where the best ideas are going to come from, the management team needs to use every means available to encourage everyone’s involvement. Besides meetings, e-mails, idea boxes and bulletins, facilitate discussion and keep an open ear at more informal times. Water cooler exchanges, cafeteria conversations and even the company softball games are all informal but important places to listen to the people and what they think needs to happen.
Learn from history. It’s way too easy to disregard history. But where your customers are concerned the keys to being their best choice may very well lie in past experiences. Use story telling techniques to understand the implications and value of past experiences with customers. Organize sessions or e-mail storybook files to encourage employees to tell you stories about your customers. And reward them for their efforts.
2. Get Change Rolling As Quickly As Possible
After you’ve tapped your organization for information and ideas, move through the mountain of data quickly. Assign teams, comprised of people who represent various disciplines, to analyze the information and come up with a game plan for changing what they do and how they do it. Then exchange the plans among people, disciplines and levels of the organizational structure to give everyone a clear understanding of what each department is thinking.
Define clearly where and what kinds of change are needed in every nook and cranny of the company and make everyone accountable for seeing that change happens and happens now. Keep the highway to change clear of barriers and empower people to make changes as they go. Promote, encourage and demand communication and have your teams assess their progress regularly.
Reward people for successes as they occur and keep everyone posted on who’s doing what, where you are in terms of the game plan and any problems that you’ve got executing and moving on. And keep listening and responding to what employees are telling you about your customers.
3. Execute With Your Eyes Wide Open
Because change embodies traversing new ground and navigating uncharted waters it’s important that the organization keep its collective eyes open throughout the execution process. Nothing is written in stone when change is the goal.
Survey people at all levels of the company to discover problem areas, potential barriers and what’s working and not working. Your management team should be operating on full alert so that changes in direction, methods and tactics can be implemented quickly and with little if any pain for customers.
A big part of your success will depend on how well you communicate with customers and employees about the changes taking place. Market the fact that change is underway and survey both customer and employee responses to what you’re doing or trying to do. The benefits need to be conveyed to customers and the workplace on a regular basis.
Expect some sticky moments and keep in mind that a commitment to change will also bring with it a variety of issues that will have to be resolved if you are going to accomplish your goals. Your workforce is going to operate at a wide range of levels as change is implemented. Some will adjust and succeed quicker than others. Be patient. Give people room to fail in order to eventually succeed. Support employees who are genuinely trying to make change happen. Move quickly to jettison those who seem to find unsolvable problems or immovable barriers at every twist or turn in the road regardless of their position or title.
4. Be Prepared To "Unlearn"
Forgetting the old way and using the new one may sound simple. If resistance to change were not so great, unlearning would be simple. Change is difficult to bring about because change creates discomfort and initiatives fail far more often than they succeed. When they fail, the inescapable conclusion is that the learning/unlearning process has also failed.
Our Conclusion
Change, if it is successfully implemented, is not a one time thing. You don’t change and then relax. An organization that changes in order to be the best choice in both the marketplace and workplace will view change as part of its strategic and operational structure. It will be ever changing-on purpose.
Change is also hard work. It’s demanding and certainly unpredictable. But it’s also rewarding because it makes growth possible and the workplace more challenging and rewarding. And it frees people to do their best on behalf of customers and fellow workers alike.
