Archive for the “Change Management” Category

Clients frequently don’t want to take the time to assess their organization’s leadership alignment. My experience is that the assessment always provides some new insights. One such client was a division of a large conglomerate. The 2008 economic recession had hurt their industry particularly hard. The CFO had been aggressively cutting costs and the business began to implement new systems from SAP to support their business.

When asked, “Why are you implementing SAP,” nearly 100% of their top management had one of two answers. “Our corporate parent wants us to standardize on a common system.” Alternatively, “The finance department needs better reporting to help us manage our costs better.” Both answers, however, were wrong.

This business had already cut its costs nearly to the bone and was under no pressure to standardize. The CFO was enabling the business to have a more vertically integrated supply chain. They needed a new supply chain so they could compete more effectively with imported product. Their huge effort wasn’t about costs, it was about revenue.

Had the client not uncovered this misalignment, their leadership would have faced significant challenges. The team would have been working to deliver the wrong business model and processes. With this new understanding of how the leadership was oriented to think, the business was able to head in the right direction a lot sooner and with less friction along the way.

First things first: the right people can make any organization structure work, but these situations are usually the exception. The general rule is that an organization aligns to a common set of objectives, and those objectives can be in conflict with another organization’s objectives. An easy way to think about this is a sales team wants to sell many units at any price. A marketing or finance organization is more interested in selling units at a profitable price.

In thinking about an I.T.-oriented change initiative, there is a similar tension between organizational objectives. The Information Technology group is typically driven by objectives such as cost, project timelines, information security while they meet the needs of their internal clients. Those internal clients, frequently the owners of a particular business process, place a lower value on I.T.’s objectives. Process owners are most concerned about employee effectiveness and efficiency. A process owner will frequently trade away short-term costs for long-term gains in productivity.

In thinking about a typical organizational change manager’s work, it is clear that they are most closely aligned with the process owner. It goes to follow that having the change manager report to the I.T. organization mis-aligns interests. It becomes too easy for the cost and time-driven IT manager to stifle input from the change management team. The voice of the organization is never heard.

It makes far more sense for the change manager to have a direct reporting relationship to the business sponsor that is accountable for the success of the project. Granted they typically don’t want multiple project direct reports, but it has been my experience that they will be much more interested in talking about business and organizational issues than the status of integration testing and data cleansing routines. The sponsor needs to play an active role in leading the project and needs to be constantly up-to-date on the business and organization issues being caused or cured by the project. There can be no better place for the change manager to be.

Consider putting these checks and balances in your next project governance structure.

I might be the last person on the internet to see this video, but this video should be frightening to somebody in the early stages of their career. How will they possibly keep up with the pace of change?

Did You Know?

In the midst of a major transformation initiative, senior managers are frequently surprised by what employees say in response to open-ended survey questions. As a result, we are big fans of making sure senior management hears these comments. We are also big fans of ensuring senior management acts visibly and appropriately in response to what they hear.

A while back, our company was retained by a client in the midst of a reorganization. The 7,000 employee business was moving from a single corporate entity to a divisional structure along product lines. It had been widely stated that the moves would not cut headcount except for a few senior-level positions. The economy was healthy and this company was meeting its objectives when this was underway.

We ran a survey to assess the situation, and here are a few of the comments we received:

• Give the big picture. As people become aware of this, then you can start drilling down into levels of detail.
• It appears we are doing a lot of explaining without a lot of information being revealed. Rumors, speculation and anxiety grows while we wait. I would have done more “behind the scenes” work and made the changes less visible to the organization until we were ready to make the change.
• I would like to see more “personal” meetings with senior levels. Although the communications are effective, they speak to a broad audience. I would like to see members of the executive team go to each site and personally speak to smaller groups of people to explain the rationale and changes.
• The communications have improved from senior management. There should be a weekly bulletins.
• Be open and honest. The rumor mill is rampant about 20% head count reductions. The change was not communicated this way in the beginning. There is even less communication now than ever. Associates want to know the dates when they will find out about their destiny. The vision about accelerated growth has disappeared. There is next-to-no communication about process changes unless you are directly involved.
• Keep up the good work.
• Set an exact timetable. We keep hearing conflicting dates.
• My manager has done an abysmal job of explaining this to our group, has shown no compassion and seems disinterested in our concerns. The process is too slow and is killing our culture. We hear very little from the executives and they don’t do any “walking around.”
• Will these moves really change the company and break down silos? Or is really a financial restructuring that will enable us to sell off parts of the company?

What are the takeaways:

1. Rumors fill vacuums.
2. Leaders can’t over-communicate. Be visible. Some people want more detail and some want less. There is no way to make everybody happy.
3. Have a plan and communicate your plan. Set expectations and then meet them.

I’ll post more soon.

I just got a phone call from somebody who needed to cancel a meeting we had scheduled for next week.  A few days ago, he and most of his department were let go. He walked out the door without a badge or laptop, but still holding his Blackberry – loaded with emails, contacts, etc…  Two days later the Blackberry has not been wiped. He is using its data to professionally cancel appointments that nobody from his old employer intends to fulfill.  As an aside, he is also using that information to network a bit for his own benefit.

Needless to say, his previous employer’s equity has taken a hit in my eyes. We won’t be doing business. He, on the other hand, did me a favor by respecting my time and I’m inclined to repay the favor. The winners and losers in this conversation could be have reversed if the employer had a workforce reduction plan that respected its people, customers and suppliers. It isn’t hard, it just takes effort. Let’s put aside whether they are cutting “fat” or “muscle.”  They cut at least one of their opportunities for future growth.

Think about it if you are doing the cutting.

Novice communications professionals love to write goals along the lines of, “Create 100% awareness of the benefits of Initiative X.”

Don’t do it. Never make the goal 100%. Let me explain with a story.

On February 23, 2007, The Wall Street Journal published a piece on how the Census Bureau is planning for the 2010 census. Question number 3 will be, “What is this person’s sex? (Mark ONE box).”

You would assume that 100% of people should be able to answer this question correctly. This would be a bad assumption. In a 2005 field test, .05% of people asked checked both answers. Extrapolated out, 150,000 people in our country of 300 million would answer this question incorrectly.

If you choose to pursue 100% of anything – even the most basic communication goal – you will fail. Just think about the 150,000 confused folks among us.

So what is realistic?

• If you don’t have 70% of people prepared to move in a particular direction, the group will take an inordinate amount of time to go. 70% is your awareness tipping point.
• The high 80s begin to become problematic. You are spending lots of resources for the last few points of awareness. Perfect will become the enemy of good.
• If information is fairly basic, low 80s is a reasonable, yet challenging goal. If the information is more complex, 75% is reasonable.

Don’t forget, new hires, vacations, leaves of absence, travel schedules all get in the way of achieving super-high awareness numbers. It won’t be your efforts that are the issue; it will be the changing nature of your audience. 

Remember, the internal communicator’s job is to broadcast messages to everybody, and management’s job is to narrowcast within their area of responsibility. The two efforts need to work together. Practically speaking, managers will be picking up “loose ends” that don’t get addressed during your broadcasting. On the other hand, recognize you must reach that 70% minimum. Without it, management’s initiative will be fighting an uphill battle.

I’ve put up the posters, posted the articles, blasted out the emails, stuffed the envelopes and hosted the lunches, but some messages don’t seem to reach the right people. I’m not the only one who is having the difficulty.

As you are no doubt aware, analog TV is being unplugged nationwide in February 2009. You’ve probably seen the public service announcements. What you might not know is that Wilmington, NC has been a test market for the cutover to digital. The city television stations unplugged their analog signals earlier this month. The result? Even with saturated media, some people will miss the message.

On the first day of cutover, almost 800 people called the government helpline. Over 400 called on the second day. (An FCC document on the subject is available here.) Granted, this call rate represents less than one-half of 1%, but with over 100 million households in the country, the FCC needs to be able to answer about 500,000 calls on cutover day in February 2009.

So what is the takeaway? If you can carpet bomb an audience and still miss 1% (adding the two days together) and you are impacting their television, imagine the effort required to convince 100% of your employees to participate in yet another major change initiative. 

Communication will only get you part of the way there. It raises awareness – but participation will only come when the leaders in the business actively engage their teams in the process.

John Kotter, one of America’s most influential business gurus, has hit the presses recently with a piece on urgency. I always find Kotter’s material a very clear reminder of the basics that make change successful.

In this Change Manifesto, he speaks about:

• The environment we find ourselves in today is changing faster than ever. Although this is not a new observation, it can’t be emphasized enough.
• Change is no longer episodic, it is continuous. As a result, the ability to manage change well – and quickly – is now a fundamental requirement.
• Managing change well is all about creating and managing the right kinds of urgency: focused urgency and not wasteful cycles of activity.

His piece is worth reading.

On November 12, I will be speaking at the IT and Business Alignment Forum at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas. The Forum is actually three conferences in one: Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management & Enterprise Web, and Portals & Collaborative Technologies. In short, these conferences are designed for the people who design and implement processes and technologies to improve the way people work. Our focus is on the people side of implementation.

In similar previous conferences there has been a lot of conversation along the lines of: “We have designed something great, but nobody wants it.” As it turns out, people are usually resisting the changes – not the new technology. In short, if people are not aware of change well in advance, understand the rationale for the change, and participate in creating the change – the risk of resistance will remain high. The much easier path is to actively lead the change process and help impacted people accept change along the way.

I’ll be posting my materials from the conference in mid-November. If by chance you are interested in attending and would like discounted admission, feel free to use discount code SPKRITBIZSR.

I was recently asked by a Human Resources professional how he could help their company become better at managing change.

I felt a little bit like the doctor answering the question, “I have a bad headache, what’s wrong with me?”

Without a lot more information, the answer will be simple, “Take two aspirin, and call me in the morning.”

Resisting the urge to encourage him to call my office, I gave my diagnosis-free prescription: “Improve senior management leadership capabilities.”

Without a doubt, the approach will help. As detailed in a prior post, CEOs believe senior manager skills and experience stand in the way of implementing change. Not only are senior manager skills an opportunity, but improving their capabilities will give you leverage in future initiatives.

The better diagnosis would come after some frank conversations in the C-Suite. Six topics should be covered:

1. Please tell me about the largest change initiatives you have gone through in the last five to seven years.

2. What went well with those initiatives, and what did not go as well?

3. How likely are we to go through large-scale change in the next three years?

4. How likely are we to repeat the positives and negatives of your previous experiences?

5. How well prepared are our senior and middle managers to lead future changes?

6. What should we do now to best prepare for the future?

After having this conversation with each member of the C-Suite, I would identify the common themes and report back to them as a group. The report would have three elements:

• What did they say?
• How does their collective view compare to best practices and experiences in other organizations?
• My recommendations to address the opportunities.

Those recommendations could cover a wide range of options, but people-related opportunities are likely to dominate. The best part of approach is that the go-forward plan will be largely of their creation. They will give you a charter to prepare for change and become your guiding coalition in that journey.

Perhaps I should give my acquaintance a call and give him some new advice. He needs to go have a frank conversation with the C-Suite.