Archive for the “Change Management” Category

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.

Monday’s post was about the types of change occurring in large companies. Today’s is about what stands in the way of organizations implementing large-scale change.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ 11^th Annual CEO Survey asked: “Which of the following people challenges were critical barriers for your organization in terms of achieving the desired benefits?” Frankly, the answers are fairly depressing.

The depressing part is that all five of these barriers are within the CEO’s control. The CEOs are talking about their own people.

Some observations:

• As Bill Gates said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” He was likely not referring to the pace of change within a company, but the quote is still appropriate. The C-Suite is typically looking for transformational change to occur much more quickly than it actually takes. What might be seen as a two-year project is usually a three-year project. Sometimes the factors above play a role, but sometimes it is just plain old, overly optimistic, bad estimating.
• The Human Resources function has a responsibility to address. If speed, flexibility and agility equal competitive advantage, and senior management skill sets are a significant barrier, HR should be forcing change management skill development.
• The CEOs never mention that they themselves may be part of the issue. They aren’t saying, “Failure to hire appropriately skilled senior managers,” or, “Inadequate time spent on leading change initiative.” The cure for some of these issues could very well be the personal demonstration of change management skills.

Based on casual conversations with just about anybody in the business world today, large-scale change is commonplace. The Society for Human Resources (SHRM) published the Change Management Survey in 2007 and quantified those types of change. Over the two years leading up to the survey, companies with more than 500 employees had the following types of change: 

The key takeaway: change is occurring for any and all reasons. In the words of Benjamin Disraeli, “Change is inevitable. Change is constant.”

The question invariably comes.  “How long will this ‘transformation’ take?”

The client is thinking that, like the children of Lake Wobegon, the employees of this company are above average, so it won’t take long. But whether it is a merger integration, a change in direction or a large-scale reorganization, it almost always takes longer to achieve the vision than the client would like. The reason is simple: it takes time to move a group of people to do anything, and moving a group of people takes work.

Take this example from my vacation: seven people deciding on lunch. The conversation started at 11:30 and covered the following topics: choice of food, best place to obtain, who would drive, relevant allergies, how the choice would mesh with the dinner choice, what would be for dinner, confirmation of location, take out or pick up, getting a menu, what the kids would eat, the need to make a quick phone call, the need to change shoes, cleaning the back seat of the car, forgetting the cell phone, and who would sit in the front seat. The cars left the driveway at 12:10. It took 40 minutes to accomplish the simplest of tasks.

Granted, part of this debacle was the effects of Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill available time. Given that it was vacation, time was aplenty, the adults weren’t truly hungry, and the kids weren’t screaming. The debate stretched on because it could. Unfortunately, decisions at work can drag on as well – and so does the transformation.

So what is a change leader to do? The answer is simple: cut the available time. When establishing goals for a transformation, a leader cannot just set the long-term, visionary goal. A leader also must set milestones along the path, and hold people accountable for achieving the interim goals along the way. The change leader must create a sense of urgency by helping people move from milestone to milestone as quickly as possible. The leader must break the long visionary journey into a series of discrete, focused trips.