Posts Tagged “SHRM”

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to speak to a business process management organization and a human resources organization about leading transformational change. The groups share three attributes:

1. They both help design the organization’s future,
2. They both see somebody else as responsible and accountable for implementing those changes.
3. The press that covers these groups is frequently discussing the question, “Why don’t we have a seat at the CXO table.”

A Facilitator Ran This Road Crew

Many I spoke to saw their role as facilitators. I absolutely believe in the value of a good facilitator. Unfortunately, facilitators, by definition, are more focused on the process than the outcome. People at the CXO table care about outcomes. I didn’t share my story about a particularly frank CFO adapting an adage about lawyers. When confronted with a huge problem and an army of consultants, he turned to his team and said, “First, let’s shoot all the facilitators.”

Stewardship has many definitions. In biblical times, the steward was a servant that managed the master’s household affairs. It was a position of honor and earned through trust. Today, stewardship refers to a mindset where a person takes responsibility for something that the person does not own. Environmentalists use the term to refer to the appropriate usage of the earth’s resources. Stewardship is a proactive mindset that says, “Count on me to do the right thing.” Anybody can be a steward.

I turn off the lights when I leave a room in my home, and in hotel rooms. I’m a mini-steward of the environment. I try to teach my children to take responsibility for things they don’t directly control. With basketball season upon us, my comment became, “Instead of criticizing her for missing free throws and the fact that you have to run more, invite her to work out with you and show her how to shoot better shots.”

Think about the working world. There are people you work with that regularly stand up and say, “I can make sure that happens.” The task at hand has nothing to do with the person’s job description. They make things happen by influence, not force. (The best thing about those people is that they frequently don’t say a thing; they just do it.)

The next time you want to see change happen, don’t say, “I can’t do anything because I don’t control the situation.” Ask yourself, “What is the number one thing can I influence?” One light in one hotel room won’t stop global warming, or lower my price on the next visit, but it did make a difference. My daughter has yet to realize that the coach is going to make the team run and she will never get to avoid it. She might as well have a teammate who can shoot.

I’m sure you will find you can influence at least one thing in a positive direction. The best part of stewardship is that practice it makes you better at it. The more you act as the steward, the more you will want to, and the more others will want you to. You can influence a tremendous amount just by ignoring your job description and saying, “count on me to do the right thing.”

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.”

A recent comment on this blog regarding resistance to change led me to try to prove an intuition about the subject. (Meyers Briggs’ intuitives can look like geniuses frequently, but can also look like idiots when those intuitions are wrong!)

According to SHRM’s 2007 study on Change Management, about 70% of major organizational changes encounter employee resistance. The comment stated that typical levels of employee resistance run around 15%. Is there a way to reconcile the two? In short yes. They aren’t mutually exclusive. 70% of reorganizations can encounter resistance – but the resistance can come from only a small number of people.

A 2005 benchmarking study of 411 companies by Prosci identified where resistance to change was most commonly cited. Middle management won the prize by a long shot.

Their study provides common sense insight on why managers resist change:

1. Loss of power and control
2. Overloaded with current responsibilities
3. Lacked awareness of the need for change
4. Lacked the required skills
5. Fear, uncertainty and doubt

The managers’ reasons are far different from the reasons why front line employees resist change:

1. Not aware of the business need for change
2. Layoffs were announced or feared
3. Unsure if they had necessary skills for success
4. Comfort with the current state
5. Believed they were being asked to do more with less, or more for the same pay

Thinking back over the many initiatives I have been involved with, the front-line employee concerns were more easily handled. Provide information in a professional and compassionate way as it is available and you will earn trust, respect and engagement in the change process. The middle manager, however, has always been more difficult to address. Frequently their concerns are well-founded. They are going to lose power or they are going to become more overloaded.

As you work with them to gain their participation in the change, however, it is best to remember the leverage they represent. Getting one middle manager on your side means a whole lot of their people will follow him or her. It is a whole lot harder to convince the employees of a middle manager to not follow their leader’s resistance than it is to get the leader on your side.

In 2007, the Society of Human Resources published a study on Change Management during major organizational changes. At the risk of over-generalizing, just about everybody is reorganizing, but less than half of the organizations are doing so with a clearly defined approach. Approximately…

• 89% of large employers (500+ employees) had planned or implemented major organizational changes in the 24 months prior to the survey.
• 40% of organizations used change management consultant services during the change.
• Nearly two-thirds reported no particular model was followed during the change.

The survey also shows how the obstacles and challenges being confronted in major organizational changes.

It is no surprise there is resistance to major organizational changes. It also is no surprise that communication breakdown occurs. Sometimes breakdowns occur because the change being implemented has not been thought through. Sometimes communication breakdown is due to a failure of execution. As I watched one executive say to her team, “In times like these, you can never communicate enough, and it would appear that I failed to follow my own principles of leadership.”

Other challenges appear in different ways, but they all come from a common mistake: a tendency to under-resource initiatives. Whether it is people, time or money, the team charged with bringing about the change does not realize what it takes to execute a major organizational change.

We have faced the same challenges in our work. In our experience, there are two strategies that best address these issues:

• Measurement – Measure the number and types of communication. Measure attitudes. Measure attendance at lunch and learns. Measure everything, show how the measurements trend, and report on those measurements. The best way to get senior management involvement or additional resources is to show the measures that back your case.
• Leverage – The laws of physics are clear. With right sized lever, huge movements can be made easily. What are the levers for you to push and pull in your organization? Putting the COO on a speaking tour with employees? Publicly and broadly communicating status of progress by individual groups? You would be amazed to see the performance created when VPs agree to post the performance of their group relative to other groups.