Initiating Change: Some Pretty Good Ps

Posted on March 16, 2009 by John

Thinking of starting a major change effort? What to improve your margin? Put your company on the right track? Become a market leader? Survive the economic downturn?

Keep in mind that a successful change effort starts with two critical requirements. You must

  1. Be very clear on the change itself: what, why, when, who, and how; and
  2. Communicate that to all members of the your organization as soon as you can and as often as possible.

These two requirements are critical regardless of what kind of change you make, or whether it's targeted toward process or quality improvement, market leadership, survival, positioning for sale, or some combination. If you do these things well, you have a good chance of beating the 3:1 odds of failure in change efforts. If you don't, then join those who contribute to the 75% failure statistic for change efforts. Continue reading →

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Don’t Talk About ROI, but the Cost of Continuing as We Are

Posted on March 16, 2009 by John

The first step in an effective change effort is the business case. Unfortunately, it's easy to get caught in the trap of establishing a case for Return on Investment, and that's the wrong place to start.

Don't get me wrong.

A good change effort should absolutely deliver business value that can be measured in ROI. That's just not the place to start. Continue reading →

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Six Ways to Build a Dysfunctional Organization

Posted on March 16, 2009 by John

I've traveled around a lot of organizations, and seen some wonderfully-creative ways they can be disabled in their intent to improve or to achieve their goals. Here's a recipe from a cross-section of organizations I've seen over the past few years:

  1. Identify a staff function, e.g., HR, Improvement Team, etc., and give them the goal to enforce compliance to practices that they themselves create for line management and employees to follow.
  2. Set aggressive goals that are unchangeable, no matter what happens during the year. Enforce those goals by tying bonuses to graded percentage-of-compliance audits conducted by the staff group. Set an arbitrary compliance value, say 91%, and enforce it rigidly.
  3. Compare senior managers to each other, so everyone knows who's slacking off. Focus on "getting the compliance score up." Continue reading →
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What we can learn from change

Posted on March 16, 2009 by John

Change is hard, but it doesn't have to be.  It's instructive too. The instruction comes from what we think of as "resistance" to change.  If you keep in mind that whenever we feel resistance, it tells us we are stuck.  Maybe were stuck in our way of thinking, or old habits, or just in the way we like to do things. That by itself tells us something.

So if you feel yourself resisting something — a new management trend, a new directive, introduction of a new process or policy — ask yourself, "What is it inside me it's keeping me stuck?  And what exactly is keeping me from learning something new, or adapting to something new, or preventing me from exploring what's being offered to me?" Another way to think about this is that the opposite of change is learning and growth.

A colleague once said to me,  "I never turned down an opportunity to do something new.  It's like God asking me to dance.

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