Jansen 2 Unternehmensberatung
Sie befinden sich auf:
Welcome Change Management
Change Management (CM) is a unique gift or scientific field that helps us assess changes in a safe and reliable way. It includes a wide range of changes: changes to your personality, social changes, changes in your working environment and also organizational changes. Though we live in a world of constant changes, our ability to recognize these changes is limited as we can discern only a few parts of the overall size and scope, rather than the picture as a whole. The natural limits of our brain keeps us blind to the pace of the world around us if we don’t keep a regular watch. Since we cannot always be present, we find ourselves either being “late” or “excluded.”
Looking at changes more closely, it often seems there must have been a period beforehand, during which change emanated from some stimuli. Moreover, there must have been someone pursuing change with a certain idea behind it. As humans we have been given the gift of seeing the imperative for change.
If you are, for instance, steering your bike in the wrong direction, you would be quick to realize your mistake and self-correct your course. The same is true for the business person who is perfectly acquainted with the market, the customers, and the underlying dynamics. He or she therefore has a knack for sensing the vitality of demand and supply. However, if the function of perception is blurred, or has been swayed by some outside force, attempts to correct the course will have repercussions for both employees and consumers as they are asked to acquiesce. .
Once the imperative for change has been sufficiently internalized, it becomes essential to strike the right note in communicating the course correction to the stakeholders. Only this would allow you to get ahead with your project. Although this management skill constitutes an integral part of leadership, it has a much greater impact in practice than one can imagine. This is because it requires the adoption of systemic perspectives and the awareness to properly steer processes and techniques that are generally not found in standard management training let alone in everyday business. So, if the company has not only internalized the idea of Change Management but has also implemented its organizational implications, a culture will develop that is open to – and aware of – changes, and this will be perceived as something beholden to a versatile and adaptive enterprise.
Companies eager to achieve this stage of ‘thinking in terms of change,’ usually resort to highly-skilled, long-standing, and experienced consultants, who are capable of providing the supportive framework necessary with independent Change Management. Once the idea of Change Management enters a company’s culture, this results in a analysts viewing a special, positive contribution to the company’s balance sheet. (CM as Assets on the Balance Sheet)
How can I recognize the imperative for deliberate Change Management?
Please find below a few examples taken from our practical experience.
a. A change of style and environment is pending. A successor to the head of your company has assumed his or her duties and happens to adhere to a completely different style of leadership. If the new situation is not adequately handled, the majority of your personnel will become prone to raising obstacles, which would require a disproportionate increase in efforts to manage both change and consolidation.
b. There are also changes in private life, whose dynamics we often find disconnected from those in our professional life. What is the correct order of things when life gets turned upside down? Marriage – child rearing – planting a tree? …And what comes after? It is quite natural for employees to labor on many things besides their job. At some point they will find themselves in a situation where great changes in their private life are looming, and not all of them will be sufficiently prepared to deal with the nature and scope of these changes. Once personal steps are taken and goals accomplished, they will find occupational changes are much harder to realize than in earlier stages of a career. Financial and social dependencies are likely to provoke resistance and raise formerly unknown fears.
c. A problem has either not been recognized as such or been procrastinated. If stakeholders detect that the causes that led to the necessity for change have been deliberately hidden by the people in charge, their readiness to support change is unlikely to surge, and the issue might even take on a legal dimension. Consider this instance: The soil of a residential zone had not been sufficiently cleaned up before construction work began. It therefore required to be cleaned up again once construction and other work had been finished. If you were one of those building the houses, can you imagine how you would support this cause? In cases like this, a stand-alone mediator would probably be hired to try to get the parties involved to reach a mutual consensus. However, this is not what we understand as Change Management. Quite thecontrary, pro-active Change Management would have started at a point well before the sale of the land so as to prevent pitfalls from becoming risks, and also to take the responsibility for the management and ultimate elimination of the problem.
d. Sales-related challenges can be evaluated by methods used in Change Management. The sales department should be regarded as the arrivals hall or navigation system of a company. If a sales project gets lost in rough terrain, it is the responsibility of the people in charge to continuously evaluate the potential for closing the sale and, moreover, the probability of repeated closings in the future and to then report this back into the company. Only through this, can the company deal with the external stimuli of competitors and customers in real time and therefore maintain the speed and course of the “endeavor.”
e. Change Management as the pillar to support organizational development and maintenance. Setting up an organizational structure leads one fact to come to the fore: employees will always want to see themselves placed in a position mirroring their current role. If a company is ready for change, it is best advised to alter its organization structure in order to concentrate enough resources for the cause. But there is a problem to this: The usual ways and means don’t seem to work. Though there is sufficient cash to pay for the job, no enhancer is in sight to do it, and no member of the management expects the project to be a sufficiently challenging or rewarding endeavor. All of this will unduly protract the project. As a result, the company is coerced into fighting resistance, lack of motivation, and even fear among its employees. Question: What went wrong? Stakeholders would have needed less effort to comprehend the causes and targets of change if the company had simply deployed pro-active Change Management, and they would have met the challenge with far more tact
Change Management is not a “silver bullet,” rather a technique or method that helps you comprehend problematic situations in their complexity and take on the task of leading the stakeholders in terms of timeframe and content, and doing so in a way that enables them to meet the challenge on their own and prevent similar constellations from becoming problematic in the future.
The search for the causes of lack of readiness for Change Management inevitably leads us to find multiple interdependencies, all of which require quite a deep look into ourselves. In our daily work experience as in scientific studies, we find that human beings are apt to lose their ability to fully comprehend changes because their perception becomes increasingly selective over time. This accounts for why we are commonly known as “creatures of habit.” Sociologists explain this phenomenon by referring to the increased scope of sensory joints in our brain, which usually comes with older age. If you add in the reduced agility in later years, the growing complexity of the world (technologically, politically, or socially), and the intricacies within ourselves (having long-standing dependencies or skeletons in the closet), it becomes plausible that more convincing and target-group specific awareness training needs to be done before any of the stakeholders can be ready to commit themselves to the cause.
Besides the issues commonly associated with the individual’s life, there are also causal links to the organizational structure of the company. To illustrate this, think of the way participants in a successfully completed project keep in touch after the period of cooperation, even though they work in separate departments. Since sympathy and trust has been sustained this way, one wonders what it was that made them show such solidarity with one another, considering them fearing the assumed consequences of a proposed change.
What are the reasons for resistance to change? The human brain is actively anticipating consequences of coming changes, and it therefore ponders the questions of “what will I have to give up” and “what chances come with the new situation.” If the future is anticipated as a rather bleak one, this would fit a situation of resistance. It appears to be part of human life that stakeholders want their fears to be taken into consideration. This is exactly the point where Change Management must step in and do the research that is necessary well in advance, so that any signs of resistance would be detected and neutralized before they start to form insurmountable obstacles to the project.
The saying: “Changes are great but not in my back yard…” speaks for itself. Obviously, those saying so have not yet listened to reason, let alone warmed to the idea of change. Here, consultants or change managers often find it challenging to do the convincing work because company leaders have missed out on the opportunity to communicate adequately and well in advance.
Indeed, quite frequently resistant behavior is caused by one’s weaker self. These cases of internal resistance to the objectives and the imperative of change require special treatment by the change manager. Although this suggests something akin to the psycho-analysis of each individual employee is required we can actually avoid this through effectively executed change management. The customer’s character and disposition would also help to determine the specific approach to be employed. Because good things come in small packages, it would pose a unattainable challenge if “one’s weaker self” comprises the entire staff of the company. Unexamined and unreformed, this kind of paralysis or organizational “viscosity” would sink any company. To prevent this from becoming a reality, you would need experienced consultants who are experts in Change Management.”
Well, a fault confessed is half redressed. This provides the starting point of Change Management. Gaining an insight into the imperative for change allows you to check whether one or two approaches may “fit the bill” and could be used for succesfully realizing the proposed change within the company. Over time, the Phase Model (according to Kotter) has proven useful as has a well-defined role model, comprising the roles change agent, stakeholder, and management sponsor.
For people to acquire the competence to recognize the imperatives for change at an early stage, the provision of support and an excellent level of information flow from within their company is essential. Of more importance is a good mixture of distance and entrepreneurially-fueled curiosity, if not a sales-oriented hunting instinct. Also, it has proven most helpful when one has become acquainted with interdisciplinary ways of thinking and its application during the course of a career. Equipped with these means, we are ready to start this journey of perception, a journey which could easily end up in frustration and cynicism for those not adequately trained in cultural issues. People are therefore well-advised to begin such a journey after a degree of personal maturity and a levelof cultural experience has come to exist within a company.
A variety of tools are available to support the motivation for and structuring of change among the stakeholders, so that the proposed changes can be implemented. Thoroughly tried and tested implementations, such as a particular means of communication or mechanisms for adjusting schedules do contribute to the success of a project. During the implementation of the objective, the change manager is always seeking to alter not only the organizational structure, but also the minds of the stakeholders. In doing so, a change manager is likely to be confronted with two extremes of motivation: namely paralysis and the knee jerk effect. If the decision-makers of the company aren’t fully integrated into the change project, the change manager’s work will be doomed as he or she will lack the necessary standing in day-to-day operations to get their messages across. To avoid being thwarted by a stream of fresh resistance, the implementation of change works best when the change manager can take on the role of a pilot or navigator, that is to say someone who makes use of the existing management structure and always keeps an eye on the overall targets. Navigating, piloting, and coaching work must therefore be thought of as part of the process of change, from which the company will profit in the long run.
If you have followed these introductory remarks and found them worthwhile, you are most welcome to contact us for more information. Believe what we say and enable your company to benefit from our long-standing experience, expert advice, and foresight in Change Management. Make Jansen2 your first call.
© 2001 - 2012 Lutz Jansen Unternehmensberater BDU | Diese Seite verschicken | 
Seitenanfang