Mom used to always say “count your blessings”.  As the year comes to an end, organizations should to the same – with a twist.

If you work in an organization that is making plans for the new year, you should “count your successes”.

The path to growth and improvement can be long and bumpy.  There can be detours, side-tracks, unexpected challenges.   And that long, bumpy ride can make progress feel like a failure.

But if you stop, take a breath, and look back, you will see how far you’ve come.  It may not be as far as you wanted, but it’s almost always further than you thought it was before you took the time to look back and count your successes.

For the people who work in an organization, taking the time to reinforce the progress that has been made and the good work that has been done is invaluable.  Nothing motivates a team like a bit of success.  A winning team is pumped and ready to go out and win again.

This doesn’t mean you should completely ignore things that have not gone well.  But for just a moment, don’t focus on the misses.  Focus only on the hits.  Tell people that too… “I know it hasn’t been perfect.  We can talk about all of the ways we could have done better another time.  For now, let’s just be proud of all that we have accomplished.”

So take time to count the successes your organization has had over the last year.  And celebrate!

In today’s business environment, there’s no such thing as “steady state”.  Getting accustomed to making change happen quickly is an integral part of building and leading an effective organization.  Whether responding to customer demands, making course corrections when a strategy is running off the rails, or quickly integrating a new product or service line when the perfect opportunity drops in your lap, organizations need to change fast.

When it comes to organizational change, there are some things that leaders should know, and some common misconceptions that should be dispelled.  Here’s what you should believe, and what you should not believe.

FACT:  Organizational changes happen when individuals within the organization change.  Organizations are essentially groups of individuals.  New processes, structures and rules can be put in place, but if people are not committed to new ways of thinking and acting, the changes are not likely to be successful.

FACT:  The human reactions that occur during any given change are at least as important as any other aspect of implementing change.  People naturally and inevitably react emotionally when we ask them to think and act in new ways.  The behavior of the people who make the organization work changes as individuals move through their individual transition process and develop commitment.

FACT:  The more involved people are in a change, the less negative their inevitable reactions will be.  People naturally support what they help create.

FACT:  The emotional response people will have to a change intensifies as the speed of change increases.  If you want change to happen fast, you can expect there to be stronger resistance than if you are on a “we’ll get to it when we get to it” timeline.

FACT:  The longer a group, individual, or situation has remained static, the greater the investment in the status quo and the greater the resistance to change.  The fact that people are proud of what they do and how they do it is a great thing – except when you want to change it.

While there are basic truths that leaders should believe about change, there are also some little-white-lies about change that they should not believe.

FICTION:  Time takes care of everything.  People are able to think and act in new ways by moving through the human process of transition and developing commitment – not through sitting and waiting.  Without intervention, that process can take weeks, months, years, or may never fully happen.  (William Bridges, Managing Transitions, 1991 & 2003 William Bridges and Associates)

FICTION:  Everyone who isn’t on board with a change has something wrong with them.  New neuroscience research confirms that it takes more physical energy to do new things than it does to do things the same old way.  And the natural human reaction is to conserve that physical energy. Resistance is a natural response to change.  (Rock and Schwartz, “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, Strategy + Business, Issue 43)

FICTION:  The reasons for the change will be seen in a rational manner and will therefore be easy for people to go along with.  People are not singularly rational beings.  There is an emotional connection that people need to make to really commit to the new way.  (Lee Colan, Passionate Performance, 2004 Cornerstone Leadership)

FICTION:  If communication is done “right” the first time, it is enough.  People generally need to “hear” a message anywhere from eight to ten times to really get it.  And “right” is different during a change process for each person.  While there are times that a company-wide meeting and presentation is what people need, there are also times when they need a one-on-one conversation with a boss or a roundtable conversation with peers.

FICTION:  Change happens at or on a scheduled discrete event.  While new processes, structures or rules can be scheduled to start or take place on a specific date, people travel through their individual transition over some period of time.

Based on the facts and fiction, it may seem that we should all throw our hands up and go home.  But luckily there are proven ways to manage change that can deal with the challenges that are presented with changing organizations. Pay attention to the facts, ignore the fiction, and make your change successful!

This blog rounds up my top five signs that indicate you need change management on your project.  Here’s a quick review of what I covered in the previous 2 blog posts:

1. Sign #1  Leaders aren’t visibly supporting your project
2. Sign #2 Employees don’t have a clue about what’s going to change
3. Sign #3 When people talk about the project, you think, “Why are they saying THAT?” 

Sign #4 is  No one’s talking about stakeholder strategies.  True learning, commitment and understanding come from involvement and hands-on participation. The more people are involved in change, the less negative their inevitable reaction will be. People naturally support what they help create. Truly involving others takes time, the ability to select the right people and the ability to delegate and manage diverse groups. Identifying various audiences and involving others the right way takes prioritization, inclusiveness and empowerment. The payoff for this approach is employee buy-in and commitment to the new strategy or goal.

Change managers document impacts by stakeholder and create specific transition strategies so workers are well prepared. These strategies include activities that help promote understanding and commitment to working differently.

Last but not least, sign #5 is  HR is not included in the planning.  Support and reinforcement are critical for making changes stick.  Sometimes, some of the old ways of hiring, developing and compensating people will work just fine in the new world.  But often, the reinforcing systems in the organization are misaligned with the new behaviors.  Without reinforcing new behaviors, people naturally revert back to old ways of working. To sustain change, the organization needs to have the right infrastructure in place to reinforce the change. 

This is where HR comes in. They bring additional perspective on how these systems should and can be changed. They usually play an important role in the training that takes place before go live as well. The sooner HR can understand the impact to the employees, the sooner they can start working on ensuring these supporting eliminates are aligned with the new business goals.

The Change Manager’s role includes connecting communication, leadership, HR and project activities so they are consistent and coordinated in terms of transitioning the workers.

Change Managers work on the People Strategy. This is a critical element when driving organizational change. After all, it’s the people who will do the new process, use the new system or have to work with a new team every day.

So, from the previous post, we discussed how  if Leaders aren’t visibly supporting your project, you need Change Management. People take their ques from leaders to figure out what’s important and what’s not. But what else signals the need for Change Management activities?

Sign number 2 is when Employees don’t have a clue about what’s going to change.  Good communication takes strategy and planning. It takes organization, consistency and a continuous improvement mindset.  Sound easy? Most organizations don’t do it. They underestimate what it takes to communicate effectively. Although it takes effort, effective communication is worth it…and is a key element to successful organizational change.

The Change Manager drives a proactive, communication strategy aligned with the project and organization’s vision. This strategy considers messages and vehicles for large audiences as well as specific, targeted strategies for the different stakeholder communities. Often, different stakeholder groups have different needs for information. Vehicle effectiveness varies by audience as well. A change manager has the experience to understand how to communicate during change which is different from communicating during times of status quo.

Sign #3? When people talk about the project, you think, “Why are they saying THAT?”  For change to be possible, people have to believe that the change is worth doing. The idea of change can be a hard sell if the people believe everything is great just as it is. Perception is reality.

In this situation, the employees’ perceptions must be changed before their actions will change. To create this change, the current situation must be reframed in a way that gets the employees’ attention. This reframing will get people unstuck, get them to pay attention and, most importantly, get them to care about new ideas. Reframing also helps employees recognize there is room for improvement and change is a top priority. To change their perceptions, employees need new information, new cues and new messages.

A Change Manager knows how to reframe the situation, help create a sense of urgency and develop a case for change that resonates with the audience.

If you are on a project, where, leaders aren’t visibly and consistently supporting the effort, if you are on a project where stakeholders don’t understand the change and/or don’t think there is a need for the change, you need to add a member to your team with Change Management skills.

We’ve all seen projects fail. Recognizing these red flags and adding change management activities to the project plan, will absolutely increase the chances of project success. Stay tuned for signals 4 and 5 coming soon…

Many companies staff skilled Project Managers on projects yet miss the boat on staffing projects with skilled Change Managers. Organizational Change  Management skills are complimentary but different than Project Management skills. Change managers focus on communication, engagement, transition, support and reinforcement strategies. You need someone on your team with change management skills if…

1)  Leaders aren’t visibly supporting your project.  People watch
what leaders do and say and then filter that information to figure out if they should support a change or not.  Talking the talk is useless if walking the walk doesn’t follow. During times of major change, leaders are watched with even more scrutiny than usual. I don’t want to make leaders paranoid but they usually underestimate how much importance is placed on even one action. Importance can even be placed on inaction. For example, not showing up to participate in a meeting sends a signal to those attending.

When leaders are aligned and supportive of a change, there is success.
When leaders are not aligned and supportive, there is failure (“Best
Practices in Change Management,” Prosci 2002, 2005). Change Managers coach
leaders on their role. They provide direction, recommend actions and even write
leadership talking points. The Change manager connects the project to the
leaders in a way that influences others to support the change.

If your leadership is not visibly supporting your project, you need to add someone with change management skills to your team.

To be continued…

Truly exceptional organizations facilitate continuous learning and
transformation.  In order to bring about effective organizational change, individuals within an organization needs to be ready, willing, and able to work in new ways… over and over again!  That means that the individuals who make up the organization continuously learn and transform.

Organizational learning is tricky business these days.  People are busy.  Budgets are tight.  And adults are not really programmed to learn in the same ways that most of did when we were in school.

Adults at work learn in lots of different ways.  There is of course experiential learning that takes place every day through interactions, mentoring relationships, and on the job activity.  But there are also crafted learning experiences like training and workshops that are critical components of a continuous learning strategy.

Continually educating the workforce so they can work smarter, leaner and faster can be very expensive if we think about learning from our traditional viewpoints.  Everyone in a classroom.  Days away from the job.  The dreaded hotel conference or ball room.  These models can still work, but there are other options.  With geographically dispersed workforces, as well as ongoing demands of our jobs, looking at virtual options for learning only makes sense.

One concern that comes to mind when looking to virtual forms of learning is the loss of the benefits of interactions with a trainer and classmates.  With live virtual events (“live” meaning that the training takes place with a live teacher and classmates, “virtual” meaning that the group does not sit in the same physical room but shares an electronic or virtual room), the benefits of live training can be paired with the benefits of virtual training.

When facilitating organizational change, there is almost always the need to help people learn new ways of working.  Being creative about the way training is delivered (in one shot or broken up into small bits over time, in one location or from disparate locations) can reduce resistance to training and even improve the effectiveness of the learning.

If people in your organization need training to be effective at whatever change
you are trying to implement, think about how to best deliver that training so that you can meet the demands of the learners as well as the change.

You don’t need a lot of research to show you that change in organizations is an ever increasing phenomena.  New technologies, new products, new competitors, new regulations, new people with new values and experiences.  Every day, organizations try to stay one step ahead of their competitors by changing to meet the needs of their customers either cheaper or faster or both.

Not too long ago, many started recognizing that change within organizations needed to be proactively managed.  Those that were forward- thinking started working explicitly to help the people in their organizations get ready, willing, and able to work in new ways that were required for future success.

Those that hoped people would just “get with the program” or “do what I said because I said so” have lived (and died) with the results of low productivity, engagement, and performance relative to their more enlightened competitors.

For the organizations that have worked hard to manage the people aspects of change explicitly, the rewards have been forthcoming.  But change is speeding up.  As soon as one change is “complete”, it seems another is starting up.  Just paying attention to managing the people aspects of organizational change will not be good enough as time goes by.  The organizations that thrive in the long
term need to develop an organizational change competency.  Change needs to become part of an organizations culture and DNA.

Given the pace of business change today and in the future, building a change management competency is going to be a clear competitive advantage for organizations of the future.  Organizations that are really good at helping their people move from thinking and acting in existing ways to thinking and acting in new ways that are required for the organization’s success are the ones that are going to beat their competition every time.

For lots of years, organizations have viewed change as an event.  Implementing an ERP system.  Reengineering processes.  Redesigning an organization.  Spinning off a division or merging with another entity.  Some have grinned and bared it just waiting for the pain to stop.  Others have learned to muscle through with less pain, but memories that are less than fond.  And still others have gotten pretty good at managing these kinds of change events.

Organizations range from having no change management focus or skill at all, to complete integration and competence in managing the people side of change.

What does it take to build an internal change management competency?  Some organizations are building change management functions or centers of expertise (such as Motorola).  Having a team of people who are dedicated to focusing only on the human elements of change ensures that it is not forgotten.

Other organizations are developing and adopting common tools and techniques that can be used across an organization to manage change.  For example, Johnson & Johnson has their “Change Integration Process” and General Electric has their “Change Acceleration Process”.  The use of a common language and approach to manage the people aspects of change speeds up the process of managing change and instills a mindset that helping people navigate through change is important.

If you don’t want to create your own model for managing the people aspects of change, then adopt one that’s out there already that fits your organization’s level of sophistication and experience.  Start letting people in the organization know why managing change is important.  The act alone of teaching staff about a change management process and tools sends a powerful signal to employees that
the people part of change is important.  And build the skills, tools, and common language to help people start doing the work.

Change management is the next frontier of business improvement for organizations of all sizes.  Just as Six Sigma and Lean started with big companies and “trickled down” to smaller organizations and became a real competitive advantage for some, effectively managing ongoing change is starting to trickle down.  If you can be ahead of the next guy by building an organization that is capable of managing people during change, you won’t be sorry.

Studies over the years have continued to confirm what you may have already suspected… the greatest contributor to successful organizational change is leadership.  In a studies of hundreds of companies and their change efforts, “Strong Executive Sponsorship” was cited three times more frequently
than any other contributing factor to successful change  by Prosci (Best Practices in Change Management) in both 2005 and 2009.

If your organization is currently undergoing or contemplating a change, the focus should be on leadership.  There are two elements of leadership that should be fully understood and addressed:

• Alignment – the extent to which leaders are “on the same page” about what the change is, why it is important, what it will mean to the organization
• Sponsorship – the things that leaders are actually doing to demonstrate their support for a change such as contributing resources, attending key meetings, and encouraging others to work with the project team

Understanding the degree of leadership alignment and sponsorship around the change and identifying and addressing leadership issues will position the change for success.

Collecting information about leadership alignment and sponsorship that you need doesn’t have to be a big deal.  A few candid discussions and well conducted interviews can do the trick.

A friend of mine if the President of a mid-size company.  We were having dinner recently and he mentioned that they were evaluating ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendors.  Put simply, ERP systems are complex computer software programs that integrate all functions and departments across a company onto a single system.

ERP systems bring together most if not all ofthe data used by an organization into one place.  They link up business processes across an organization as they share information.  Not every department of an organization needs to be part of an ERP system (although the more the merrier in the ERP view), but at least a few functions such as finance, the shop floor, the warehouse, or HR are often included.

One integrated software system for people planning manufacturing runs, taking orders, and generating purchase orders for new raw materials is a powerful tool.  It can have a tremendous payback if used well.  No more taking orders for items that are actually out of stock; no more taking orders from customers who are past due on payments; and no more telling customers they have to call someone else to figure out where their order is.

Although ERP systems can be fantastic for organizations when implemented well, they are not always all peaches and cream.  Customization to reflect a specific business can be hard and expensive.  ERP systems are generally not cheap.  And they aren’t simple to use.

Most importantly, ERP systems require people to change how they do their jobs.  If people don’t change the way they work, the value of a the system be minimal, and the organization can even suffer a hit to productivity and effectiveness as people work around the new system to keep doing things the way they have always done them.

The effective use of an ERP system requires a level of discipline and willingness to share information across departments.  Accountability and communication are key cultural attributes in ERP environments.  If an organization is not a cultural fit for ERP at the outset, the amount of change in store is even greater for people.

To overcome some of these limitations of ERP, it helps to focus on how people work.  Make sure you know very clearly what will be different for each person or role in the organization.  What will Mary have to do differently?  What new information will she need?  How specifically will she need to use the new system?  What decisions will she have to make?  Who will she have to interact with?

To make sure that people are ready willing and able to effectively use an ERP system give them specifics about the changes coming as soon as you know them.  Demo the system so that people can see what the ERP looks like.  Let people do some role-play exercises or games in the system to see what happens when they get things right versus make mistakes.  Train people according to their specific roles.  And create training that is based on business processes, not just the system.

When considering an ERP system, think about the total impact on the business – not just the new software.  Consider the process changes that need to go along with the software, the culture of the organization, and the people who work there.

Can your company adapt quickly to change? Successful companies have a repeatable process that helps employees through transitions. They create an environment that prepares employees to think and work in new ways. These companies make sure employees are ready, willing and able to make whatever change is needed to achieve business goals.

How do they do that?  First – communication and involvement. Employees are ready when they understand the status quo is no longer enough. They understand why the change is necessary for the survival of the company. They see it’s a priority by how leaders act. They hear it’s a priority by what leaders say. Benchmarking, sharing data and company goals help make the case for change. Companies good at preparing employees also create temporary work groups and empower employees to make some of the decisions that will affect them.

Second, employees are willing when they are motivated to work in new ways. They’re job has been redesigned and they see how it fits into the new plan. They are recognized and rewarded for adopting the new processes.  They are
willing when they are evaluated based on the new business goals and measures.

Employees are able when they have been educated and trained to support the new way of working. For example, do they know how to measure and track quality? Do they have the tools and skills to work as a team?  Employees are able when the organization structure supports the business goals, whether it’s working in teams or cross functional task forces.

Competition and environmental forces will continue to drive businesses to change. Creating an environment where employees are ready, willing and able is hard work; however, companies that are good at transitioning their employees will adapt quickly and have a competitive advantage.