Four Ways to Know Whether You are Ready for Change
This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog on June 2, 2010. It has been reposted with the expressed consent of the author.
Why can some companies take advantage of any change the market brings (Apple), while others struggle with the even the smallest internal or market-necessitated modification (GM)? Chances are your company has successfully executed a planned change initiative, but been unable to take advantage of a change brought on by market demands. Or vice versa. The reasons why will differ for each organization, but the question is definitely worth asking - especially in light of the fact that the pace of change is accelerating at the fastest rate in recorded history.
In our experience, the companies most likely to be successful in making change work to their advantage are the ones that no longer view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business. GE, Hewlett-Packard and Nissan are three companies who are starting to treat change as a constant event; not as an initiative that needs to be managed. In these organizations, change readiness is the new change management.
Change readiness is the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance. The age-old challenge: balancing the tension between the internal and external focus required to do all three equally.
This continuous and integrated approach to change requires the coordinated participation of everyone in the company, not just a few change agents or change leaders. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, articulated this in the company’s 2007 annual report when he explained that his new senior management team training, Leadership, Innovation and Growth (LIG), was to “embed growth into the DNA of our company.”
In a Harvard Business Review article “How GE Teaches Teams to Lead Change,” Immelt explains what he meant by that statement.
“… getting the teams leading the businesses to think about organic growth day in and day out - to be constantly on the lookout for opportuities and to create inspirational strategic visions that would enlist their troops in the cause… to weave innovation and growth into every aspect of their businesses… their behavior, their roles, how they spent their time.”
The need for this organic, constant approach to change is acknowledged in a Center for Creative Leadership White Paper, Transforming your Organization in which the authors conclude that organizations “need a new kind of leadership capacity to reframe dilemmas, reinterpret options, and reform operations - and to do so continuously.”
This is pretty ground breaking considering that our understanding of organizational change has has remained fundamentally intact since the innovative work of Lewin in the 1940s. Likewise, the concept of change management as a process of reorganizing, restructuring and reengineering (PDF link), which evolved incrementally over two decades.
Leaders know these theories no longer work, and even seem crazy considering how much the marketplace and corporate environments have changed in the same time period. Product lifecycle has never been so compressed, nor the need to innovate so fierce.
Consider BP and the oil still spewing from the company’s deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico more than a month after the initial explosion. No 10-step change management process is going to help BP’s management. The company must simultaneously react and innovate - all while maintaining their daily business. The BP situation may be extraordinary, but it does illustrate the need for change readiness vs. change management.
The discrepancy in the accelerated rate of change and the outdated change management practices still employed today unarguably have much to do with the 70% failure rate of change initiatives - a dismal statistic validated by study after study. Failure rates this high demand a new mindset and new actions, but before you can improve your change readiness, you must first assess current change awareness, agility, reactions and mechanisms.
Change Awareness. Change Awareness is a company’s ability to redefine itself as necessary. This contextual focus is critical to innovation - the right product at the right time. Good change awareness practices include scanning the environment for opportunities, focusing on emerging trends and planning for the future. Does your company have people responsible for regularly assessing the market for new opportunities and market changes? Does your company proactively search for opportunities for brand renewal and product innovation?
Change Agility. Change agility represents your company’s ability to engage people in pending changes. This is an internal focus that is critical to the company’s ability to effectively implement identified innovations. A great idea won’t matter if you can’t muster the capacity and commitment to carry it through. An organization with good change agility has the capacity to stretch when necessary and quickly shift resources to the place they will make the most difference. Leadership should inspire confidence and trust, and consistently. How agile is your company? How effective are your managers at engaging and delivering the changes envisioned by your decision makers? How well does your company actually facilitate and execute on change when it is needed?
Change Reaction. Change reaction is the ability to appropriately analyze problems, assess risks, and manage the reactions of employees. This internal focus ensures your company can sustain the day-to-day business while reacting in a timely and appropriate manner to self-initiated and market-dictated change. How effectively do you and other leaders at your company assess risk and manage unplanned change? How well does your organization react and respond to crisis?
Change Mechanisms. Change Mechanisms should encourage clear goal alignment across functions, the ability to integrate a change into existing systems, accountability for results, and reward systems that reinforce desired change behaviors. This contextual focus is critical to the ability to implement desired change with no interruption to daily operation. Are your structures and systems flexible enough to adapt and support the implementation of change? Does your organization have the structures and systems in place to support the successful implementation of change?
We have found that managers at companies like the ones mentioned here are asking themselves questions like these in the effort to build a capacity for change readiness instead of change management.
How are you working to increase your company’s change readiness?
Chris Musselwhite is president and CEO of Discovery Learning Inc. Tammie Plouffe is the managing partner of Innovative Pathways.
There’s a Fine Line between Courage and Foolishness
Last week, I decided to forego the mall and take my 11-year old son Santiago to a secondhand store to purchase him some dress clothes for a friend’s wedding. As I was hunting for suits in the boys department, Santi went on his own hunting trip and returned a few minutes later clutching a marble trophy and looking me right in the eyes. “Can I get this?” he asked. I looked more closely at the trophy and saw it had an engraving:
A courageous individual constitutes a majority.
I asked him why he wanted it. He said, “It will remind me to always stand up for what I believe in no matter what other people think.” I paused for a moment. Then, I looked at Santi and realized again how fortunate I was to live with one of my greatest teachers.
The engraving on the trophy inspired me to reflect more on courage, and the courageous individuals it might be referring to. Of course, Rosa Parks came to mind, as well as the young Chinese student who stood against the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. I also thought of Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning, who singlehandedly blocked the vote on a bill which would have extended unemployment benefits to millions of laid-off workers. There was no doubt in my mind that these individuals firmly and passionately believed in what they were doing, and whether one agrees with their opinions and tactics or not, their courage could not be denied.
But there is a fine line between courage and foolishness. I believe that line is defined by timing, context, the message, and the messenger.
In 1863, nearly one hundred years before Mrs. Parks boarded that historic bus, Mrs. Charlotte L. Brown took a seat in the mid-section of a San Francisco railcar and was forcibly removed by the driver. Both Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Parks were African-American women of a similar age living under oppressive conditions. They posed no threat to others, but simply were tired and wanted to take an empty seat. So the context, message and messengers were much the same in both situations. But the timing was not right for Mrs. Brown and she all but disappeared from our history books. But for Mrs. Parks, history and society proved that the timing was right for her action to have a larger impact.
Likewise for Senator Bunning, he stood his ground as his allies continued to withdraw their support. Was he falling victim to timing or context? Perhaps his message was misdirected, or he was simply the wrong person to deliver it. Whatever the reason, his show of courage was quickly slipping into an act of foolishness.
Wise leaders need to have the courage to stand by their convictions no matter what. But they also need to look around and see who is listening. Are their listeners leaning forward with piqued interest or are their arms crossed with impatience and disinterest? Is this the right moment?
Senator Bunning decided that it was not his right moment. Mind you, I can’t really know whether he waffled on his beliefs and convictions; but his change in tactics suggest that he understood the time was not right and no one was standing with him.
As leaders committed to social change, we need to be mindful of our timing, context, messages and messengers.
Thinking, communicating and planning strategically are keys in assuring success. Much of my work involves getting organizations and communities on the same page with their mission, vision, values and strategic direction. And when that happens, the courageous individual can rest assured that her opinion will have a great and lasting impact.
P.S. Santi’s trophy is sitting on his bookcase. We also got him a designer suit, a shirt, tie and a pair of dress shoes - all for twenty-four dollars - and he looked impeccable. So the moral of this story is to check out your local secondhand store. You never know what treasures might await you.
Still Pushing for DREAM (Inside Higher Ed)
“This week, news reports have suggested that Congressional Democrats are pushing ahead to take up immigration reform legislation, which would most likely include measures aimed at putting students who spend at least two years in college on a path to permanent residency,” Inside Higher Ed reports. “It was with this sense that such change might finally be in the offing, after close to a decade of false starts, that the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good, based at the University of Michigan, and the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance convened for ‘Challenges and Opportunities: Future Pathways Towards Immigration and Higher Education,’ a three-day conference designed to build support for policies aimed at helping college students who are also undocumented residents of the United States.”
This post originally posted to FinancialAidNews.com on April 28th, 2010.