What Is Change Management?
How to Manage Change Effectively through Employee Engagement
Change is resisted because it disrupts our routines and makes us fear failure. Also, it is too top-down. Employees need to be more fully engaged at all stages.
Too many change management principles regard change as a short-term event, like implementing a new procedure or IT system. Organizations are advised how to prepare people for a momentous event and get them through it with minimal damage and cost. The event-management approach to change may be outdated in an era where change is virtually constant. What we need instead is to cultivate cultures where all employees are constantly seeking to improve. They need to take to heart the mantra "Nothing succeeds like success," which means that today's great practices and products are certain to fail tomorrow so we must keep the change ball rolling continuously.
Another problem with many approaches to change management is that they are too top-down. The whole focus is on how to break down the resistance to change of stubborn employees. We miss the point that it is the people who develop the idea to change who are the most enthusiastic about it. Senior executives aren't more adaptable than lower level employees. The real problem is that ownership is at the top.
Resistance to Change
People resist change for good reason. Everyone is under great pressure to meet targets and, to be efficient, we need routines. A great deal of our work may require us to solve problems with some creative thinking, but the bulk of it can be done on automatic pilot once we know what we are doing. This takes a lot less effort than having to think through from scratch how to do something. Change is frustrating because it disrupts people's routines. This is very threatening because it raises the possibility that we might not meet our targets if we have to learn something new. It is a worrying thought that we might not be competent in the new methods.
Change is also annoying because someone else is trying to tell us how to do our job better. This is insulting and people resist it for emotional reasons no matter how good the idea might be.
Effective Change Management
A key principle advocated by change agents is communication, to keep people informed fully at each step of a major change project. Involving people in change usually means little more than getting them together to deliver the latest messages. What is really needed is a much deeper level of engagement. The best change managers use excellent change facilitation skills to draw solutions out of people, not just for a specific change initiative, but on an ongoing basis in an effort to foster a change oriented culture. Skilled facilitation means asking questions which are all variations on "What do you think?" Such questions would include: "What would you see as the benefits of doing X?" Or, "How would you implement this in your area?" Or, "If you went back to the drawing-board, which of your routines could you radically overhaul and how?" Another good question is "How is this a leadership opportunity for you?" By drawing solutions for improvement out of the people who have to live with them, the odds of resistance are greatly reduced. Ownership is thereby fostered at the front lines rather than sold from the top-down.
Resistance can be tackled by asking people to cite benefits of the change. They are quick to list objections. Ineffective change managers argue with resistant employees. They try harder to sell the need for change, which only increases resistance. A better strategy is to ask employees to set aside their objections for a moment and make as long a list as they can of the benefits they can see for the change. People are more likely to buy a change if they can put the benefits in their own words. The skilled change manager addresses each objection in turn, by asking questions like: "How could you address this issue?" "What could you do to get around this obstacle?" The key here is to continually push ownership back onto the employee.
Cultivating a Change Mind-Set
To foster a change oriented culture, all employees should be given improvement targets to encourage networking and keeping abreast of the latest practices in their fields. They should identify comparable fields to learn about new practices emerging in related disciplines. All employees should have dual responsibilities: one to deliver today's results and two to help the organization create the future. Employees at all levels should be encouraged to see themselves as change leaders.
