Leon Gettler: Why change management is hard work | Management ...

For decades now, academics, consultants and managers have been looking at change management. Everyone agrees it?s a difficult and thankless task. Try changing an organisation and you get conflict. It comes with the territory because change undermines time-honoured treaties, rituals and arrangements.? Even if it doesn?t tear the organisation apart, it blows existing power relationships out of the water. Change threatens to destroy empires built around systems and processes.? It?s not great for certain careers, either. It can generate hotly contested turf wars that produce winners and losers. Camps emerge on all sides: those for, those against, and the fence-sitters. But change is necessary for organisations to keep adjusting to market conditions.

First, it has to be said that change management programs have a notoriously high failure rate. The consultants at Forrester put it as high as 70 per cent. They say that organisations fail to realisze the impact of change on the employees. They do not plan and execute carefully enough to address the people issues through all phases of business process change management.

So what are the biggest mistakes? One of the world?s most eminent management thinkers, John Kotter, summed up the problem in a now classic piece written for the Harvard Business Review, Leading Change: Why? Transformation Efforts Fail. ?The most general lesson to be learned from the more successful cases is that the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time. Skipping steps only creates the illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second very general lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating hard won gains.?

Kotter says managers make several mistakes: not establishing a great enough sense of urgency, not creating a powerful guiding coalition, lacking a vision, under communicating the vision by a factor of 10, not removing obstacles to the new vision, not planning and creating short term wins, declaring victory too soon and failing to anchor changes in the corporation?s culture.

The consultants at McKinsey say that managers need to communicate their vision clearly and spell out where they want to take the organisation over the next two years.

The sub-text in what Kotter and McKinsey are saying is that change management is political. Managers undertaking change management need to build coalitions of support. They might like to stay above office politics, but they could do worse than read Machiavelli, one of the greatest political philosophers of all time.

Machiavelli could have been describing change management when he wrote 500 years ago: ?It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes in a state?s constitution. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.?

In other words, managers implementing change management programs need to remember that the odds turn in their favour once they know, like any good politician, how to persuade, establish a sense of urgency, win support, and silence the naysayers. Change management is a political process, deal with it.

How would you handle change management? What advice would you give?

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