Executives, employees, analysts, researchers and business people generally have a strong opinion that when a company decides to launch a new product, plans to downsize, restructure or introduce strategic software, it will save, move forward or downright destroy the company. These are simply speculations and no one can really say how successful the change initiative will be.
Although it is impossible to predict the future accurately, systematic steps and methods can increase the chances of successful change, setting the right expectations, learning as you go and shaping the project, but they can also be called off at any moment if it turns out that the initial decision was hasty or wrong.
Our change management approach can give you a real competitive edge, providing quick strategic and tactical solutions, not writing documents, but helping you to implement your ideas. We don’t just deliver the project, we make a strong impact in the organisation, creating lasting value.
In our experience, no two projects are the same, so the first step is to throw all the clichés out of the window. No one method works everywhere. Business is not a laboratory. Even if you have mapped out the processes, even if you have selected the sponsors and the host of the process at all levels of the organisation, these activities do not in themselves represent what people actually do and say. Everything you have done so far may get people enthusiastic about change, but enthusiasm alone does not mean change itself.
Before we say anything, we will clarify your goals, review the resources available and how committed you are to change. We clarify the strategic direction that the organisation has set with senior leaders. We then need to identify priorities and key actions. This will be the initial information for those working at lower levels of the organisation. At the end of the first step, all members of the senior management team will have a common understanding:
New outcomes will require new behaviours in the organisation, so first and foremost, managers need to demonstrate the new behaviours that the change will bring and be able to give appropriate feedback to their staff: encouraging repetition of the right behaviour with positive consequences or giving corrective feedback to stop unwanted behaviours.
The key point here is not to rush in the hope of a quick result, and not to think in terms of quick wins only. At the same time, we are not doing a deep psychological analysis, just digging deep into behaviour to the extent necessary to find those that need to be changed. We equip leaders with the necessary skills through workshops, coaching, focus groups, etc.
Once all leaders and key people have mastered the behaviours at the right level, implementation can begin. Leaders and other key people help to mobilise the others, in effect becoming ambassadors for change. We can talk about effectiveness when the behaviour of leaders and key people has developed, performance has improved and results are getting better. We measure, report and fine-tune regularly because we believe in evidence-based management.
At this point, we provide personal counselling and feedback to help the management team learn effective leadership behaviours and overcome any obstacles that may arise.
At the end of the process, new behaviours and ways of working must be sustainable. You need to make sure that the organisational structure and its processes support the new behaviours and are consistent with each other. Unfortunately, this is the point that is missed at the end of most change initiatives.
The new tools and concepts need to be integrated into business planning, leadership development, talent management and all the core activities that drive the organisation’s operations, and aligned with the HR functions of the company that assess and incentivise performance. Sustaining change is supported by Act2Manage, our state-of-the-art leadership development application. Our experienced team in change management and leadership ensures that a carefully constructed project does not go into decline once we move on.
Checking our calendar, we had a kick-off meeting at the beginning of 2021 and started dreaming about the 4.0 version of our Act2Manage leadership development application. And now, we have just released the improved version including most of those dreams. It is a major change from professional perspective as well, we implemented a number of new functions based on behavioural science and neuroscience.
Working with managers over the last decades I am getting more and more convinced that despite trainings (or because of a lot of poor ones) managers have got confused about the concept of management.
It’s always great to see when L&D professionals make an effort to find data-based evidence for the effectiveness of various training and development initiatives. One day, Fuse, a digital learning tool provider (no, not LMS, but a totally different approach) joined forces with the AI Center of University College London to work for Carpetright, an international retailer with 420 outlets and 3000 employees. They wanted to find out if digital learning results in measurable performance improvement in sales.
Over the past twenty years I have had a chance to see hundreds of performance appraisal documents that had a goal setting section. An incredibly high proportion contained low quality, vague goals, such as “keep up with the good work” or “develop communication skills”. All these managers missed an opportunity to actually carry out their primary responsibilities: improve the work performance and output of their people, and help them grow.
