How do You Fine Tune the 'Change Management' Process?

Change is not for its own sake, but putting people at the center of the change.

Change is the new normal. However, more than two-thirds of the Change Management effort fails to achieve business expectations. When would you communicate the change imperative to your employees and how would you ensure their buy-in to this new directive? And how do you well tune the “Change Management” processes in managing change with efficiency, effectiveness, and agility?

Ownership and accountability of change management lie in the capable hands of the executive team. Change Management always fails when management thinks they get all the answers, and they come up with a plan in a vacuum and try to sell it. It’s important to have the team own a process by bringing them in early and getting their involvement in creating the process. Your job as management is to make the final call and make sure the team adheres to the process, and they know why it's needed and what it fixes or improves. And 'exceptional change leaders' need to ensure that they dilute change management principles and monitoring techniques at all levels down below until they reach the lower-level employees.

It needs a solid organizational culture that is built on the foundations of 'accepting change.' Not every management executive has a foolproof plan laid out. Even the management has a complete, realistic plan in place, who's to say that the employees will not show resistance to the proposed change? Business executives themselves cannot be the only people who can successfully transform the organization. In some organizations, the management team lives in an illusionary world when they 'assume' that their employees will accept change in a gracious manner. Organizations are a huge melting pot of various personalities and depending on the generation the comprised employees belong to, 'change' is probably the last thing on their minds, regardless of how enthusiastic the management team is. Therefore, you need to gain all marketing skills been taught in the world before committing the change management Journey.

Communication, exemplification, and amplification of best practices are all crucial steps in building a changing-enabling culture.  Make sure all of the management is on board and educated well on the objectives and how to carry them out effectively. Often that works on a micro-level should work on a macro level, you just need to have a strong team of middle managers to delegate to. How you do this will tie into the cultural and philosophical values you project to the organization as a leader. You need to not only sell the policy but also sell values on culture and philosophy. Management needs to allow the community to have a voice for feedback, a much-needed mechanism to refine and fix a policy that is not functioning at an optimal level. During the whole process making sure that all staff is aware of the plan and process, timely updated, and responsible for something. Make yourself accessible all the time in case there are questions from the staff.

Following the scenario with logic steps to manage changes: In order to execute a successful change management process, there is a need to delegate roles and responsibilities of the process, and have an honest communication plan in place. First of all, organizational managers should remind themselves that Change Management is all about balancing the following main elements impacting change: People (the most important one), Strategies, Procedures and IT. And you have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by establishing a committee involving the management in the HR, IT and operations. Secondly, you want to emphasize on the Human Resources role in the change management because people are always considered as the real axle for the organizational movement. Hence, people's resistance could stop all other elements. Change Management part that is played by the HR is the factor number one for any successful organizational & Strategic Change Management. Thirdly, Change Management is a leadership game, and leadership involvement is a must. Lastly, having a Change Management agenda ready, with planned and ensured communication from top to down would highly help in building the new culture.

A systematic Change Management takes logic processes and stepwise scenario. It is about leaders identifying their vision, strategy, and approach, make people feel responsible for the success of the plan, engage them actively and make sure that your new proposal solves their current problems and provides a better working environment. It means change is not for its own sake, but putting people at the center of the change.

Posted in: Business Process Management,Change Management