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#CareerAdvice : #ChangeManagement – How to Deal with These 4 Types of #ChangesAtWork …From Getting a #Promotion, #CompanyRestructure, #Layoffs, to Working with a New Boss.

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When it comes to your career (or life, really) very few things are certain. There is one thing you can count on for sure though. Throughout your professional life, you’ll continue to encounter change, big or small, positive and negative, voluntary and involuntary.

When you experience these changes–you have two choices. You can either actively resist it, or you can accept it and figure out what you can learn from, and how to, leverage the situation. In most cases, the latter is usually the smart option. As Jennifer Harvey Berger previously wrote for Fast Company, in a world that’s only going to become more complex, “shifting your mindset is the only way to not only cope but also make the journey more fun and successful.”

Here are five of the most common changes you can expect to see at work, and how to deal with it so you can continue to thrive in the workplace.

GETTING A PROMOTION

Congratulations! After over-delivering on project after project, and exceeding all your goals that you set with your manager when you started your job, your employer is finally rewarding you with a change in title and an increase in compensation. You’re exhilarated, but you’re also a little confused. What do you do now?

First off, start with figuring out what you will no longer take on, time coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders wrote in a previous Fast Company article. Assuming that your promotion comes with more responsibilities, you will probably need to learn how to master your new tasks, and you won’t be able to do that efficiently if you have to do that on top of your old job. This requires trusting other people, which can be difficult if you have controlling tendencies. But as Saunders pointed out, the higher you move up, the more you have to depend on others. So start to learn to let go of your micro-managing tendencies, and trust that you’re not the only one who knows how to do everything.

It might be counterintuitive to prioritize personal well-being like sleep and exercise. But as Saunders noted, when you are required to perform at a high level, you need to be stricter about making these things a priority. After all, they have a major impact on your productivity. That’s not something you can compromise when you’re required to perform at the next level, Saunders said.

Related: Should you ever accept a promotion without a raise? 

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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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COMPANY RESTRUCTURING

Very few things make employees as anxious as a company reorganization. Regardless of whether or not you survive the re-org, you’re sure to face some big changes. The first step, whatever the outcome, is to acknowledge what you went through, Neil Lewis, co-founder of Working Transitions, told Gwen Moran in a 2017 Fast Company article. If you survived the re-org and felt “survivor guilt,” give yourself permission to feel them. Then slowly rebuild your confidence by assessing what kind of opportunities you can take on to grow, and whether there are any gaps in your skills that you can fill. Lewis also urged that you shouldn’t be afraid of reaching out to your colleagues who have left the organization. After all, they’re a crucial part of your professional network.

If the re-org results in a layoff, The Muse’s Jenni Maier recommends that as soon as you’ve had time to process the news, let your network know you’re looking. When Maier was laid off from her role, she desperately wanted to keep it quiet, but because she was unhappy with (and wanted to change) her situation, she decided to be open about the fact that she was back in the job market. She wrote, “The majority of the interviews I went on after being laid off came from friends-of-friend leads. Leads I never got before I lost my job because no one knew I wanted them. And the position I ended up getting at The Muse? That “in” came from a former manager’s friend.”

Related: Take these steps to boost morale after layoffs

GETTING A NEW BOSS

Your happiness and success in your job has a lot to do with the relationship that you have with your boss. You might spend a long time building this relationship, but people move on, and one day, they might leave. You find yourself reporting to someone new, and you want to establish their trust and respect, quickly.

How do you do it in a way that doesn’t come off as bragging? As Gwen Moran previously wrote in Fast Company, the first step you should take is to build in some “networking” time with your boss–whether it’s coffee, or scheduling some time in a calendar for focused discussion. This way, you can start to learn their goals, working styles and any new ideas they might have, and work to amend your priorities where appropriate. Be proactive in terms of identifying where they might need help–that’s an easy way for you to secure some quick wins to help them shine, which builds goodwill quickly.

A CHANGE IN COMPANY CULTURE AND PROCESSES

Sometimes what the company looks like when you joined looks nothing like the company you’re still working at 2 years later. This especially common in a startup–which tends to start without structures and systems in place. As the company scales, those things become necessary, and sometimes, it can change the company culture, entrepreneur Matt Barba previously wrote for Fast Company.

The first step is acknowledging that structure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and simply accept the fact that it comes with company growth. If you feel like there are some cultures that the company used to have that you want to reinstate–there are ways you can do that without needing approvals from the higher-ups. As SYPartners’ principal Joshua-Michéle Ross said at the 2017 Fast Company Innovation Festival, you can create deep transformations with tiny steps. He went on to say that one of the ways to do this is to create “rituals that solve a problem.” In the case of Airbnb, for example, the home-sharing company found itself with far too many internal meeting as the company grew. Their solution? they started filming the meetings and editing them into digestible content–which solved a problem and got rid of unnecessary bureaucracy.

Your brain might be averse to change, but with time and a shift in perspective, you can learn to accept it. And if you train yourself to be comfortable with uncertainty, you might just see opportunities as a result of those changes that you might not have had otherwise.

ANISA PURBASARI HORTON  is the Assistant Editor for Fast Company’s Leadership section. She covers everything from personal development, entrepreneurship and the future of work.

 

FastCompany.com | August 6, 2018

 

#Leadership : Great Leaders Replace Rules With Accountability…Is it Possible to Replace 90% of All Company Rules? So, What’s your Answer?

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Recently we explored “Why Good Companies Have So Many Bad Rules” and “Why Almost All Rules And Policies Have Bad Outcomes.”  So what is better than rules? How can we replace rules with something that still encourages the best behaviors? In a word: Accountability.

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Yves Morieux, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, urges companies to manage growing complexity not by dictating behaviors and over-specifying processes, but rather by creating a culture and context where the ideal behaviors organically occur.

In his TED talk, As Work Gets More Complex, 6 Rules to Simplify, he shares the story of an automotive company that was suddenly forced to deal with the new financial realities that accompany longer warranties. What happens, for example, when an owner brings his car to the dealer to fix a light, and the mechanic must remove the engine to remove the light? If the car has to stay a week in the garage instead of a couple of hours, it causes the warranty budget to skyrocket. In essence, how could the company make cars as easy to repair as possible?

Initially, the automaker responded with a complicated new process, new job titles, new KPIs, and it all had zero impact on the problem. Then the company changed course. This time, they decided to allow their people to use their own judgment and decision-making but to hold their people accountable for those decisions. Specifically, they made their employees feel what game theorists call the “shadow of the future.” According to Morieux:

“They said to the design engineers: Now, in three years, when the new car is launched on the market, you will move to the after sales network, and become in charge of the warranty budget. And if the warranty budget explodes, it will explode in your face.”

With the decision to make the designers responsible for the warranty budget, the designers’ accountability increased. In effect, company leaders inspired what author Justin Bariso calls “self-empathy” or empathy for your future self. The designers were moved to invest extra effort now to promote easy repairability later, since they were the ones who would have to deal with negative consequences.

 

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I can remember my former partners and I trying very hard to increase “cross-selling” among our different divisions. Cross-selling is a common problem in large organizations and notoriously hard to accomplish. At first, we did all the usual stuff: held a “summit” to rally around it, trained each other on all of our solutions, mandated that every sales call include a secondary pitch of a cross-sell solution.

Of course, nothing changed. Then our CEO decided to make us truly accountable for cross-selling: 100% of our annual bonus was going to be tied to the amount of what we sold of other team’s solutions. One hundred percent! Literally I could have doubled the sales of my business unit, but if I didn’t sell anybody else’s solutions I would have gotten no bonus for that year. Suddenly, everyone was cross-selling everything. Problem solved!

Instead of using rules, look for opportunities to build accountability by assigning ownership and consequences to their decision-making.

I described previously how my old CFO and partner tried to control expenses mandating that nobody could buy sticky notes. And no alcohol could be ordered when having a company meal while traveling. It left everyone feeling micro-managed and bitter.

Wouldn’t it have been better to just set a quarterly office supply budget per person (by role), and trust people to buy whatever they needed? Or even better, set a per role budget and create some kind of contest or reward system for those who came in under budget?

What about travel expenses? What if there were no per meal or per day reimbursement rules for the sales team, but instead everyone’s per day meal expenses were posted on a public rack-and-stack board? Imagine the power of peer pressure when you see most people are spending $25 per day on travel meals and you’ve been averaging $50 per day. What if the top 25% lowest spenders were celebrated or given gift cards as thank you? Wouldn’t expenses organically drop while engagement went up?

How can you pair accountability with coaching? Instead of a hard and fast no-beer rule, what if the CFO just flagged someone’s manager when a meal reimbursement seemed out of line? Then a coaching conversation could take place. Maybe the high expense could be justified (e.g., “It was in Manhattan, I had worked all day and into the night skipping lunch and room service was the only option.”) Or maybe not (e.g., “What, four beers at dinner is too many?”), but it would become a conversation that reinforces the expectations around professional behavior and expenses.

 –

Kevin Kruse is the author of Employee Engagement 2.0 and a top leadership speaker. Join his newsletter at kevinkruse.com.

 

Forbes.com | August 22, 2016 | Kevin Kruse

Your #Career : 4 Ways To Prepare For Inevitable Career Disruption…Disruptive Change is Inevitable. It Doesn’t Have to Be Destructive. Choosing Change Before Immobilizing Obsolescence Knocks on your Door is Within your Control.

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“I Never Saw it Coming” is the All-Too Common Lament of Companies and Leaders Blindsided by Technological and Competitive Disruptions that Leave them Immobilized.  Take digital music. iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora obliterated the global commercial music industry. Office and manufacturing automation is eliminating jobs by the thousands. Artificial Intelligence will render roles like accountants, lawyers, stock brokers, and other knowledge-based workers far less useful. Driverless cars are imminent. What do all of these disruptions have in common? Despite being foreseeable, those most affected by them likely concluded, “Oh, that would never happen!” You may well be someone staunchly avoiding the disruption coming right at you.

business man draw business solutions and plan b concept with marker on glass isolated on white background in studio

I spoke with Jay Samit, author of the provocative and richly insightful book, “Disrupt You!” to learn more about how those who thrive and prosper through disruptive times differ from those that get annihilated by it. Samit says, “You will have your career disrupted. So you have to either proactively turn the impending change into something more enjoyable and fulfilling, or you sit in fear of the inevitable day when the hatchet comes your way and then not know what to do. People who prosper find the spark inside them to change their lives and turn potential catastrophes into career triumphs.”

Disrupt You! is chock full of wisdom from Samit’s multi-decade career in the entertainment world. It’s also full of rich explorations of individual, organizational, and industry-wide sea-changes that disrupted many aspects of life and history.

Reflecting on the deteriorating health in organizations within industries ripe for disruption, Samit notes, “Sadly, people have given up hope for positive change. They work just enough to get a paycheck because the system has driven out individuality. They work enough not to get fired, but not enough to actually care. Self-preservation is the first rule. They duck and cover, hoping someone else gets cut.” Samit advocates for individuals taking control of their destiny before disruption broadsides their career and derails an otherwise promising future. Here are four ways to prepare for disruption to your career or your company, rather than avoiding the inevitable with denial or wishful thinking.

1- Identify and be honest about the tapes playing in your head. Says Samit, “In our childhood, well-meaning parents tell you what you can’t do or become. So people who gave up on their dreams want you to give up on yours. They want you not to live through the heartaches they believe they avoided.” Many people live under the false assumption that we are hard-wired to be certain ways. Tapes that play in our head unconsciously shaping behavior, known as operative narratives, that tell us, “You’re stupid,” or “It’s too late for you” or “Others are better” or “If you try, you’ll fail.” And they trigger a fearful, risk-avoidant impulse that leads us to believe that homeostasis is safer than change. Samit says, “It’s like a big horse tied to a white plastic lawn chair. It’s so conditioned to think it can’t move from that place, he doesn’t bother to learn that if he just starts walking, the chair will go with him.” Be honest about the messages playing in your head that could be holding you back from needed actions that may require the discomfort of taking a risk.

 

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2-Confront denial head on. Stop and ask yourself what assumptions may be preventing you from stepping out into a different future . The more certain you are of something, the more you should find disconfirming data to refute it. Are you in an industry, company, or job that is ripe for disruption? Are you struggling to keep up with advances in technology? Do you cling to methods and processes that are more than 5-8 years old? Have you dismissed something that arrived into your field as just “a passing fad?” What are yourationalizing? Tenure in executive jobs is in a freefall, and most come stamped with an expiration date. To be sure, truthfully looking at shifting ground raises uncertainty and anxiety. But think about the alternatives if your assumptions prove wrong. Says Samit, “When you see the collapse of an otherwise successful career, it means that a signal was missed somewhere along the way.” When asked when the best time to change is, Samit always replies, “The second best time to change is right now. The best time was a year ago.”

 

2- Replace habits with learning. Being forced to is typically the most common reason behind why people change. When people have no choice, suddenly change isn’t so painful. But predictable routines make change that much harder. Samit suggest, “Habits allow us to accomplish more because then we don’t have to think about all our decisions. But that doesn’t mean we develop good habits. It’s just that routine makes us more productive. Dismantling those routines is a painful prospect.” Breaking free of routine requires reflection and learning new routines. We must be intentional about choosing to give up familiar things and investing the energy to learn unfamiliar things. Samit believes, “There’s no difference between the literate and the illiterate if you don’t read. You have to seek out knowledge. Lifelong learning has become the ‘new normal’ for individuals and organizations. If you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.”

 

3- Solicit honest feedback Success is another significant barrier to change. Once you have mastered a skillset, and been reinforced and rewarded for a unique application of that skillset, you’re not likely going to be the first to acknowledge that skillset is headed for obsolescence. If you don’t have a regular source of honest feedback about your skills, what it’s like to work with you, what you could improve, and how you better optimize your strengths, then get one. Nothing helps calibrate reality than the honest perceptions of those who work closest to you . Samit reflects, “One of the greatest downfalls of otherwise promising entrepreneurs is that they are ‘ruined by praise, but saved by criticism.’ They fall so in love with their own ideas and become unable to separate their identity from what they create, that no one can tell them when their baby is ugly.” Leaders who go uncalibrated for too long lose touch with the raw truth of how others experience them. So they convince themselves “all is well” and are shocked when their career derails for behaviors and skill shortages that could have easily been rectified with honest feedback.

Disruptive change is inevitable. It doesn’t have to be destructive. Choosing change before immobilizing obsolescence knocks on your door is within your control. “We are all born into an imperfect world filled with opportunities for improvements,” says Samit. “I grew up in row housing in Philadelphia. If you’d told me many of my friends would be self-made billionaires who had nothing more special than anyone else, I’d have never believed you. For some, improvement comes from working to create a more just society or build products that make life better for customers. We get one time through life. Why would you not want to make the absolute most of this amazing adventure that you could?”

 

Forbes.com | August 16, 2016 | Ron Carucci , CONTRIBUTOR

#Leadership : 10 Change-Management Strategies That Are Backed By Science… If Science helps Explain our Negative Reaction to Change, It also Offers Insights for Helping People Deal with Change.

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I’ve been speaking on change leadership for over 25 years, but only recently have researchers been able to use technology like functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) to look at the brain and see what actually happens when we’re facing a major organizational change.

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For example: Most of our daily activities including many of our work habits are controlled by a part of the brain called the basal ganglia. These habitual repetitive tasks take much less mental energy to perform because they become hard wired and we no longer have to give them much conscious thought. So it’s no wonder that the way we’ve always done it not only feels right, it feels good.

Change jerks us out of this comfort zone by stimulating the prefrontal cortex, a section of the brain responsible for insight and impulse control. But the prefrontal cortex is also directly linked to the amygdala and that’s the brain’s fear circuitry, which in turn controls our freeze, fight or flight response. And when the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed with complex and unfamiliar concepts, the amygdala connection gets knocked into high gear. The result is all those negative feelings of anxiety, fear, depression, sadness, fatigue or anger that change leaders observe in their teams (and often in themselves).

But if science helps explain our negative reaction to change, it also offers insights for helping people deal with change:

1. First of all, make the change familiar. If you show people two pictures of themselves, one an accurate representation and the other a reverse image, people will prefer the second because that’s the image they see in the mirror everyday. It takes a lot of repetition to move a new or complex concept from the prefrontal cortex to the basal ganglia. Continually talking about change, focusing on key aspects will eventually allow the novel to become more familiar and less threatening.

 

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2. Let people create change. No one likes change that’s forced on them; and yet, most people respond favorably to change they create and brain research shows why this is so. At the moment when someone chooses to change, their brain scan shows a tremendous amount of activity as insight develops, and the brain begins building new and complex connections. When people solve a problem by themselves, the brain releases a rush of neurotransmitters like adrenaline and this natural high becomes associated positively with the change experience.

3. Simplify your communication. The prefrontal cortex can only deal well with a few concepts at a time. As tempting as it may be to lump everything you know about the change into one comprehensive chunk, don’t do it. Your job is to help people make sense of complexity by condensing it into two or three critical goals that they can understand and absorb.

4. Don’t sugarcoat the truth. The prefrontal cortex is always on guard for signals of danger. When overly optimistic outcomes or unrealistic expectations are exposed (and by the way, they always are) the prefrontal cortex switches to high alert looking for other signs of deception and triggering the primitive brain to respond with feelings of heightened anxiety.

5. Help people pay attention. The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in the brain. In fact, attention is what is continually reshaping brain patterns. The term attention density refers to the amount of attention paid to a particular mental experience over a specific time. The greater concentration on a specific idea, the higher the attention density. High attention density facilitates long-term behavioral change. Now, one way to encourage people to pay attention is to package new ideas in continually different ways, attention grabbing ways. A story, a game, an experience, a humorous skit, a metaphor, an image or even a song.

6. Don’t underestimate the power of emotion. According to the neurologist and author Antonio Damasio, the center of our conscious thought (the prefrontal cortex) is so tightly connected to the emotion-generating amygdala, that no one makes decisions based on pure logic. Damasio’s research makes it clear that mental processes we’re not conscious of drive our decision making, and logical reasoning is really no more than a way to justify emotional choices. When leaders announce change, therefore, they need to go beyond logic and facts and include an appeal to the audience’s emotions.

7. In addition, remember that emotions are infectious. Like the common cold, emotions are literally contagious. You can “catch” an emotion just by being in the same room with someone. And since emotional leads tend to flow from the most powerful person in a group to the others, when the leader is angry or depressed, negativity can spread like a virus to the rest of the team, affecting attitudes and lowering energy. Conversely, upbeat and optimistic leaders are likely to make the entire team feel energized.

8. Watch your body language. When your body language doesn’t match your words, your verbal message is lost. Neuroscientists atColgate University study the effects of gestures by using an electroencephalograph (EEG) machines to measure “event related potentials” – brain waves that form peaks and valleys. One of these valleys, dubbed N400, occurs when subjects are shown gestures that contradict what’s spoken. This is the same brain wave dip that occurs when people listen to nonsensical language. So if you state that you are open to suggestions about implementing change, but as you talk about “openness,” you cross your arms in a “closed” gesture — you literally don’t make sense. And if forced to choose, people will believe what they see and not what you say.

9. Give people a stabilizing foundation. In a constantly changing organization, where instability must be embraced as inevitable, a sense of stability can still be maintained. The leader’s role here is to create stability through honoring the organization’s history, detailing current successes and challenges, and creating a powerful vision for the future. And, by using the term “vision,” I’m not referring to a corporate statement punctuated by bullet points. I’m talking about a clearly articulated, emotionally charged, and encompassing picture of what the organization is trying to achieve.

10. Optimize the power of inclusive relationships. Using (fMRI) equipment, researchers found that when someone feels excluded there is corresponding activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex — the neural region involved in the “suffering” component of pain. In other words, the feeling of being excluded provokes the same sort of reaction in the brain that physical pain might cause. The new change-leadership fundamentals emphasize inclusive and collaborative relationships. Social networks – those ties among individuals that are based on mutual trust, shared work experiences, and personal connections are the  foundation for organizational success. Anything you as a leader can do to nurture these mutually rewarding relationships will also enhance the change readiness within your team and throughout your organization.

Carol Kinsey Goman is an international keynote speaker, leadership presence coach, and author of The Silent Language of Leaders: How Body Language Can Help – or Hurt How You Lead.

Forbes.com | August 12, 2016 | Carol Kinsey Goman

#Leadership : 12 Steps to Achieving a Meaningful Change in Your Life…The Secret to Meaningful Change is to Focus All your Energy Not on Recreating the Old, But on Building Something New.

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No matter what you do or what industry you’re in, chances are that your business  is facing some form of change. It may be due to growth, poor performance, a new CEO, an acquisition, or the need to respond to changing market forces. It may take different forms. But sooner or later, change will happen.

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When it does, it falls to you as a leader to make it happen successfully.

This 12-step checklist can help you manage change ensure a smooth transition and good outcomes:

1.    Paint the picture. Identify change clearly by painting a vibrant and clear specific picture. People have a much easier time dealing with change when they know what is changing, what is staying the same, what they can expect during the process, and what things will look like afterward. Communicate a clear and consistent message from all members of your team so people know what to expect.

2.    Know not just what but why and how. Build a business case to explain the need for the change. Describe the purpose of the change as well as the likely consequences, stating both will help with the change initiative.

3.    Keep people in mind. Without your people, change will not happen–or, at least, it won’t happen well. Use your business case to make sure everyone on your team understands the need for change. Seek buy-in from everyone involved in, or affected by, the change.

 

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4.    Communicate with transparency. It’s important to keep people in the loop throughout the change process, not just at the beginning. Help them understand events and issues at every step. Change is never easy, but if you communicate with candor and transparency you can minimize any disruption.

5.     Emphasize the benefits. Don’t be dishonest or one-sided in your communication, but make sure that any benefits of the change are front and center to keep the context positive for any later information.

6.     Set outcomes and goals. A set of common outcomes and clear goals sets the sometimes-chaotic process of change within a coherent strategy. Even if people disagree on the priority of the forces driving change, establishing outcomes and goals sets out a coherent strategy where each person is aligned on where they need to be and what they need to be doing.

7.    Groom change agents. You can lead people into change more effectively if you don’t try to do it all yourself. Identify and work with a group of change agents to help develop the change program and ensure its success. This team should include a mix of people from across the business and does not need to be run by anyone in management. Change implemented from the top down is less successful than that developed from within a company.

8.     Use training wheels. Provide additional personal and professional development opportunities for the people who are going through the process of change. Offer training to those who are being moved or assigned new responsibilities. Make sure the members of your team feel equipped to implement the change, either with in-house training or a trusted consultant.

9.     Check in regularly. Especially when change is imminent, it is important to always know the pulse of what is happening throughout your team. It’s also important to demonstrate you care and you are listening, especially when you are asking people to perform outside their comfort zones. Checking in accomplishes both.

10. Make it happen. Make sure the change is implemented effectively and on schedule. Don’t drop the ball. Many organizations spend a lot of time and energy planning change, then get distracted by other priorities and let it run off the rails. If this happens too often, people stop getting behind change because they think they will be wasting their effort.

11. Keep up the momentum. Remind people of how far you all have come and what has been accomplished. Keep the momentum going by celebrating wins and recognizing effort and milestones.

12. Lead by example. Be ready to take the lead–to act as an example, to stand beside your people and help them along the way.

The bottom line is that we can not expect quick hits or 100 percent buy-in, especially at the beginning of the process. To get people to embrace change, you need to be serious about how you make it happen. Let the things that come easily be the impetus for real change. Otherwise, it may be just as easy to revert to same old ways–and that is the last thing you want to happen.

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The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Editor’s note: “The First 90 Days” is a series about how to make 2016 a year of breakout growth for your business. Let us know how you’re making the first 90 days count by joining the conversation on social media with the hashtag #Inc90Days.​

PUBLISHED ON: MAR 22, 2016

BY LOLLY DASKAL

President and CEO, Lead From Within

#Leadership : The Change Habitat – 70% Percent Of Change Managers Are Wrong…Top Managers Should Lead Only One Big Change Program: The Creation of a Change Habitat. 70% of All Change Initiatives Fail

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There Seems to be a Veiled Arrogance in the Statement “70% of Change Initiatives Fail”. It basically says, “We know what workers should be doing, but most of them are either too stubborn or too ignorant to do it.” This know-it-all attitude to change programs has generated mountains of books and herds of change consultants advising top managers to create a sense of urgency, walk the talk,get employees involved, form a team of change champions, celebrate short-term wins, and communicate, communicate, communicate!

 

You’ve probably seen this statistic before. It has been repeated again and again by reputable sources such as Forbes, Harvard Business Review, IBM and McKinsey. And even though more than one expert has claimed that the statistic is wrong, it is a fact that change programs have a bad name among workers, and one of the biggest frustrations of top managers is that people resist all change.

But what if the change managers themselves are failing?

The problem lies in beliefs about who is responsible for launching change and how change is implemented.

– Gary Hamel

 

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Your Business Is Like a City

I frequently claim that organizations are similar to cities. Instead of a geographical boundary, businesses have an economic boundary. But most of what people do in businesses–they way they collaborate and compete and they way they lead and follow–can be compared to how people manage themselves in cities.

 Have you ever seen a local TV station complain that 70% of citizens fail to watch their programs?  Would it bother you to know that 70% of business ideas fail to get paying customers? How would you rate a politician bemoaning the fact that 70% of voters fail to vote for him?

There seems to be a veiled arrogance in the statement “70% of change initiatives fail”. It basically says, “We know what workers should be doing, but most of them are either too stubborn or too ignorant to do it.” This know-it-all attitude to change programs has generated mountains of books and herds of change consultants advising top managers to create a sense of urgency, walk the talk,get employees involved, form a team of change champions, celebrate short-term wins, and communicate, communicate, communicate!

When you see the organization as a modern city, instead of a traditional army, change becomes a very different phenomenon. No marketer, politician, or entrepreneur would blame the public for 70% of ideas not catching on.  The people’s resistance to change is what others would call the manager’s failure to make a difference.

Fortunately, you can address this issue.

Create a Habitat of Change

What’s needed is a real-time, socially constructed approach to change, so that the leader’s job isn’t to design a change program but to build a change platform—one that allows anyone to initiate change, recruit confederates, suggest solutions, and launch experiments.”

– Gary Hamel

What Gary Hamel refers to as a change platform–which is a rather technical term–could better be called a change habitat.

Habitat /ˈhabɪtat/

The natural environment in which a species or group lives; the natural home of an organism; the environment one is accustomed to living in.

Managers should lead only one big change program: the creation of a change habitat.

A change habitat is an environment in which change is natural. It is the home for people who feel comfortable suggesting, introducing and implementing changes. It is an ever-changing environment that workers are accustomed to living in. Such a change habitat has at least five preconditions:

  • A higher purpose toward which people can self-manage;
  • The autonomy for workers to do what they believe is best;
  • Sufficient connectivity which enables sharing ideas in a network;
  • Ample transparency for everyone to know what is going on;
  • A feeling of safety that allows people to experiment and fail.

When you have these in place, there is little need to roll out change initiatives as a manager, to get people involved and to communicate, communicate, communicate. In all but a few cases, it is not even your job to create a sense of urgency or to celebrate short-term wins. The major of a city doesn’t do that, so why would you?

Your job as a manager is to create a habitat that is optimized for adaptation, exploration, and innovation.  Forming teams of champions for every change of direction is a waste of your time! Allow your creative workers to do this themselves. If you don’t think they’re smart enough, then why did you hire them in the first place?

Will you care that 70% of the change initiatives of your workers are going to fail? You shouldn’t. In fact, informal investors would tell you this statistic is a rather impressive number. They are used to 90% of their startups failing. The world of business has become too unpredictable to plan and roll out top-down change initiatives. Top-down change is too slow and too risky.  By offering your employees a change habitat, you let the crowd do its job for you. Maybe 70% of those changes will fail, but–by offering purpose, autonomy, connectivity, transparency and safety–it is you will likely succeed.

Forbes.com | September 22, 2015 | Jurgen Appelo