Change Management

Here I go again…butting in things that are none of my business, instead of concentrating on things I’m supposed to be doing. Problem is I think too much, especially about things I care about. Mushy disclaimer done, let’s move on to the reason for this post.

Organisational change needs 3 things to succeed:

1. Intent
2. Precision and
3. Speed

However, most Change management exercises fail precisely because the Change Agents fail to get one of the above right. Either the effort is a half-hearted one (Lack of Intent), or it is done with too narrow or too wide a focus (Lack of Precision), or it seems to go on forever (Lack of Speed), leading to demotivation & loss of energy.

Lack of Intent: Usually occurs because the Change Agents do not have a clear vision (sorry to use that term) of where they want to go. This might be partly due to the ever-changing nature of the environment around them, or lack of direction from Senior Management, but usually it is because the reasons for undertaking the Change program are not clearly articulated. Quite often the programs are undertaken because of ego-clashes, fad-hunting or because the Change Agent is just plain bored or frustrated with the status quo. Articulating the reasons for the change program, and the benefits that are sought to be achieved, is the first step towards getting it right. Spending more time & thought at the pre-planning stage would make the execution usually better.

Lack of Precision: Usually occurs because in their haste to change, Agents attack the problem piecemeal, rather than taking a holistic view. Or they may desire to change everything of the past (remember the Re-engineering fad?). While tools like OD, Scenario Planning et al might help, probably the best approach would be to run a pilot program in a smaller part of the organization as an experiment to learn from, gain political currency, and leverage. Do keep in mind though, that at times, this might not be possible, or indeed desirable. This would be particularly true in cases of downsizing, strategic purchase/sale of business, or while entering a new market/geography/product line or repositioning an existing product line. In such cases, probably the best approach is to move with large steps at a rapid pace. Which brings us to…

Lack of Speed: This is where (my uneducated & totally biased guess) 90% of change management programs fail. Most programs proceed at too slow a pace, meandering & floundering on the way, not because of lack of intent or precision, but because the time taken to implement the program is so long as to render the original premise & plan meaningless. This is usually because even when people are convinced of the “intellectual need” for a change program, they have not bought into it “emotionally”. This is because such programs frequently challenge our pre-conceived notions of how things ought to be done, or force us to step out of our comfort zones. Surprisingly, it is as true of the Change Agents themselves, as of the other people effected by or involved with the program. Acknowledging the emotional impact of the Change Programs goes a long way towards ensuring speed.

Have you seen any Change Programs suffer? If so, do you agree with the above, or can you think of other reasons why Change Programs flounder?

Quality of Leadership

Adrian Savage has this to say on judging the quality of leadership of an organization:

Always remember this. How your staff behave is telling the rest of the world — very clearly and loudly — how good you are as a leader. When I see poor staff, I know the leadership is crap. And don’t give me all that rubbish about blaming the quality of the people available. There are thousands of talented folk out there looking for work. If you employ poor people, you’re either getting what you deserve (the good ones wouldn’t be seen dead working in your organization); you’re too mean to pay a decent wage; or you can’t tell the difference between good people and those who should be politely sent on their way — or, worst of all, you don’t care. However you slice it, you’re to blame. There are no excuses.

Hmmm, something for all of us to ponder upon…

Two Stories of Management Styles

Recently, came across a really old article by Joel Spolsky regarding contrasting management styles. What caught my eye was this phrase:

(At Juno)… it was the idea that no matter how hard you work, no matter how smart you are, no matter whether you are ‘in charge’ of something or not, you have no authority whatsoever for even the tiniest thing. None. Take your damn ideas, training, brains, and intelligence, all the things we’re paying you for, and shove it. And at Juno, there were plenty of managers, something like 1/4 of all the employees, and so they had plenty of times to stick their fingers into every single decision and make sure that they were in control. The contrast with Microsoft, where VP’s descended from Building 9 to make it clear that you have the authority to get things done, was stark.

Read the two stories contrasting the management styles at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html, and then think about which story would be true for your company!

Wildly Important Goals

In the audiobook, “The Four Disciplines of Execution”, Stephen Covey and Jennifer Colosimo say that the first discipline is to focus on wildly important goals. To do this, they state that people can only accomplish two or three goals at once with excellence and insist that we must narrow our focus in order to achieve such WIGs. An excerpt:

One of the most fundamental principles of organizational activity is that human beings are genetically hard-wired to do one thing at a time with excellence. And there’s no better place to illustrate how this principle is honored than at the airport. Because right now there could be more than 100 airplanes either approaching, landing, taking off or moving around. And all of them are very, very important – especially if you happen to be in one of them.

For an air traffic control specialist only one aircraft is wildly important right now. That’s Flight 457. The controller is aware of all of the other planes on her radar. She is keeping track of them, but all her talent and expertise is solely focused on Flight 457. If she doesn’t get Flight 457 on the ground safely, if she doesn’t do that with total excellence, nothing else she might achieve is really going to matter much.

Wildly important goals are like that. They always share one unique characteristic. They are the goals we must achieve with total excellence. Any other goal we might achieve really won’t matter much. This is what we suggest you must do in your work. You must make the hard choices and separate what is wildly important to you and your organization from all of the other merely important goals that may be on your radar. Then you must approach that wildly important goal with focus and diligence until it is delivered as promised with excellence.

The other three disciplines as per Covey & Colosimo are:

1. Create a Compelling Scoreboard
2. Translate Lofty Goals into Specific Actions
3. Hold Each Other Accountable — All of the Time

Quotes – by Milton Friedman

1. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
2. I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
3. A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
4. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
5. We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
6. We don’t have a desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow.
7. With respect to teachers’ salaries – Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.
8. If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at the expense of another.
9. History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
10. Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
11. Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
12. There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income. – Fox News interview 2004