Choosing to Change

An Alternative Understanding of Change Management

David Bentley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138237889
• eBook ISBN: 9781315298771
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

It is commonly quoted that the majority of change initiatives fail and equally common is the reasoning that failure is due to a lack of adequate planning and robust processes to deliver change to the organisation.

However, organisations cannot change it is only the people in the organisation, and those connected with it, that can change the way they work, think and behave.

Choosing to Change takes an alternative view of the change process, applying thinking from the studies of complexity to explore how change in organisations is driven by individual choice. How the totality of our individual experiences and our aspirations for the future shapes our thinking both consciously and unconsciously, setting out an approach that brings change by choice rather than process.

It is an exploration of how choice is the basis of all successful change programmes and how that affects the theory of change management. Through the reflections of those who have experienced change. This book tackles how our expectations of the future will determine the choices made and is a vital tool for managers, practitioners and advanced management students.

1 Experiencing change

The depot manager’s story

We start our exploration of change with a story of experiencing change: an account of a successful change programme seen from the perspective of a key manager in the company undergoing the process.

Jim is the manager of a vehicle service depot for a large UK logistics company which had, in the previous few years, been taken over by a European operator and was about to undergo a change programme designed to improve efficiency, quality and manager competence.

This is Jim’s story.

Past changes

“My real passion in life has always been sport and particularly football. I played semi-professionally but never quite made it into the top flight, so, I then took it up as a coach. The highlight of that was spending seven years working abroad as a professional coach. One of my claims to fame was that two of my protégés made it into their national team. When we returned to the UK I felt that my pursuit of a career where I could be doing what I really wanted to was over. Through a friend, I got a job as a customer service assistant with a logistics company. I settled into that and worked my way up to be the depot manager at their Southeast location about an hour’s drive from my home on the South Coast.

“After a couple of years in that post the company was taken over by a European operator and we went through a major change from working for an English firm to a pan-European company. Our processes completely changed. We changed the way we did things. How we did health and safety and different work practices. We accepted the changes quite well. We met with our staff, that is, I met with the staff, to let them know what was going on.

“I would like to think that the positive attitude was a lot down to me. Probably my being a bit older, a bit wiser, and having worked abroad for an overseas company, I knew it wasn’t going to change. The new company wasn’t going to turn around and say ‘Oh let’s just do it their old way’ because they had just bought us. So, it was important to get across to the staff, that it’s not going to change. That we need to be positive. If we are negative nothing is going to happen to change things.

“So just purely by, I suppose it was just a case of putting my arm around people and saying: ‘you know it’s going to be alright, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel’. I think it was just forward thinking that this is the way it is going to be. Let’s grab it with both hands. Go on the road, as they say. So, we were one of the ones that were recognised where there was a good attitude and we just moved forward.”

Beginning the change

“Again, a couple of years passed as things settled down before we heard that the UK board of the company had decided to bring in consultants to look into the way we do everything. They wanted to review all the processes, look at best practice and make changes to improve the efficiency and quality of vehicle servicing.

“We were in the second phase and the feeling at the start was:

‘What do they know?’

‘Why do they want to do this?’

‘We’re fine’: all the usual things that staff talk about.

‘We don’t need anybody else to tell us what to do. We know, we have been doing it for twenty years.’

“Those were the initial responses we had.

“The only thing that I would say, I had a little bit of doubt about, was the communication. We just got to hear that they were trialling some new processes. The consultants were in four of the depots around the country looking at our processes and the way that we do everything. So, the people weren’t really getting anything specific. They didn’t say ‘this is what we are going to do, we are going to do this or we are going to do that. We just knew that ‘the consultants were coming around and you will deal with them’.

“My workshop supervisor and I got the chance to go to our Southwest Depot and meet some of the consultants who were trialling the processes there but that did not go well. He was very anti the consultants, saying:

‘What does this bloke know?’. ‘I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years and he’s been here five minutes.’

“So, that was typical of the initial reactions.

“Given our success in going through the changes when we were taken over I was quite positive. I don’t mind things changing if I feel it’s for the better. The worry I had was that certain members of staff were being quite anti. Uncertain about what the consultants are going to do and how they were going to do it, so they were apprehensive about the future.

“They were more worried about, not their jobs, but someone telling them how to do something that they thought they were doing right anyway. So, they were raising all sorts of questions. You know, ‘well what about this, what about that?’ They, I think, went straight on to the defensive before anything happened.

“So again, as I did with the takeover, I held a staff meeting. But because we didn’t really know, I couldn’t explain or say ‘this is what is going to happen’. The only thing I could say, as I said before was ‘we should be positive, it’s not going to change’. They’re not going to say ‘no’ to the consultants, ‘don’t bother to go to the Southeast Depot’. So, in the workshop, the troops were not happy. In the office, the staff, they were fifty-fifty but they didn’t really know what it was going to be like.”

The change programme

“The Board, together with the consultants, had put together a communication pack which addressed the reasons for the programme and showed some of the new best practice processes that they had identified in operation in their continental depots. It included a message from the UK managing director, intended to reassure the staff that the programme was not intended as a criticism of the current staff and procedures but a process to make things even better.

“The four depots that were doing the trials got the message at the start of that period and then the other depot managers got it through the operations managers letting us know what was going on. There was going to be a conference call for those four depots and I saw some of the slides that were part of the communications pack at that time. Looking back on it now, I think it was alright and I thought, at the time, that it would be good for the depot. I didn’t realise then, however, how good it would be for me personally.

“The change programme was set to roll out in my depot over a twelve-week period. Starting with a two-day training course and then followed by a sequence of process roll-out, coaching and personnel development. During this period, my depot would be supported by one of the consultants visiting one to two days per week to coach the staff and introduce the new processes and working practices, monitor progress and work with individual staff members to help them through the change.

“The programme was implemented across groups of four depots at a time and we were in the first phase after the four trial depots. We started with the training sessions. I didn’t, personally, think that the training really explained what was going to happen in the depot. I did the training and went away with the thought of it’s a good idea but I couldn’t work it out in my own mind, how it was going to work in the depots. We went through all the slides, like staff management, measuring technician efficiency, health and safety and how to do one-to-one meetings. But I couldn’t work out in my mind, when I left and got in the car, how it was going to be. Two others from my depot, the workshop supervisor and the planner, also went on the training and they both came back saying things like, ‘I don’t understand it.’ Particularly from the supervisor saying, ‘It’s a load of rubbish.’

“There was quite a bit of negative feedback and that made me a bit nervous. I think it was just that it was going be outsiders who were going into their domain. They were worried that someone was going to come in and say to them:

‘You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong, you need to do this, do that.’

“They were thinking: ‘Why should we change things that we have been doing for twenty-five years?’ I heard the expression, ‘If it is not broken why are we fixing it?’

“So, there was a lot of uncertainty about what was going to happen. They weren’t being specific about things that they were concerned about, it was just a feeling:

‘Why are they doing this, why are they spending a fortune doing this?’

‘Who are these people?’

‘What do they know about trucks?’

“There wasn’t any certainty about what we were going to do, like, this is how we are going to measure our efficiency and this is why we are going to record it. There was more a sense of being told you are just going to change! So, there was, I think, a lot of anti-feeling in certain parts.

“Personally, I could see, that is part of me could see, it was going to be good but I couldn’t see it working in the depot. I went away just thinking, how are we going to do this? How will it be beneficial? How will I explain this to the staff? Saying ‘it will be really good’ when in my own mind, I wasn’t sure how it would go. I didn’t feel that I was going to be the barrier but I just wasn’t sure about it.”

Implementing the change

“In the week following the training courses we started to implement the processes. The consultant came to the depot for his first day with us in the middle of that week. That is when things began to fall into place at least as far as the new processes and working practices were concerned. He explained to us what was going to happen, how it would evolve over the three months that he would be around. Above all he was just bringing lots of stuff for us to do.

“To start with, I think, it was again the same problem, there was much apprehension about what was going to happen and what the real motive of the consultant was. We hadn’t spoken yet to the staff so they were still uncertain. This consultant turns up and was watching what they were doing and again there was some negative attitude from the senior people where they were saying ‘I know what I am doing.’ But once we had sat down and spoken about it and sorted out what we were going to do, what the process was and how long it was going to be, then I could see where we were going. I could see what we were going to do and I was a little bit more confident.

“On the first day, he observed the staff, initially it was just to see what their job roles were. Explaining to them what we were going to do. What meetings we were going to have and so it was just laying the ground rules for what we were going to do going forward for the twelve weeks. We were introduced to doing the conference calls, which is something some of them had never done before, so people were apprehensive about doing that. So, on the first day we set the ground rules, we basically had a chat. After he left I had a staff meeting and tried to reassure the staff that I thought there would be a good outcome to the programme. Again, I was saying that it was a positive thing, ‘we are going to have a few bumps in the road, as we know but it will be positive for us’. If the staff were positive as well it would be alright. Still lots of people were not so sure about what we were going to do.

“The way I finished it was, ‘well we’ve done it once before, and we came out of it the other side, we can do it again. We have got to be open to what people tell us, even if it is bad we’ve got to be open, we are all here to discuss it’.

“Personally, I thought it would be good not only for the depot but for me as a manager. I felt it’s a good tool for me to make me a better manager and I was quite positive with it from the start. I wasn’t really a negative thinker, you know, but once I had a better understanding, I thought it would be a good thing.

“Over the week following the first day, with the consultant the feedback was:

‘I don’t know if I trust him.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Why is he watching me?’

‘Why can’t he watch someone else?’

“It was just so very guarded.

‘He knows nothing about trucks, so what is he going to tell me about trucks?’

‘What do they know?’

“The people who had been doing it for years and years were just very cautious, they didn’t think it would work.

“Then, at the start of the second week we were involved in our first conference call. At that early stage, we were not contributing any data from my depot. There were a lot of slides but we were only listening in at that stage. We were just looking at what the other depots were doing and I said to my people that were listening ‘there is nothing difficult here’. But again, they were still saying:

‘Oh, I’m not sure about this. I don’t like this. It’s more work. I work hard enough as it is. If you want me to do this as well it’s extra.’

“As we moved forward over the coming weeks, we were talking to the staff, we were doing one-to-one sessions and we were doing formal observations. For the first couple of weeks of doing the observations there was still a lot of ‘What are you watching me for?’ But as we progressed it changed to ‘Oh aren’t you doing my observation?’ as they got involved and began to see the results of that for the depot reported in the conference calls.

“In the office, it was quicker because they wanted to see what score they were going to get. ‘Did I do this? Did I do that?’ I think what it did was, it enabled me to start recognising what my staff were doing and what they weren’t doing. So, it was, for me, a good tool and we could move forward.”

The Values and Beliefs sessions

“In the third week, we started the one-to-one process with the Values and Beliefs sessions and that was the point where things really started to change. Overall, we started to move forward as a depot, we had a few setbacks along the way, but these sessions really made the difference. For me, after that I never looked back from that point.

“Using two sets of cards prepared with values written on one set and beliefs on the other I was asked, by the consultant, to identify the five values and five beliefs about myself that I held most important. Picking the values that are most important to me was relatively easy and I don’t think that they were much different to those that most people would pick. However, when it came to my strongly held beliefs about myself it was very different. One of the cards stood out from all the rest in the early ones that came out and as we worked through the rest of them, eliminating those that meant less, that one stayed at the top. That card simply said, ‘I’m not tall enough.’

“The conversation that flowed from that was at the same time both difficult and a revelation for me. It was the first time that I had sat down to say things like that. When I was young my Mum took me to the hospital, I wasn’t growing properly and I had a problem with growth and everything. I was the youngest of four boys and being small I wouldn’t be in the football team and even if I was picked I wasn’t big enough. As a professional footballer, I never quite made it into the top flight and I always had in the back of my mind the reason was that I was not good enough because of my lack of height. The other beliefs about myself that I picked out just served to reinforce my lack of self-esteem that was wrapped up in the belief that my lack of height had and was continuing to hold me back in being successful.

“As the conversation opened out into some of the issues I was experiencing in my work life, such as finding it difficult to delegate work or manage my long working days, I began to see things more clearly. Yes, I think it was the values and beliefs that brought it home to me that although I am only five foot six inches tall it doesn’t matter. Nowadays, I don’t think that I am small anymore. I think that this was quite a big thing to get over. I walk tall now. That was quite a difficult thing to do but I’m glad I have done it. Whilst I was nervous before it, I didn’t know before what was going to come of it. As we were doing it, as it was explained to me, I actually walked out of it thinking, ‘I’ve changed, I’m going to change, I’m a different person now.’ I was, like, ‘I’m not small in stature, I’m a leader, a manager,’ and I think from that day it changed me in what I did and how I did it. I was more confident in how I did it.

“My values and beliefs session was the first of the set that were done at the depot with the key staff. Having been through the process I was able to reassure those who followed me that it was nothing to be worried about and that I had found it to be a very positive experience. The sessions were held in confidence, so I don’t know exactly what came out of the sessions with the other staff members but I can say that they became more confident. I don’t know if they bought into it fully, as I did, because they are still behaving in the way they did. But they are more confident in the way they are doing their jobs.

“The Values and Beliefs session enabled me to reflect on the way I behaved as a manager. I was doing everything. I admit, quite feely now, I did everything but did nothing. I just, as it were, forwarded everything to myself, thinking ‘I’ll do this, I’ll do that.’ My lack of confidence in myself, my underlying assumption that ‘I was not good enough to succeed’, was preventing me in having confidence in my staff. My reaction then was to do everything myself. Obviously, looking back, the knock-on from that was they were under-utilised and dissatisfied.

“Building on the Values and Beliefs session the consultant challenged me to make a difference in the way I managed my workload. I took on improving the way I managed my time. By keeping a detailed diary of what I was actually doing I was able to identify those activities that needed my input, where I could add value, and those that could be done perfectly well by others. I looked at how I was delegating, or not, to my staff using the learning from the training session. I started explaining what I wanted them to do. I started to give people jobs to do that did not need my input and that was good for me. It made me a different person, a different manager. I went from being someone that, well, I could always leave what I was doing at the gate when I drove out of the depot without taking it home with me. But now I was more comfortable with what I was doing and it being a part of my life. I could now give people things to do, so I had the time to concentrate on things that were happening. I had the feeling, like, ‘This is so different.’

“It wasn’t, though, all plain sailing from that point on. I lost two members of staff within three weeks of the programme starting. The workshop supervisor was very unhappy with what he was being asked to do. He didn’t want to get involved with it and thought it was a stupid process. I tried to have a conversation with him...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. Experiencing change: The depot manager’s story
• 2. The managed approach to change: The management view of the change process
• 3. A complexity view of change: An alternative approach
• 4. Facilitating change: A story of change leadership
• 5. Choosing to change in the face of the unknown
• 6. Storytelling: The power and influence of narrative learning
• 7. Putting choice at the centre of change management: Easing the path to change
• Index