Along with the hype that leading and managing are two completely separate roles (instead of complementary functions of the same role, as I am advocating), another fad hyped since the 1980s has been that âchange is good.â Leaders and employees alike have been admonished to âembrace change.â As fads go, this one has been enduring, partially because change is indeed constant, and partially because the need to manage change has been highlighted by the challenges of IT implementations, where costly and disappointing outcomes are more likely than not. Among the latest in a long string of research documenting such disappointing outcomes is the July 2008 study by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) that found that of 840 federally funded projects, 49% were poorly planned, poorly performing, or both. In case you are tempted to conclude that the situation is better in private organizations, a 2008 study by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association found that 43% of 400 respondents admitted that their organization had had a recent project failure.
My own track record, based on the leadership and change models taught here, is much more successful. My father, my colleagues, and I have a consistent history of successful change management, including helping decrease the length of nuclear refueling outages at PECO Nuclear, helping a software organization release their next upgrade on time and on budget (after their prior release had been disastrously late), facilitating a multinational Oracle implementation, as well as many other IT and non-IT examples. The same principles of high-performance leadership apply to managing change, especially goal clarity (next chapter), single point accountability for all tasks and decisions (much more on this in Chapter 12), role clarity, the need for both clear stands and for well-organized engagement of the people who will be effected by the change (plant managers, end users, etc.), visibility of roles, tasks, and deadlines, and careful monitoring and support. In other words, lead the change, manage the process.
The same holds true for daily operations. Leaders must lead (take clear stands and connect), and they must manage. As President Reagan put it, they must âtrust but verify.â Of course, if there are layers and cross-functional silos, they are going to delegate much of the task of monitoring, but they must monitor the monitoring. To simply say âhereâs where we are goingâ and then to detach completely from what happens next is only going to work by luck and on rare occasions. Donât be like Napoleon at Waterloo. Leaders must manage, and every manager must lead to be effective.
There is no cookie cutter here. You have to figure out how much freedom to allow and how much oversight to provide, and you have to work through the wants and reactions of your subordinates regarding how much âmanagingâ is too little or too much from their perspective. You must listen to your own inner voice and to the voices of your people, and then decide. As time passes, you must adjust and renew the way you manage based on whether you are getting the desired results. And since you want results (surely), the management of daily tasks is also the management of change. You may have output goals (such as keeping troubled youth in school, or producing a product at or below a certain cost) that remain the same over time, but you will always have process and other types of performance improvement opportunities in any type of daily operation. Managing is managing change.
Hence the title of this chapter. To get high performance and continuous improvement, embracing and creating stability is at least as important as embracing change. Quality and Lean (which both have roots in Lewinâs action research) methods require process stability in order to assure orderly and reliable continuous improvement. Ambiguity is inevitable in life and work, but the more clarity that can be provided about tasks, decisions, roles, etc., the easier it is to execute at a high level of performance. Both neurological and organizational research supports this. It has been said that it takes groups approximately two years to get to a high level of performance following every leadership change. The US Navyâs research indicates a significant performance dip for up to six months every time a leader changes (Figure 10.1).
Figure 10.1Transition state.
Neuroscience shows us that our brains are wired to go on alert when there are changes in the environment (again, as small as someone sitting in the chair you normally sit in at a regular meeting). The amount of change in most of the organizations Iâve been in (and that is quite a few since the beginning of my career back in 1984), some by circumstance (leaders retire, markets shrink, etc.), much by choice, is overwhelming. No wonder research shows that morale is low in most organizations! People are too stressed, and again turning to research, there is good stress (the sense of responsibility to get the job done and to do it well, the focus of a sports team), but there can clearly be too much stress. The results, as illustrated by Friedmanâs Five Characteristics (covered in Chapter 4), is predictable: dysfunction increases and performance declines.
Friedmanâs âquick fix mentalityâ (again, in Chapter 4) is part of the problem and is a leadership dilemma/responsibility. Implement improvement initiatives absolutely. But for heavenâs sake, donât tackle so many improvement initiatives at the same time that you overwhelm your people and screw up not only the initiatives but daily operations as well.
Equally important, donât blame your people for being stressed. Stress is a physiological response (triggered in the primitive brain) to change. People donât need to go to training classes to figure out how to âembrace change.â Sending them to such a class, or handing out books on how to handle change, implies that managing change is primarily a matter of attitude. As in all things, how each person manages themselves is always part of the picture, but change is primarily a leadership issue in organizations and focusing on it as a personal issue can add insult to injury.
What people really need is calm leaders who will be patient with the initial stress reaction, and who will stay the course (unless presented with compelling and overwhelming evidence that the course is likely to be disastrous, then you would be wise to not pull a Burnside! Change your course!), while allowing as much real influence on how to implement as possible. Create as much clarity as possible about what can be influenced, and what is beyond influence, and then create clear ways to allow your people to influence what they can. The more they are engaged, the less stressful and the higher quality the change will be.
Equally important, be selective about the changes you are choosing. Pick changes that make sense to your people if possible, changes that they have been requesting and/or that are clearly targeted at removing barriers to performance and morale. When you believe you must impose change that will not be popular, donât chastise them. Acknowledge their feelings and work calmly on how to engage them as much as possible. If at all possible, donât overdue the number and frequency of such changes.
One organization I worked for was moving from a culture of almost no changes. People had worked in the same departments, locations, and functions for years, and thought they always would. To say the least, they were heavily siloed. To change the culture and create more cross-functional interaction and perspective, the organization began forcing people to move into different locations and functions (engineers to operations, and so on), and to move laterally and up much more frequently so that groups would have new leaders, and leaders would head new groups. No longer would groups have the same leader for decades, with change only occurring at retirement. It was not going to happen by itself, so forcing such movement made sense.
The organization, however, went overboard in many cases, and created unnecessary chaos during a time of a great many other changes. One of my functions was to facilitate leadership transition conversations between groups and new leaders. Such conversations can rapidly speed the process of establishing new clarity about roles, expectations, etc., thus moving the team quickly towards a new period of relative stability. In the span of four years I facilitated five such conversations for one young leader, as he was reassigned to five different groups! Capable as he was, there was no way that a leader of any of those groups was able to meet their potential of high performance. It was simply too much change too soon.
Needless change is an epidemic. In 1995, my father wrote an article called, âOrganizational Structural Change: A Trap or a Path?â The organization he had worked for in the 1960s had changed its structure three times in eight years. As he put it, âThe next time someone suggests a major structural change as a solution, ask yourself, âIs making and remaking the structure a pattern in this company?â If the answer is âyes,â look elsewhere for a path.â Structural change, like leadership transitions, has consequences (confusion about roles, new silos replacing the old, etc.). Most organizations overuse it to attack cross-functional problems. Engineering is decentralized to get it closer to the internal customers. Engineering is centralized (often in the same organization a relatively short time later) to assure that solutions are the best for the entire system (not too driven by local internal customers) and that knowledge can more easily be shared between the engineers. Centralization also often occurs in hopes of saving money: everyone will use one centralized group, often outsourced, to reduce the costs of having their own resource. You can substitute âengineeringâ for any other function (IT, HR, maintenance, etc.) and the same dynamics hold true.
The problem is every structural change creates a certain amount of chaos, and many organizations pile on one structural change after another in rapid succession. By the time the workforce gets orientated to the latest change, they are often confronted with another. Change burnout becomes a real issue, on top of the inevitable confusion. And while one problem may get solved, such as reducing IT costs, another emerges, such as the inability to get needed IT service, which has potentially huge hidden costs.
Cost savings aside, the changes are usually attempts to solve cross-functional problems. Yes, moving the engineers out into the other departments will likely result in engineering solutions ...
