Leading Positive Organizational Change

Energize - Redesign - Gel

Bart Tkaczyk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367608767
• eBook ISBN: 9781000260007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Although many organizations see the need to transform and to reinvent themselves, for far too many leaders, "change" and "failure" are virtual synonyms. In fact, most organizational change efforts fail. But that needn't be the case, and help is at hand. Leading Positive Organizational Change, an alternative way to think about organizational change and development, is a strategic, learnable discipline that can re-energize and re-imagine your enterprise, and release the potential for change – delivering a positive, creative future and breakthrough bottom-line results.

Written by an award-winning expert in positive organization development and change leadership, this book provides executives, change leaders, and change leadership teams with a step-by-step guide for collaboratively crafting and executing a change strategy that aligns with organizational objectives so as to fuel their future. With a strong science-backed and field-tested "how to" approach, and with a radical focus on organizational positivity, super-flexibility and renewal, collective design thinking and applied imagination, this highly practical book features:

• A ToolBox of 30 powerful, imaginative (and time-saving!) tools for you to use in practicing leading positive organizational change and carrying through your change program – with example templates and worksheets, concise notes and ideas from numerous complex global projects.
• Lead-ins to each chapter that are a fundamental feature of the book, representing a springboard to a chapter and serving the purpose of awakening interest in the topic.
• Dialogic Reflection for Professional Team Development, at the start of each chapter, that enables you (and your team as a whole) to reflect on and discuss some thought-provoking questions, linking to the chapter and helping to contextualize your learning.
• Industry Snapshots that explore current issues and trends in one of the fastest-growing professions and industries – coaching and consulting.
• Windows on Practice that demonstrate how issues are applied in real-life business situations, offering a range of interesting topical illustrations of positive change leadership in practice, relating the core concepts of the book to real-world settings.
• Summary Propositions, at the end of each chapter, that recap and reinforce the key takeaways from the chapter.
• References to help you take your learning and development further.

Tkaczyk's engaging, reflective, task-based book equips the change leader and leadership teams with the skills needed to navigate chaos and the unexpected, to renew your business and create winning change. This action-based workbook can be used in a variety of business settings, among others, executive leadership team meetings, organization development and change consulting, design-led strategy retreats, human resource development consultancy, executive 1:1 and team coaching, leadership boot camps, design thinking workshops and sprints, innovation labs, and executive education and MBA courses – as a handy additional text in either an organization development and change or human resource management class. It can also be used in a flexible strategic transformation program – with the flow of the change execution process mapped within the context of a specific change initiative.

Part I
Understanding the practice of leading positive organizational change

1 An alternative strategy for leading positive organizational change

Energize, redesign, and gel (ERG)

Lead-in

There is nothing permanent except change, and many change initiatives fail. The pushes propelling organizations and their leaders toward change come from the outside (think environmental pressures such as geopolitics, climate changes, epidemics and pandemics, work automation, industry disruption, or hypercompetition) and/or the inside (think organizational pushes like change of leadership, adopting new technology, organizational identity or growth pressures). Executing strategic transformations successfully in a world in which volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) reign is difficult – the failure rate of change efforts is around 70 percent. Therefore, to lead positive organizational change, be catalysts for adaptability, and be continuously change-ready, executive leadership teams, today, need new dynamic capabilities, methods and skills that go beyond managing, namely, energizing, redesigning, and gelling (ERG). ERG is a cycle of action and learning over time that leads to sustained and effective change and organizational renewal. Specifically, the focus here is on: the “positive” (energizing the workplace, enhancing organizational health), “design” (putting into place collective design thinking and appreciative future search), and “organizational ambidexterity” (thriving on fluid reality and adapting to change super-flexibly), so as to bring forth a golden future for, and health and prosperity within, the enterprise.

Dialogic reflection for professional team development

In your team, discuss the following questions:

1. Why do so many change initiatives fail so often?
2. If a major change program had to be implemented in your enterprise, what do you think would be the major barriers that would stand in its way, and what can you and your organization do to remove (some of) those barriers?
3. Do you know some popular theoretical frameworks that can help guide the change process and management effectively?
4. What are continuously change-ready and learning-ready enterprises very good at doing?
5. “Change should be planned and dictated from the top. When the change is announced, frontline employees will just go along and deliver it.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
6. Now, reflect upon your own approach to leading change so as to deliver a creative future. How would you describe your role as a change leader (e.g., as a change architect, catalyst, challenger, team coach, connector, designer, director, dreamer, positive energizer, explorer, futurist, disruptive innovator, insider expert, interpreter, mentor, monitor, navigator, negotiator, networker, nurturer, socializer, storyteller, cultural steward, teacher, digital transformer, or a trusted advisor)?

   If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

   (Peter F. Drucker, a giant in the development of management thinking)

The one permanent feature in our times is change. Andy Grove, the former President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Intel, holds forth that change is never-ending and is constantly and endlessly accelerating (Grove, 1999). The pace of change is furious and businesses are bashed about as rocks are battered by the sea. Still, it must be recognized that such change differs in terms of type and scale. Herein, change could be large-scale and radical and transformative – even to the roots of the organization and to the ways it operates. Such change can involve merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions, the workplace technology, or organizational restructuring and downsizing. Change could also be small-scale and incremental. Change of this nature involves being flexible in activity and the market, practicing continuous process improvement, fine-tuning business endeavors and employee and client relationships. These practices support organizational continuity. Still, change leadership, like riding a bucking bronco, is not successful without effort, whether these changes are continuous or episodic, planned or unplanned, radical or small-scale, continuous and incremental or discontinuous, reactive or anticipatory, revolutionary or adaptive, or tectonic and volcanic, as exemplified right now.

Change is fierce: important lessons from the field

It can truthfully be said that the majority of businesses that are now more than ten years old are different to what they were even as little as five years ago. Indeed, next year, they might be different to what they are this year. Organizations change for many reasons (e.g. the global financial crisis, team leadership transition, epidemics and pandemics, disruptive innovation, new ways of doing business and new ways of working, global expansion, recession, strategic changes, environmental and climate concerns, adopting new technology, work automation, paradigm shifts, changing consumer expectations, emerging new markets, and so on), but what is important is to always be ready for changes that might be desired or forced. The shove, the push for change can come from the outside (environmental) and/or from the inside (organizational).

The outside forces can be vigorous. First, the “power of individuals” is growing, with millennials and Generation Z at the forefront, who value collaboration, resourcefulness and transparency and who expect enterprises to make a positive social and environmental impact on society. For example, 51 percent of millennials would pay extra for sustainable products, and 49 percent of them prefer to work for a sustainable company (Nielsen, 2014). This goes far beyond “corporate responsibility” into really becoming a conscious capitalist and a better corporate citizen, and redefining value propositions in this way (Nooyi & Govindarajan, 2020). Therefore, nowadays, a good deal of organizations are making a purposeful effort to put sustainable practices into action, such as working toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 (UN, 2015). The good organization, whose purpose marries revenue growth and profit-making well with the need to be mindful of its environment and stakeholder ecosystem, knows that doing well by doing good not only helps the natural world and the general public, but it can also positively contribute to their brands’ health and performance. Yes, “green” plans can help to save costs and the planet – minimizing packaging, cutting transportation costs, and placing energy-efficient lighting are some of the ways environmentally-savvy enterprises can lower costs. Yet, the bottom line is not only about profitability – it’s about a culture change too.

On the subject of age and “social reconfiguration,” the majority of kids born in affluent countries today can expect to live to be more than a 100, according to the Human Mortality Database (HMD, 2007). Rising life expectancies and an aging global workforce have been noticed for some time now but we still organize our lives the way our parents or grandparents did. In truth, current HR practices and policies are ill-equipped to navigate a 100-year life. Thus, the “longevity dividend” actually enables enterprises to partner with older workers to better craft new talent management strategies, to re-conceptualize work-life integration, to delink pay with age, to delay retirement, to tap into diverse networks and regenerative relationships, to design new learning and development opportunities, and to champion new multistage career models and experiences, as we will have to work a lot longer than our parents (Gratton & Scott, 2016).

Next, citizens seem to “trust business” more than government, globally. Clearly, 76 percent of the general population believe it is critically important for CEOs to respond to turbulent times and take the lead on change instead of waiting for government to impose it (Edelman, 2019). As a result, people are looking to business to fill the void on “wicked problems” like healthcare. By way of illustration, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase joined forces to tackle employees’ healthcare costs, addressing an issue that government cannot find a solution to on its own (Johnson, 2018).

Besides, rapid technological change, “automation” in particular, is exerting a profound impact on corporations and markedly altering the ways we work. That being the case, many jobs may be at risk of being automated within, say, the next 20 years, including numerous advisory jobs, such as medical consultants, lawyers, financial advisors, and management consultants. Yet, by leveraging human-automation collaboration and technology for sustainable growth, future-proof enterprises should be capitalizing on the benefits of Big Data, workplace connectivity, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) (Agrawal et al., 2018). The energy for embracing AI is widespread indeed. In point of fact, new research by MIT SMR Connections and SAS, based on 2,280...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Understanding the practice of leading positive organizational change
• Part II ToolBox: tools and templates for the practice of leading positive organizational change
• An open invitation: let’s engage
• About the author
• Index