Leading Change

How Successful Leaders Approach Change Management

Paul Lawrence

• Editore: Kogan Page
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780749471699
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Organisational Behaviour

It is often claimed that 70% of organizational change efforts fail, despite the popularity of linear change models. However these linear approaches to change are often based on the premise that change is predictable and straightforward, when actually change is complex, with the 'human' element often changing the functioning of the organizational system as a whole. Leading Change provides the practical framework that allows leaders to actively engage with a complex adaptive system to bring about successful organizational change. Supported by academic research, and grounded with a range of examples and cases, the book offers a genuine, viable alternative to existing approaches.

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PART ONE

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Reflective dialogue in action

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02

Dialogue and communication

Communicate, communicate, communicate?

In 2006 Laurie Lewis and colleagues obtained copies of the 100 best-selling books on organizational change as listed by Amazon.com and analysed those books to identify what were the most common pieces of advice (Lewis et al, 2006). Most of the books emphasized the importance of communication, usually with reference to sharing a vision or announcing that change was coming. Although a few books talked about participation, the predominant theme was leaders communicating clearly downwards so that as many people as possible knew what was going to happen and why. For example, Duck (1998) wrote:

Communications must be a priority for every manager at every level of the company. It is important for the messages to be consistent, clear, and endlessly repeated. If there is a single rule of communication for leaders, it is this: when you are so sick of talking about something that you can hardly stand it, your message is finally starting to get through.

Larkin and Larkin (1994) suggest providing line supervisors with 3×5-inch laminated cards upon which are written the key points about a change to help them answer people’s questions. The emphasis is on dissemination, pushing the message down, on managing the style and content of the message, and on planning the propagation of the message. Where participation is mentioned, often this appears to be more about creating a place for people to ‘feel’ more involved and to discuss the change in service of complying with it. Four of the 100 books reviewed by Lewis et al (2006) talked about making an example of those who don’t comply. One even had a section called ‘Enlist star power or have a public hanging’!

Forty-six per cent of the people I spoke to in the research also emphasized the importance of disseminating the message, for example the importance of:

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Communicating at all levels regularly. I started with my leadership team, then the whole organization. I needed to get my direct reports aligned and functioning and working as a team, understanding that they were responsible and accountable for cascading it down. I did town halls and written communications; people were hungry for direction.

Other storytellers also talked about the importance of effective one-way communication. Here are three examples:

I ‘over-communicated’. You need to keep repeating the message. People go into denial. They rationalize what they hear and take away a different message, particularly if the change is seen to be negative. You must keep the communication simple: First, what are we doing? Second, why are we doing it, and third, what does it mean to you? You need to be explicit and honest. I didn’t have internal communications people and so I wrote it myself. People knew it came from me.

I had a very effective project management office. We shined the light on what was wrong, what was working and what wasn’t. We knew what we needed to achieve and were relentless in issuing reports and holding people to account. We reported to an internal committee chaired by the CFO and encouraged frequent communication. That said we still got criticized for not communicating enough.

We met resistance for different reasons and at different levels. We managed the pushback by making it clear from the start that there was no wriggle room and communicating that regularly. That helped a lot. Previously local management said yes but then didn’t really do it. In this programme the central team went out to the business to help them clearly define the plan and make sure they were sticking to it.

However, more than half the people I spoke to didn’t make specific mention of the importance of communicating outwards. It may be that some didn’t feel it was worth mentioning, that they took for granted it would be assumed they engaged in effective one-way communication, but few mentioned it as one of the two or three key success factors they believed contributed to the success of their project. More emphasis was placed on engaging people in the change process, for which merely repeating a message appears to be an inadequate strategy.

Communication, monologue and dialogue

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘communicate’ as to ‘share or exchange information or ideas’. To share implies a one-way flow of information while to exchange explicitly defines a two-way flow. The emphasis in the change literature is on the sharing or dissemination of information rather than exchange. The Lewis et al article includes the word ‘listen’ just four times, without elaborating on its significance.

In contrast I heard the word ‘listen’ much more often; listening was mentioned by 66 per cent of the people I spoke to. The following story was recounted by an external practitioner contracted by a European organization to design and implement a new group leadership development strategy:

I spoke at a conference where I told the story of how we successfully implemented a global leadership programme in a huge multinational. I was approached by another international company to come and do the same for them. I hadn’t been there long when people started asking me, ‘What’s taking so long? Couldn’t you speed things up?’ I told them I had a programme at home they could have, but I wasn’t convinced it would work for them or if it was what they needed. When I contacted them, the operating companies told me that the team at the centre was always coming up with things then lobbing them at the operating companies where they were quickly put on a shelf. Things began to get tense.

I was assigned a bright, smart, German person to help me. She was a bit more forgiving but still said: ‘I’m worried… when will we actually start doing it?’ I told her that the content wasn’t the issue, there’s lots of content around; we needed to engage the organization and have them wanting it, whatever ‘it’ was. One day, the global Head of HR walked past as we were talking and asked me how things were going. The message she left us with was: ‘clearer – faster – quicker!’ Eventually, I persuaded her to give us time. My colleague also began to understand the approach we were taking, and started to talk in terms of what ‘we’ were trying to do – the project was now jointly owned. What took time was talking to loads of end customers in the businesses, about things that had been done before; what had worked and what hadn’t. For example, the folks from a plant in Russia said: ‘We can’t have people off the line for long.’ We heard things we couldn’t ignore, and it became obvious that the process would be complicated; many of the messages were competing.

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Then I physically left the safety of the ‘mother-ship’, the telephones and e-mails, and went out to speak with employees. We set up workshops with people from different levels of the organization all in the same room, at the same time. We talked to front-line leaders about what it was like to be a front-line leader in the presence of mid-level leaders and direct reports. We tested some of the things we’d heard and tested some of the ideas we had had. People really liked the sessions. In one session in Egypt they said: ‘This is great! We should have more conversations like this.’ In Nigeria people flew in from all over the country to be at the sessions. People got very interested and we learnt a huge amount.

When it came to designing the programme it looked very different to anything the company had done before and some people had to let go of that. However, once the programme was out there, the feedback was great, and the company began to see the initiative in a different light. There was a meeting of all the HR managers and apparently they said: ‘This is the way we should be doing things from now on.’ The businesses said they saw the centre working in partnership with them, that their views were being listened to, and that they saw how the design of the programme reflected their different perspectives.

When I choose to share my intentions with others with the expectation that they will understand and comply with those intentions, this is monologue; there is only one ‘logic’ at play. Had our storyteller taken his off-the-shelf programme and attempted to implement it across the new organization, selling its benefits and interpreting pushback as ‘resistance’, it is unlikely he would have been successful. Instead he determined to first understand the world through the perspectives of his end-users. If I’m seeking an exchange of ideas then this is dialogue; I’m inviting the other person to bring their logic to the interaction. The communication of change in many organizations however is monologic. The implicit message is ‘This is what we have decided. Please do your bit in making sure it gets done’ (Jabri et al, 2008).

Monologue as coercion

Schein suggests that the change leader who expects recipients of a one-way communiqué to comply with their message without question is engaged in ‘coercive persuasion’ (Stacey, 2012). No response is required; indeed any form of questioning is regarded as resistance. There are two aspects of ‘coercive persuasion’ worth highlighting here. First, coercive persuasion is often presented as an invitation to collaborate. The words and the style of delivery may suggest a desire for consensus and to hear all views, but the reality is different. This is monologue presented as dialogue.

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I had personal and awkward experience of such a process early on in my corporate career when working for the European division of a multinational energy company. The head of the European business invited 500 people from all around the continent to a two-day conference, the objective of which was to settle on a strategy to take the business forward. He had read a management text which suggested that successful companies chose between one of three ‘value disciplines’ and stuck to that discipline (Treacy and Wiersma, 1996). He had shared the book with his executive team and asked them which of the three strategies they thought was most appropriate for the business. Between them they chose one of the three value disciplines before convening the meeting of the 500, the objective of which was to engage the wider business. I usually sit at the back of the room at large gatherings so that I can see everything that’s going on, but on this occasion I arrived late, and ended up on the front row.

During the morning the senior team told the story of how they had chosen one of the three value disciplines and explained how they believed this would bestow upon the organization competitive advantage. Before lunch we were all asked to stand up, and then to sit down again if we agreed that this new approach would indeed deliver us a competitive advantage. In all innocence I remained standing, wondering how adopting this discipline would deliver us competitive advantage if our competitors were implicitly adopting the same discipline. Because I was sat (or rather standing) in the front row I failed to notice until it was too late that the other 499 people had all sat down. Feeling vulnerable I fielded a couple of questions from members of the senior executive, the heads of the country businesses, who stood around the perimeter of the room in various places. They asked me what it would take for me to sit down. The answer was – not much. I sat down as soon as I felt able to do so without looking foolish. Later that day one of the executive came up to commend me for my courage. He assured me that my actions hadn’t constituted a career-limiting move, though it was just as well I sat down when I did. Around the tables at lunch and dinner the real meaning that people were making of the event emerged, and their authentic levels of commitment became clear. In reality many people were sceptical as to the likelihood that the different business units would commit to the initiative in practice, despite the declarations of commitment from the country heads. In the event the initiative lasted about a year until the head of the European business left the organization.

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McClellan (2011) tells the story of an art college’s attempt to redesign building spaces to accommodate increased student enrolment and promote environmental sustainability. The change process included collaborative workshops at which it was intended the different stakeholders would come together and agree a way forward. McClellan sat in on some of the workshops and found that change proposals supporting people’s existing understanding of what the art college was, what it did, who it served (its identity) were generally supported. Those that challenged that identity were closed down. Consequently all of the agreed changes supported the existing identity of the organization and transformational change wasn’t achieved. In other words, McClellan saw an absence of dialogue and the domination of monologue. People were focused on th...