Over 70% of most major change initiatives fail because they treat organizational change as a mechanical change to implement, and forget the ‘people’ side of the equation. It requires time and work to build buy-in and commitment to change.
In this week’s Leadership180.Net, Ravi Tangri introduces Chrysalis’ ‘Go-No-Go’ framework for building buy-in and commitment to change.
While delivering a leadership program at the Ritz Carlton in Doha I had the opportunity to interview Avinash Menon, the Director of Human Resources to dive deeper into how their leadership shapes their service culture.
Why do over 70% of change initiatives (TQM, reengineering, mergers, etc.) fail? Simply put, the analysis and design work stop short and ignore the major barriers to change.
In this clip from a presentation, Ravi Tangri introduces you to Chrysalis’ Solutions Model (TM), a simple framework that expands traditional strategic analysis and planning to ramp up your odds for succeeding in your change project.
I recenlty started working with a client that I had not worked with for several years. In the intervening years, they had a CEO who was autocratic, controlling and very negative. During those years, they were focused on cost-slashing, their turnover went through the roof, and the morale at all levels went down the tubes. What had been a wonderful place to work turned into a back-biting, everyone-out-for-themselves environment that was highly toxic. The CEO held on to power with a tight fist, and certainly wasn’t interested in working with us to engage stakeholders to co-create new solutions.
The new CEO is a 180-degree turn to the person who was there before. He believes in people and their power, and he acts like he does. He respects his people, he supports them, he encourages them, he praises them. He’s not a country club leader, though – he still has high standards and holds people accountable to them, and so he gets those results – results the autocrat who preceded him could never have attained.
It’s still a work in progress, but the culture in that organization is finally healing. It’s once again becoming a wonderful place to work. People are engaged, connected, supporting each other and working together again, and it’s a pleasure and an honour to work with them in rebuilding a great culture.
My hat’s off to the new CEO. And I’m humbled again at the power that one person has to shift the culture of an entire organization.
A worlwide study conducted by Booz and Company in December 2008 showed that:
40% of
senior managers don't believe that their leadership has a credible plan to
address the economic crisis
46% of senior managers are not
sure that their leadership could carry out the plan (credible or
not)
51% of managers below the CEO and CXO level don't believe in their leadership's ability to make their crisis plan work
1/3 of all CEO and CXO-level respondents don't have confidence in their own plans
What's more, struggling companies aren't doing anything more than they did before the crisis, and companies that are stable and strong are not focusing on building on their strength, but rather on cutting.
This is a pretty stark picture. As I've said before, the rules of the game have changed, and too many people are still trying to play by the old rules of the game. What this information is telling me is that people are finally waking up to the fact that the emperor has no clothes.
First we have to recognize that the old ways are not working. Then we can start looking forward to explore new ways to move forward.
Many people are surprised today by Rick Wagoners 'firing' by President Obama. However, I see this is the most prominent concrete sign that things are really changing – that the 'old rules' (which created much of the ka-ka we see in today's economic uncertainty) no longer apply.
GM is certainly a poster-child of the way things were run in the latter half of the 1900s, and today it shows the ROI of that style of management. As Rosabeth Moss Kantersays, the plans that they submitted to Congress were nothing new – doing the same old thing the same old way, just more cost-effectively.
Those plans did not go deeply into what has caused the problems GM and so many other corporations are facing today – how things are done, how things are led. We've talked a lot about leadership over the past several decades, but if you look at the research that's been conducted, overall leadership has not shifted that much. It's been just that – talk.
One of the key pillars of effective leadership is challenging the way everything is being done – including your own leadership – and that's something that GM just did not do. It's like that old definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Their new plan – we'll just do the same things more cost-effectively.
This economic uncertainty is forcing us to look at how we do things – it is creating a an opportunity for those who are ready to truly transform themselves and their businesses, and I applaud the fact that Obama and his team recognize real change from moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
Are you ready to take advantage of the opportunity in these times?
There is opportunity in these challenging times because they are so challenging. The question is – are we ready to take the leap of faith to take a chance?
Take a look at the auto industry. With the turbulence that is hitting this industry, management and the unions are united against a common 'threat'. That type of situation creates opportunity for change that may never come again – the type of opportunity I encountered fifteen years ago.
In the early nineties, the military in Canada was making massive cuts and laying off as much as half of its civilian workforce. In order to keep their jobs, the remaining civilians had to bid for their jobs against private sector firms. That created an alignment between the unions and the management (those in uniforms) like never before. On many bases, both were united in finding a way to keep the jobs that remained.
I was fortunate to work with many of these bases then to reinvent the work – and often the bases – so that it could be done with half the people, and so that they could survive the competitive bids from the private sector.
The point is that prior to that process, you never would have seen management and the union working so closely together with such open communication as I saw on some bases. It would not have happened without the threat of losing the remaining jobs on top of losing so many to start with.
We like to think that we, as human beings, are intelligent and can make the intelligent choices, and yet so often we prove ourselves wrong. Take the labour crisis that's about to hit the industrialized world on the heels of this recession. We've known that this was coming for decades – it's a simple matter of demographics – and yet most organizations still, to this day, don't have effective succession planning in place and are not ready for the retirement of the boomers.
In the next 5 years, you're going to see huge change coming that nobody would go near a year or two ago because we weren't in crisis then.
We don't have to wait for that. Right now this economic crisis has changed the playing field. Unions and management and other stakeholders are working together with a common agenda – people who you never would have pulled together around the same table a little while ago. How can we leverage this to produce lasting change that makes a long-term difference, not just try to survive the next few months?
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