Managing Change

To dramatically increase the productivity of your business more than often significant change will occur. The key variables of change are people, tasks, structure and technology. People are critical to making or breaking any change initiative. 

How do People React to Change?

What Steps are needed to Introduce Change?

Strong leadership, careful planning and effective implementation are needed to introduce change. The following steps should be undertaken when introducing change: 

Creating a "Critical Mass" of Supporters

You need majority support for a change process to be successful. When something new is introduced around 10% of an organisation are likely to be early adopters who would like to try something new, have been waiting for change and will actively support it. At the other end of the distribution curve, around 10% of an organisation may be laggards who may actively resist change. Sitting in the middle are 80% of employees who are (fast to slow) followers, who will "wait and see" before actively supporting the new changes. 

The job of leadership is to focus on getting the 80% of "fence sitters" to become active supporters. The steps and actions detailed above help to do this. The process may be accelerated by identifying and involving "key people" and informal "opinion leaders", who are looked up to and bring their followers along. 

How can you Motivate your People to Change?

Leaders have sources of legitimate, coercive, reward, expertise and referent power. Good leaders use these sources of formal and informal power to influence, motivate and get things done. 

Some motivational factors are maintenance factors that must be kept at a satisfactory level to avoid de-motivating employees. Other motivational factors can create inner desire and include different social needs for affiliation, power or achievement. 

By far the quickest, simplest and best motivator is to frequently thank people for their successful performance and desired behaviour, using the BET technique. 

The effectiveness of this simple act of saying "thank you", properly and frequently, is often 

Why do Change Initiatives Fail?

A number of common reasons have been found for failed change initiatives, these include: 

• Poor leadership
• Top management not fully committed
• Lack of direction and focus
• Effort concentrated at the bottom
• Applied as a short term fix
• Loss of excitement when not an immediately success
• Did not demand organisational reform
• Poor problem solving skills
• Failure to recognise how to integrate with other functions and processes
• Delegates to "expert" rather than "real" people doing the job
• Develops a bureaucracy
• Appeals to faddism, egotism and quick-fixism

To dramatically increase the productivity of your business more than often significant change will occur. The key variables of change are people, tasks, structure and technology. People are critical to making or breaking any change initiative.