Some time ago I met with a senior manager in a large blue-chip company who described a new approach to enabling organizational change.
She works for a large, fast growing part of the business that is subject to a wide range of regulation and compliance requirements. Despite being a young and flexible organization, with lots of smart people, ample funding and a well documented “change methodology”, they were struggling to make change happen, both internally and with business partners. So what was holding them back?
After talking to some relatively new recruits who were as frustrated as she was, the real issues began to emerge – they did not have the collective learning and experience within the organization to know HOW to make change happen!
The Corporate ‘change methodology ’ was overkill and unwieldy causing adoption to be poor, whilst new employees simply didn’t know it existed. As a new division, strong networks had not had time to develop internally and consequently people just did not know how to go about initiating and enacting meaningful change.
They set about tackling the problem in a number of ways:
- A set of ‘change pathways’ was created, which described a series of approaches to making different types of change, such as small IT system design and deployment, small and large process changes, cultural change, integrated business change, continuous improvement etc
- They worked with an extended group to determine the essential behaviours required for successful change, such as celebrating failure (at least they tried!), active support, mentoring and taking responsibility.
- An active but informal network of change ‘facilitators’ (they didn’t call them that!) was created to run formal and informal sessions and provide individual support to help people build networks and confidence
Six months later and results are starting to be achieved. More projects are being initiated and completed, more people understand how to approach and carry out change and sponsoring managers, who need a whole variety of changes delivered, are recognizing this change in organizational capability and capacity.
They have started to deploy an underpinning change management software platform to support the key cultural and engagement issues they need to address such as staff engagement, oversight of the change portfolio and a set of different approaches to change depending on the change that needs to take place.
It’s still early days on the road to developing a change competence and they have had to overcome many issues, but senior management continue to actively support the initiative, knowing that a significantly increased ability to successfully enact change makes the business more resilient and flexible moving forward.
