What do your competitors not want you to know about implementing change?

A credible and shared plan behind the change

Organizational change is an inevitable part of business operations. All the more inevitable the longer the business continues and the wider the organization grows beyond the original founding team. 

In order for the change to be successful, it is necessary to be able to combine the limited development contributions into a compact entity that is also feasible. So it is not enough to produce a strategic change paper from a corner room or in a high-level management retreat without connections to everyday activities. 

On the other hand, it is also not possible to gather everything between the earth and the sky into one plan and start from the fact that the resources to carry out the change magically appear at our disposal when the time is right. 

The thinking that crystallizes resources for change is creditably opened, e.g., in the work of Malnight and partners (2005) Must Win Battles – Creating Focus You need to achieve your Business Goals. Even though the work will be a few decades old again next year, from the point of view of the transformation leader, it has not lost a drop of dust.

An implementable plan takes into account the organization's available resources and the mental journey that must be taken to make the change successful. It is essential to identify the handful of issues, the achievement of which really affects the organization's ability to function, and to solve which the best forces of the organization must be harnessed. We have to decide which battles to win, we can't win everywhere.

In other words, success requires making the right choices, involving the team and taking pragmatic (usually budget) constraints into account. If these things are not taken care of, it will happen to Finnish motorists in the fall, when winter surprises once again - resistance to change arises from an insufficiently ingrained implementation, and this should not be a surprise. Suddenly, a perfectly capable team becomes seemingly unable to take the whole to the finish line - whether the root cause is a narrowness in the overestimation of resources, differences in the team's perception of the current state, or the management's ability to focus. 

So what's your advice? How are the resources required for the development freed from the current basic operation, i.e. will the change pay for itself without additional resources and with interest?

Community change is always individual change

One of the central problems of implementing change is that change is thought of as a mass movement – everyone starts from the same point and ends up at the same point. In reality, the situation is rarely this one-sided – individuals have had their own habits and strengths for doing things, and they have their own attitudes towards both the current way of doing things and change.

When implementing the change, roughly four different areas of an individual's work should be taken into account:

1. Information. Does he have enough information about the need and reasons for the change so that he considers the change understandable and acceptable? Only an understood and accepted need leads to a change in doing. If a person truly believes that the new method of operation is weaker than the old one, and does not understand why it should be changed, the desire to change is really low. As a supervisor, you should therefore ensure that the need and reasons for the change are understandable to everyone.
2. Acquirements. Does the person have sufficient skills to do something new? We often get our dominant position in the organization when we know something that others may not know so well. We are asked for advice, and we are able to help others. If the change takes away this sense of dominance and control, the change feels really bad, and is resisted emotionally. As a supervisor, your task is to identify whether each of your team members has sufficient skills to know how to do something new. 
3. Stance. How does the person relate to changes, the work community and management in general? Does he lean on the so-called forward, enthusiastic and ready to take on new things, or do you stand idly by waiting for what stupid thing the management has come up with again? Attitude is perhaps the most difficult cause of resistance to change. There are always people who, just on principle, do not want to do something or change. This is where the so-called crowd pressure. If others in the work community can get excited, and the change gets their support, it's hard to be the only one who is reluctant. As a leader, you should make sure that the stories that support the change, about the successes of different people and how trying something new has helped someone do their job easier / better / more comfortably, begin to circulate in the organization, and to ingrain the change into a part of the culture. 
4. Motivation. Is the person's reward system such that it supports change? If you try to change something so that the change leads, for example, to smaller bonuses than before, while the old way of doing things still guarantees bigger bonuses, you will not succeed. As a supervisor, you should ensure that processes, systems and remuneration support the success of the change, not hinder it. In addition, you should enable the individual's internal motivation - does he have the autonomy to make decisions regarding his own work? Can he experience the experiences of success and learning at work? Is the work meaningful? 

In order for an individual to be able to succeed in his own change as part of community change, he must receive support for the development of knowledge and skills, strengthening of attitude, and the creation of motivation. But how can you, as a supervisor, know where the problem lies if the person resists the change? 

We'd be happy to discuss that with you more - get in touch, and we'll be happy to share our thoughts on the subject!