Leading Change

Leading change

CHRISTOPHER P. JOCK

Make the organization strong enough to absorb uncertainty and to welcome abundance

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Leadership

Change Management

Governance Risk & Compliance

Innovation

Comfort with change is

essential to vibrancy

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John Kotter, professor and authority on management and leadership, has influenced generations of global business leaders with his perspective on strategy and management.

Centered in the philosophy of leading change, Kotter’s model is now deployed in

virtually any organization that decides to put a measurable structure around a change in

strategy and operations.

Over time and something of a contradiction to Kotter’s teaching, these highly articulated

programs have come to fall under the rubric “change management.”

As a process, change management matured in the last two decades of the twentieth

century. Almost as if to ensure that organizations would take them seriously, most

change management initiatives emphasized consistent execution of carefully designed

and orchestrated tactics. Management teams wanted to make sure that employees

understood they were serious about making changes. Yet many change initiatives

wound up disconnected from the strategic center of companies—often because those

strategic centers themselves had been compromised by a demand for quarterly results

and statistic-of-the-month spin. Navel-gazing also was a risk, often to the detriment of

customer focus and a forward orientation.

Comfort with Change is essential to vibranCy /04

Still striving to find some equilibrium in this new century, workers are enduring the

kind of shift to new processes that our forebears in the last century had to master. Now

companies must grapple with the explosion of digital and personal technologies and

their impact on every aspect of doing business: customer expectations for experience

and relationship; emerging competitors’ product innovations; exponential masses of

data; and a new definition of employee commitment. No industry is untouched by the

digitization of production and communication. Besides the personal change required of

every individual, organizations must pivot without compromising performance.

On the other side of these pivots is the talent-wise organization. Access to a wide variety

of talent is a significant byproduct of the networked globe.

Online technology makes it possible to sell goods and services without boundaries

of time and place. Just as a brick-and-mortar retailer adds temporary staff around

year-end holidays, another company might retain outsourced workers for big production

projects throughout the year. Depending upon the company and if the work can be

performed remotely, however, the outsourced workers may be continents away from

the employer. They also might work via project contracts and not ever attain full-time

employment status.

/05Comfort with Change is essential to vibranCy

For mid-career managers who entered the workforce in the 1980s and 1990s, there was

no preparation for managing employees who are not just steps away. That entire teams

could be assembled project by project, on a freelance basis, with only a few, if any,

actual employees is also a significant shift. Perhaps the strangest concept is becoming a

contractor oneself and understanding the bright side of having more than one employer

and multiple skillsets.

The earth is shifting under everyone. For change management initiatives, classic means

of inventing, planning and executing change—always a risk—now require much more

than textbook implementation practices.

In the short term, change management means introducing new values and practices

to the cultures of most companies. Besides new modes of employment, companies

and people most likely will have to move through constant change in performance

methodologies and product features, due to the incessant development and addition

of technology. They’ll have to discern between distraction and utility with each new

platform or feature that appears in their information systems.


Over the long term, the capacity to pivot quickly and effectively will become a

basic element of organizational existence. Senior executives can expect strategy

implementation timelines not just to shorten but to adjust to market developments in the

moment. Real time now means immediately. As workers take on more personal visibility

through social networks and maybe even self-publish content about their careers and

work lives, they in effect become representatives of their companies’ brands. Company

leaders will have to account for employee word-of-mouth in executing changes to

products and services—and think about how to leverage it.

Doing business is going to require unanticipated levels of human and organizational

energy. The prospect of changing people and companies may be more complex than

ever but it is also much more exciting. In the hands of leaders, change can rejuvenate

more than organizations. Change can resuscitate languishing aspiration. Leading change

could become the most important management skill.


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leading change is different from

managing change

Ron Ashkenas, author and management consultant, writes that companies invest greatly in change management tools yet demonstrate a 60 to 70 percent failure rate in the resulting projects.

While this comes from a circa 2010 report, he says this statistic has remained relatively

the same since the 1970s. Ashkenas goes on to declare, “the content of change

management is reasonably correct, but the managerial capacity to implement it has been

woefully underdeveloped.”

The executives in the 30 percent of companies that succeed would agree. They have

the scars to prove it. Many of them prefer the “smaller” problems of penetrating new

markets and rolling out new products. Getting people to endorse new practices and

steer into change is that difficult a task. Yet they did it, and do it every day.

These executives typically use John Kotter’s model—The 8-Step Process for Leading

Change—listed in his words below, as their template.

leading Change is different from managing Change /09

Kotter named his model carefully and says this about the difference between change

management and change leadership:

“These terms are not interchangeable. The distinction between the two is actually quite

significant. Change management, which is the term most everyone uses, refers to a set

of basic tools or structures intended to keep any change effort under control. The goal

is often to minimize the distractions and impacts of the change. Change leadership, on

the other hand, concerns the driving forces, visions and processes that fuel large-scale

transformation.”

Step 1: Establish a sense of urgency. Help others see the need for change and they

will be convinced of the importance of acting immediately.

Step 2: Create the guiding coalition. Assemble a group with enough power to lead

the change effort, and encourage the group to work as a team.

Step 3: Develop a change vision. Create a vision to help direct the change effort,

and develop strategies for achieving that vision.

Step 4: Communicate the vision for buy-in. Make sure as many staff as possible

understand and accept the vision and the strategy.


Step 5: Empower broad-based action. Remove obstacles to change, change

systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision; and encourage risk-taking and

nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions.

Step 6: Generate short-term wins. Plan for achievements that can easily be made

visible, follow through with those and achievements, and recognize and reward the

employees who were involved.

Step 7: Never let up. Use increased credibility to change systems, structures and

policies that don’t fit the vision. Also hire, promote and develop employees who can

implement the vision. Finally, reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes and

change agents.

Step 8: Incorporate changes into the culture. Articulate the connections between

the new behaviors and organizational success, and develop the means to ensure

leadership development and succession.


Management Leadership

Planning and budgeting Creating and strategizing

Organizing and staffing Communicating and clarifying

Controlling and solving problems Motivating and aligning

Reducing complexity and increasing efficiency Imbedding and sustaining agile technologies

The executives who succeed in leading change give company initiatives their personal

attention and the highest level of priority. Essentially, these executives own the change

themselves. They are coaches, evangelists, champions—but they are also the first to

make changes in their own processes and the last to ignore any challenge to their

thinking. They inspire people to adapt by evolving themselves. They make change a part

of their organizations’ genetic code in three ways.

1 Change leaders put skin in the game. They bet their careers on the ability to

inspire career and organizational pivots.


2 Change leaders are personally close to employees. They do more then step

out of the executive suite; they work side-by-side with the people implementing

change. Change leaders recognize that not all change is led from the executive suite.

3 Change leaders like change and are good at it. They come to depend upon

change as an aspect of professional vitality and management effectiveness.

This is a different kind of executive profile than what we have come to expect in business.

The personalization of technology is making it less acceptable for executives to perform

as remote figureheads. Yet beyond the expectation for intimacy that social technology

is fostering, there is liberation from tasks and processes that took far longer to complete

twenty years ago than they do today. Executives now have the ability to witness the

impact of strategic plans more quickly and identify what is working. This frees them to try

new things more frequently and scale as appropriate across the organization.


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the four vital components of making

change less mysterious

Executives often send a mixed message to organizations. They set an expectation for efficiency and establish markers for measuring it, encouraging workers to operate within those bounds—then they ask people to think outside the box and incorporate new ideas, with little direction for how to apply them efficiently or productively.

An appropriate change leadership initiative equips workers to fill the gap between the

routine and the possible. It positions change in a positive light, describing the impetus

behind the initiative, the desired benefits, and the pain points. Essentially, the logic

should be clear enough that even if people do not agree with the need for change, the

stage is set for them to come around. Plus, a strong initiative provides something of a

roadmap that articulates the logic stream and offers flexibility around its implementation.

The overall spirit of a change leadership initiative should focus on making the

organization resilient and ready to build a comfort level with fairly regular change.

Leading change does require a methodology. There are four things it should include:

strategy, governance, execution and dialog. Of equal importance, these components

equip change leaders to enable good judgment and balance discipline with flexibility.

the four vital Components of making Change less mysterious /15

“Our organizations were never

built to be adaptable. Those

early management pioneers,

a hundred years ago, set out

to build companies that were

disciplined, not resilient. They

understood that efficiency

comes from routinizing the

nonroutine. Adaptability, on

the other hand, requires a

willingness to occasionally

abandon those routines—

and in most organizations

there are precious few

incentives to do that.”

Gary Hamel

With strategy, think of the company as an ecosystem with interdependent areas that feed upon shared goals and benefits. The change strategy should

make the case for itself based on opportunities as well as problems. To help everyone

climb on board, paint a picture—in Kotter’s model, the vision—of your current state and

the future state. Make the strategy interesting by using vivid terms that explain data

points and the new behaviors that will be required. Be transparent about the schedule,

the impact on current responsibilities, and how people can influence the initiative’s

success. Invite everyone to engage and make it easy for them to do so.

Regarding governance, establish personal accountability as a key success factor. In determining roles and who fills them, identify high performers who

can act as everything from sponsors, to champions, to evangelists. They must be strong

managers but they must be able to think on their feet, stay focused and continually

re-establish context. These are the people who keep the change system moving.

They provide resources and information, so they are agile communicators who value

interaction—they listen and they share. The most effective change initiatives establish

several teams: programming, planning, implementation and training. They’ll use business

process maps and manuals to document and communicate progress. Meaningful

execution also requires an IT platform and tools that support real-time content sharing

and content management. This is essential to optimizing the time spent on approvals

/16the four vital Components of making Change less mysterious

and decision-making, keeping it as short and non-bureaucratic as possible. In that

regard, communication and problem escalation protocols are best established up front

and reflected in the content management plan.

Assure seamless execution by positioning the outcome as desirable and the benefits as shared. Most companies have some sort of history with change. The

chances of success with the new initiative increase when change leaders review that

history to use what works and avoid what does not. Apart from the idiosyncrasies unique

to each organization, sharing ownership of the initiative, in terms of both responsibility

and reward, boosts execution quality. Training is essential to execution and should

extend beyond the introduction of new technologies to include immersion in the

business model, customer relations, best practices and staying attuned to industry and

competitor developments. These elements help to expose the context for the proposed

changes and reinforce the rationale for the initiative.

Emphasize dialog as a core value. Like the proposed changes themselves, the

process for achieving it must be relevant across the organization. Workers should see

the methodology and the proposed end state as doable and appropriate to their roles.

People are more likely to remain open when they see that their experience and opinions

matter. And it’s always a good idea to ask people if the process is giving them what they

need to make the changes. Changed processes that are inaccessible to the organization


usually get lip service. The desired change rarely happens on the scale it should—no

matter how pressing the need or sensible the initiative.

The effectiveness of these four components also can be told in the story of what the

company gains from disorder during a transition. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who has made

both controversial and insightful observations in books such as The Black Swan and the

recent Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, makes the case for risking collateral

damage—i.e., loss of employment, loss of business, loss of market position—during

periods that threaten the status quo or even present danger. Taleb attributes risk aversion

to the top-down planning motifs of conventional strategy models; he created the word

“antifragile” to describe true strength, in a company’s case, as prospering from volatility

and emerging stronger from the experience.

Taking the body blows inherent in the antifragility concept may be beyond the reach of

executives answerable to shareholders and responsible for employees. Yet accepting

pain and resistance to strengthen an organization is also a chapter in the story of

leading change.


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KellyOCG’s change leadership touchstones

Urgency Engagement

Clearance

Culture

Influence

Vision

Tangibility

Constancy

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KellyOCG’s change leadership touchstones

UrgencyDynamic

Imaginative

Aspirational

Determined

Fact-based

Compelling

Alert

Cooperative

InfluenceCollaborative

Productive

Trustworthy

Relevant

Credible

Driven

Warm

Understanding

VisionPersonal

Imaginable

Desirable

Feasible

Focused

Flexible

Relatable

Accessible

Achievable

EngagementScalable

Personally and professionally

transformative

Imbedded

Vivid

Democratic

Consistent

Agile

Enthusiastic

ClearanceOpen

Obstacles and barriers removed

Responsive

Current

Relevant

Respectful

Competent

TangibilityReal, palpable results

Immediate

Unambiguous

Motivational

Optimistic

Strategic

Proven

ConstancyCompelling

Aligned

Demonstrable

Grounded

Measurable

Committed

CultureRooted

Shared

Understood

Reinforced

Endorsed

Supported

Networked

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the qualities of

healthy change

Change is often counterintuitive. It is usually contrarian. It is often controversial.

Leading change is risky. On a personal level, it often makes a career. It also has been

known to break a few. For an organization, change requires context, process and

dedication—like any initiative or project, but often with more vigilance to the impact on

workers and customers.

the qualities of healthy Change /22

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

“Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and make new ones like them.”

marcus aurelius, roman, on cHanGe.

/23the qualities of healthy Change

You have You have not

Executed a change leadership model Underestimated the significance

of the proposed changes

Spent time evaluating the organization’s climate Developed the goals in the executive

suite and pushed them top-down

Incorporated the change initiative into your project list Delegated leadership of the project

Identified and engaged stakeholders

from all areas of the organization

Invited a select few executives to participate

Orchestrated workshops and milestone meetings

with representative participation and specific

outcomes and measures

Assumed people are communicating

results and problems

Included specific steps for achieving

business continuity

Left it to business units and departments to

roll the initiative into their schedules

Gained authentic commitment from all constituents

and a plan for winning over the holdouts

Kotter International process for leading change

“Change Management Needs to Change,” Ron Ashkenas, Harvard Business Review Blog Network, April 16 2013

“Change Management vs. Change Leadership—What’s the Difference,” FORBES, July 12 2011

“Why Companies Need to Change the Way They Change,” Gary Hamel, CNNMoney, April 22 2013

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Nassim Taleb’s Cure for Fragility,” Larry Prusak, Harvard Business Review Blog Network, November 29 2012

“Marcus Aurelius’ Six Timeless Observations of Life,” Michael Miles, Pick the Brain blog, August 8 2008

/24Resources

EXIT

AbOuT THE AuTHOR

CHRISTOPHER P. JOCK is vice president and practice leader of Kelly Outsourcing and Consulting

Group. Appointed to his current post in 2009, as global leader for KellyOCG’s Center of

Excellence (CoE) for Global Managed Solutions, Jock works with his team to assist companies

with the operational management of their core and non-core functions, ensuring and increasing

efficiency, productivity and quality. No stranger to effecting and leading organizational change and

transformation of varying size and complexity, he has been involved in well over thirty such projects while engaged

in various roles over his career. He is well-suited and suitably experienced to be a trusted advisor to organizations

that might find themselves in similar situations. He is responsible for strategy, brand relationship management and

business development and support for Managed Solutions worldwide.

AbOuT KEllyOCG

KellyOCG® is the Outsourcing and Consulting Group of workforce solutions provider Kelly Services, Inc. KellyOCG is a

global leader in innovative talent management solutions in the areas of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), Business

Process Outsourcing (BPO), Contingent Workforce Outsourcing (CWO), including Independent Contractor Solutions,

Human Resources Consulting, Career Transition and Executive Coaching, and Executive Search.

KellyOCG was named in the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals® 2013 Global

Outsourcing 100® list, an annual ranking of the world’s best outsourcing service providers and advisors.

KellyConnect is a pioneer in the set-up and maintenance of virtual workplaces. We have access to local talent via

440 Kelly-owned branches across the US. We combine this with the intellectual property of understanding how to

deliver plug-and-play technology solutions (if you don’t have your own).

Further information about KellyOCG may be found at kellyocg.com.

For more thought leadership go to talentproject.com

http://www.kellyocg.com

http://www.talentproject.com

Leading Change

Business

Transcript of Leading Change