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Why is Change so Difficult?
We expect our leaders to create visions and share those visions with us.
almost inevitably those visions involve some element of change.
Whether it's a change in the process of how we go about our work.
Whether it's a change in the structure of our organisations.
Whether it's a change in how we behave, or more importantly changes in the culture.
The way we do things in our organisations. And yet there's a paradox
associated with leadership
and in managing change. And that is that 70-80% of all change efforts fail.
So we have two questions arising from this,
The first is why is change so difficult to manage?
and secondly are there models or frameworks that we can use
which will help improve our success and outcomes.
Let's start with the first of those questions. I think it's really important
to recognise what change is.
Change is a dynamic and social process.
By dynamic we mean that it has many moving parts.
It has intended outcomes and unintended outcomes.
Even the smallest of changes will result in unintended outcomes.
Those interconnections are not always understood.
And not always known when the change process is at the very beginning stages.
People will generally react to change in one of three ways:
They may be enthusiastic, they accept the change.
They are proactive and are willing to come on board. A second group of people which
is really the majority of people
will adopt a wait-and-see approach. They want to see
how the change is going to be received and then base their judgments
on what they see and experience. The third group of people' are the people
who will
fundamentally resist the change. Very often were tempted to ignore that group.
And to say that they're just resistant people and we shouldn't be bother with them.
But in fact, it's much more subtle than that. Because these people may not agree
with the change.
They may have seen this happen before and they may have experienced this
before and
realised that this is not going to work. They may not like
the change agent, the person who's bringing about the change.
But more often than Not, what we find is
that people object to the how the change
is being implemented. It's the process of change.
They are not being consulted, they don't feel as if they're being engaged,
they don't feel as if their voice is being heard. When that happens, people will
disengage and they will resist.
So, the bottom line is that change will happen
when people are engaged. And people are key
to the implementation of change. The second question we asked was
are there models or frameworks that we can use to help us
implement change. The answer of course is, Yes. There are many models
that we can use. The oldest going back to Kurt Lewin,
John Carter we can use quality tools and frameworks.
Plan-do-study-act we can use the HSE model.
Any of the organisation development models. What these models do,
is that they help us to organise how we're going to plan and implement
the change and they enable us to take a holistic view
of that planed change. Essentially all of these models
are divided into three areas: First
they encourage us to plan the change
to try and see how the change would work, who needs to be involved at the change,
and to try and schedule it. The middle part
is about the action, what actions are we going to take and how are we going to
implement
the change. The third component and a really important point
is how the change is going to be mainstreamed
or embedded so that it becomes part of the culture.
The new way of how this organisation
or team is going to work. So, what are the take-home messages
around leadership and managing change? The first message is that leaders
need to be good an effective at managing change.
The second is realising that change is a dynamic
and social process. But we have tools and frameworks.
that can help us in implementing change.
The third point is about people, as a leader you cannot
implement change on your own. There are always other people
that need to be involved. They need to believe
in you as a leader and the vision of where you're going
in terms of implementing change. And you need to listen to them.
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