Change Whisperer on ProjectManagement.com

There are great conferences every year on Change Management.  These are opportunities to immerse yourself in the strategic, organizational development and design as well as project management approaches to implementing change, and bringing people along responsibly and expeditiously.

This is also where advancements in Change Management thinking are showcased.  No discipline is static and for organizations who recognize that the capability to be nimble is a strategic advantage these are “do not miss” events.

April:

•  “Your Passport to Change”, The 2012 Association of Change Management Professionals Global Conference will be held April 1-4, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
 

•  “Change Management 2012: Agility, Performance, Engagement” , Conference Board of Canada, Monday April 16 – Tuesday April 17 2011, Radisson Admiral Hotel, Toronto Harbourfront, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. “Learn how to maintain productivity and performance during major change. Change management has become a core competency for any successful organization, because the volume and nature of today’s change challenges are unprecedented. Find out from change management experts how to deal with these issues, and how to create an agile, high performance organization with an engaged workforce. Learn how to make change stick, and how to use change strategies to build a more resilient and effective organization”.
June:

•  “Change Management Conference”, The Conference Board (US), June 21-22 2012, InterContinental New York Barclay, New York, NY.  The 2012 Change Management Conference will provide a fresh perspective on what it takes to lead and implement change in a complex business environment. It will provide hands-on working sessions as well as case studies of leading corporations that are implementing dynamic change management strategies and tactics..
 

July:

•  “Twelfth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change Management”. Common Ground Publishing, University Center, Chicago, USA from 6-8 July 2012.  This Conference addresses ‘knowledge’, ‘culture’ and ‘change’ in Organizations from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.  Plenary Speakers will include some of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of management.
Looking for a great speaker on Change Management?  We know several – give me a call at 416.845.3040 or [email protected] and we will arrange introductions.

Have you heard of other good events? Please share in the comments section.

Attending? Please share, maybe we will see you there.

This is the second post exploring the role of leaders in transformational strategy execution.  It is not the only risk, but it is the biggest risk.  Being a great leader is NOT a ‘gimme’ for being a great sponsor.  What do great sponsors do differently?

Reason for hope – great leaders are great learners

We have phenomenal leaders on this continent, and leaders-in-waiting ready to step up.  The first step towards a successful execution is to find the leader who is first prepared to learn how to be a great sponsor in this new world order.

“Let him that would move the world, first move himself” (Socrates)

Do you doubt that your role is so pivotal or that it is so different than yesterday?  The findings of almost every survey (from McKinsey to the Project Management Institute to Prosci’s ‘best practices’), states leadership is the number 1 success factor in the implementation of transformational change.  

And yet few leaders ramp up for this very different kind of change.  Transformational change is rare.  Few leaders spend their careers implementing such complex change.

In fact most leaders come to transformational change as operational experts and change novices.  Why? Two reasons:

1. Such change might, in fact be a once in a career or once in a decade challenge
2. Being a great Sponsor is NOT the same as being a great leader  

The single biggest risk to project success is the leader who underestimates his / her role and what must be done differently.

Most organizations have support groups, internal consulting divisions and Program Management Offices, very familiar with transactional change and who are eager to support.  That is a great base.   

Together we ask leaders:  are you ready to explore what it means to be a great sponsor of transformational change?  This will change the way we operate together and it will change the results we can achieve together.

What does it take to be a great Sponsor – a Change Leader?

Over 37 years Conner Partners has studied organizational change and has identified the characteristics of “winners” and “losers”.  This research is updated constantly (the latest version of the Change Execution Methodology was released last month).  BTW, the biggest change is still an opportunity for many organizations – integrating strategic alignment, people change management and project management.  And, this is not answered by installing a PMO.

What does the research say are the most important characteristics of great sponsors?  Here are a  couple of examples quoted directly from “How to be an Effective Sponsor of Major Organizational Change”:

• Human impact of the change: The small movements of big wheels at the top of the company often translate into frantic movements for smaller wheels down in the organization. Sponsors who succeed understand how many people and groups will be affected by a change throughout their organization—they can appreciate the impact of their decisions on those employees.
• Nature of resistance: Resistance can be a key barrier to the realization of a major change initiative. Successful sponsors deal effectively with the nature and intensity of resistance as the project is implemented.
• Scope of the change: A major change can have a far-reaching impact on an organization that is both obvious and subtle. And some of these effects can lead to resistance, which could seriously impede implementation if they go undetected and/or are misunderstood. Productive sponsors identify the full range of implications for all their change decisions.
• Change inhibitors: Sponsors who triumph during change proactively identify potential change inhibitors. To the greatest extent possible, they recognize and eliminate possible barriers before they become a threat to the project’s realization. Barriers that can’t be avoided are contained and managed.
• Managing capacity: Change implementation sometimes creates unanticipated drains on the change capacity of those most affected by an initiative. Successful sponsors maintain a vigilance on any remaining capacity throughout the implementation process and take corrective action as required.
• Commitment to sacrifice: Major change often requires a personal and/or political price for those who play the sponsor’s role. The productive sponsor understands that the costs for success are real and leads the way in paying them. He or she thereby establishes an understanding throughout the organization that sacrifice will be required when the price of failure is prohibitive.

The full list can be referenced on the website (behind the registration page here) and there’s also some great information on role definitions and cascading sponsorship structures.

None of these are as simple as they seem – it is the experienced judgement on the fly that makes the difference from good to great.  And that’s why Fortune 100 organizations retain external support on mission critical business imperatives.

Ready to contract for a great “Sponsor-Agent Relationship”? Check out Daryl’s series here on his ChangeThinking blog (tip: there’s a great free download of a tool we use in the first post). 

What’s next?

Sponsorship is not the only risk to strategy execution.  Over the next couple of months, I will come back to review other challenges, such as:

• How to engage the passion of your people in authentic and meaningful ways
• Organizing chaos and the anomalies of the phrasing ‘change management’
• The horrors of overcoming a silo-driven culture that operates in the best interests of the whole organization

If you would like to discuss strategy execution approaches we have implemented successfully for other Fortune 100 companies it would be a pleasure to connect – you can reach me at [email protected].

Back in the day, there was a bit of a joke – not a “ha ha” but an “ahem” – how many tries does it take for an organization to implement a strategy?  Today, most organizations get one shot, that’s all.  The alternative could be bankruptcy (consider the bleak horizon facing Nokia).  A few of the brave and lucky, and prepared, can succeed at “turning that yacht around in a bathtub”.

 If you are approaching a ‘too important to fail’ strategy, and have not sponsored a transformational change program recently, then this conversation is for you.  Or if your program is in urgent need of remediation, stay tuned.  What is the biggest risk? Leadership follow through. 

First the context – does this sound familiar?

Inside of organizations, we all know it, there is an inertia.  As hard as leaders try to coax, push or demand, sustained traction remains elusive. 

Projects still start off with bang, or sometimes a room temperature “yea” or very cautious WIIFM, then head into a grind of excuses, delays, short falls and near misses. 

You know it – it usually starts with lots of meetings where leaders describe the vision, scope creeps in, then delays, then ruthless scope cut, then a massive puuuussshhh.  Sometimes a launch emerges but more often a compromised end product and sometimes at complete fizzle out (usually under cover of some other event, such as an economic decoy or re-org, etc).  You don’t need statistics to tell you that ~70% of transformational change fails.

None of us can afford another failure of this kind. 

Remember the mission – the calling

We need success like never before.  Our economies and our communities need revenue growth, and job creation, where ever feasible. 

The stakes are higher than ever – and the risks are just as high.

Project funding is too precious.  Competition is too fierce. 

Leaders must, and can, get strategies airborne.  And there are many internal and external resources who want you to succeed. 

This is not a square peg, square hole problem – the challenges are different

Yesterday we were manufacturing-driven and we were great at it, so great that it is difficult to leave the memory of the glory days.  Efficiency and effectiveness were enough to get 10, 20, 30% costs savings and that was great.  It still is, take it whenever you can get it. That was transactional change – reforming processes and  technology.  The largest of this is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) -  this crosses the line to transformational change – where we need people to change the way they think about their work, not just the order in which they operate.  This enters into the territory of the riskiest of strategies.

Take this another step forward and, amongst all of the economic challenges we are dealing with, our focus must evolve again. 

We are an increasingly digital society.  So what? Well, as we are increasingly information-driven there are more moving parts to opportunities and those parts themselves are more dynamic. 

Is  your organization looking at service-driven strategy, e.g. “partnering” and “collaboration”,  or becoming innovation-driven?  These involve the most difficult of change – changing the way people think about their jobs and their colleagues, about how they perform on a daily basis. 

The implementation approaches that work on transactional change, that were successful in the glory days, are inadequate against this so-called “soft” side of change.  ‘Telling the vision’ and issuing compliance-driven instructions are insufficient in complex, dynamic change where we need the passion and judgement of our people as the ROI pivot.

This is the first of the round peg, square hole dilemmas.  Something must change to get success.

Round peg, square hole dilemmas – risks

The laundry list is significant:

• Our organizations are leaner than ever before and our people are more fatigued  – there is less tolerance in the organization for change and few people (less time and energy) to do it right.
• The organization has aimed high and fallen short before – there is low confidence in ability to follow through to the end successfully (look hard at the track record and be honest – these strategies are often ‘all or nothing’ bets).  
• There is significant hesitancy – telling people what to do will not generate enough passion, enough commitment, to sustain momentum.  Engaging them cannot be lip service.
• This is not the only important strategy ‘in flight’ in the organization concurrently.  Are we competing for priority, for precious resources?
• Gen X, Y and M – as critical as they are in our Human Capital plan – have very different attitudes to work and this complexity must be factored in.
• The dimensions of the strategy are neither linear nor shallow – yet our organizations are built for linear from workflows to the chain of command reporting structure.  Now there is diversity and complexity in execution, and in adoption.  The problems are different and require different thinking and solutions – Daniel Pink gives an awesome explanation of this here.
• We cannot use the same project implementation processes of the past alone (RACIs, critical paths, gantt charts) – they are wildly insufficient. Even combined with basic change management competencies, they will fail.  This kind of change requires organized chaos, disruption and re-birth. 

So what is the single biggest risk? Survey results are resounding: leadership.  Leadership in the form of insightful and accurate strategic planning and change stewardship (sponsorship). Leaders are the only individuals within the organization with the purview and authority to deal with these risks.  And this does not point to a single leader (tho that is important) within the organization – success relies on the synergy within the leadership team.  The biggest risk is leadership follow through – from concept to realization.

Okay, we covered a lot of ground for a single blog post. In Part 2, scheduled for early August, I will come back to: “Reason for hope – great leaders are great learners” and “What does it take to be a great change leader (sponsor)?” and we will link to some great Conner Partners’ research on “the characteristics of effective sponsorship”. 

Meanwhile, if you’d like more check out Daryl Conner’s “Sponsorship” series here on his ChangeThinking blog.

If you would like to discuss strategy execution approaches we have implemented successfully for other Fortune 100 companies it would be a pleasure to connect – you can reach me at [email protected].

A question.  Actually a conversation of questions and lots of listening. Why? Because it’s not what you know that will engage your people – it’s what they know.

So, what do they “know”? What do they believe about this strategy / change initiative / project? If they trust you enough to be candid, you are likely to be surprised – perhaps shocked – and even enlightened.

To be clear, I am not advocating that the end goal is consensus or even agreement.  Many strategies that simply must go forward are unpopular. However, it is never a prudent option to ignore or disregard dissent. 

Many times listening to dissent, acknowledging it, can be enough to defuse it so as to open minds enough to begin real conversations about ‘why we must do this’ and ‘what happens if we don’t’. 

Years ago, I was leading a team of Business Managers and Analysts in support of several multi-million dollar initiatives for a major national bank.  Each week as our relationships grew, I learned more about how my directs, and their directs, were thinking about our approach.  This feedback was instrumental in many course corrections.  I was often shocked, even blindsided, despite my efforts to ‘stay close to the ground’. Their willingness to be honest, often to tell me what I did not want to hear, was crucial and I respect them to this day for that. However, I now realize I could have asked even better questions.

In “Fierce Conversations” author Susan Scott shines a light on how to have more meaningful, powerful conversations, on questions that engage and move people – move us together – towards better futures. Advice like:

• “Who owns the truth? Each of owns a piece of it, and nobody owns all of it” – and by the way no one understand this better than your people.
•  “The conversation is the relationship” – our relationships with others (well certainly colleagues and business partners) are made up only of conversations and, with that in mind, each conversation is a manifestation of that relationship, i.e. what we say matters, it moves (or doesn’t move) people.
• “The more emotionally loaded the subject, the more silence is required” – many times people need time to process information and to filter first reactions.

I ask you to reflect on the first time someone told you to change or told you something was great you should try it, and you did.  Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t – no matter how great that thing is.   In fact, I’d go so far as to say you cannot tell someone into change.  You can make them aware, you might even be able to help them understand, but the choice is theirs to move forward or not. That choice comes from within them – not in anything you say.

We all benefit from time to process information against our own experiences, beliefs, values and experiences.  Asking questions is a way to facilitate this process, to nudge it along.  Asking fosters, and perhaps expedites, the deciphering process.  A conscientious facilitator does this with integrity, does not misrepresent or misappropriate feedback, rather eases the analysis, fills in gaps of information and encourages into the new territory towards what can become a shared vision.

This process is an investment.  Naturally one leader cannot hold 10,000 conversations but this process can be cascaded as necessary to unearth the resistance (acknowledge it and resolve it where possible), that builds the commitment.   

It is not easy but it is worthwhile.

Here’s another powerful voice from the “Culture eats Strategy” discussion currently running on LinkedIn in the Group Strategic Leadership Forum.  This one is from Mona Mitchell, CEO, Achieveblue Corporation.

I believe we must apply the same rigor to our culture strategy and development as we do to other core strategies.

Culture must be defined and measured, and continual improvement plans must be developed with the same degree of analysis, action planning and introspection as any other core strategy.

I believe that culture is not something that can be left for leaders to talk about in their annual report or trotted out for at town halls to the troops. It should not be a vague statement of nice words. You have to identify what is the Ideal culture required when you are defining your strategy and this must be done by the executive team. It might have some visionary titles but its components must be easily defined, understood and measured. It should be put in the context of the organization’s vision, values and strategies so that all can understand expectations at all levels of the organizations .

You should always have a measure of culture and once you understand the Actual operating culture against the Ideal, like any strategic process, there must be a strategy to close the gap. And this strategy must be as explicit as any strategy in the organization with accountabilities clearly defined and measurements in place.

This strategy can have and should have financial paybacks. These paybacks should be measured against other strategies.

Certainly the actions of an organization’s leaders will have a great impact in creating the climate that fosters the ideal culture. Many, when faced with the measurements and feedback, will understand how their own actions have created both the positive and negative aspects of the current culture, perhaps inadvertently.

If strategy is not deployed and you have a great understanding of your current culture, other structural issues can be identified which when addressed will substantially enhance the formation of an Ideal culture. These may be in areas such as physical or technological infrastructure; company business processes and policies; metrics or perhaps areas such as compensation and incentives. Again through prioritization and cost benefit analysis, we can identify those initiatives which can have the biggest benefit to our overall corporate success.

Mona is the President and CEO of Achieveblue Corporation, an organization focussed on growing and building vibrant organizational cultures. Mona is on LinkedIn here.

If you are interested in creating a “culture of change” – a “nimble” organization (“one that has a sustained ability to quickly and effectively respond to the demands of change while continually delivering high performance”) – check out a few posts from the master of change, Daryl Conner, here.  

And, if you would like to discuss strategy execution approaches we have implemented successfully for other Fortune 100 companies, it would be a pleasure to connect – you can reach me at [email protected].