Change Enablers and Change Derailers
When last we met, I told you a sad story. I told you that most change efforts fail, and that a bunch fail even after the initial change has been implemented. Old habits die hard and people slip back into old behaviors. The momentum and good intentions that brought the change to fruition gives way to day-to-day realities and busy-ness as usual.
If you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably already broken your New Year’s resolutions. In doing so, you learned that willpower and self-control are not the keys to ditching old behaviors and ingraining new ones. Don’t feel bad. Studies have shown that our ability to control our own behaviors and resist old habits is limited. We have to line up a bunch of other factors to support our goals. And the same is true with organizational change. If we want it to stick, we have to set the organization up for success.
As you think about change, look around your organization at all of the things that support the status quo. The allocation of resources – human and otherwise – to the work that needs to get done has an extremely powerful influence on the way your organization operates today, as do your IT systems, the structure of your organization, how performance is measured and rewarded, and how people are hired, trained and developed.
Depending on the kind of change you’re leading, these factors might have varying degrees of influence. Obviously, if you’re implementing a new sales compensation plan, the measurements and rewards are going to leap to the top of the list. But you’ll also have to keep an eye on whether you have the right people in place to do the measuring and calculate the rewards, and you’ll have to make sure that your IT system’s limitations don’t stand in the way.
Similarly, if you’re altering the structure of your organization, simply changing job descriptions and rolling them out won’t be enough. To turn those customer service reps into quality assurance technicians, you’ll have to make sure they have the training they need to do the new job, that their measures of success are adjusted from customer satisfaction to accuracy and that their raises, bonuses and other rewards are tied to those new metrics.
But while changing systems and structures that support the status quo so that they support the status quo futurus is absolutely necessary, you don’t want to do it haphazardly. In order to ensure optimal results, you’ll need to be careful about what you change and what you don’t. Next time, we’ll talk about two simple tools to help you determine what you need to tackle and what you can ignore.
Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant
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