All posts by Gary Frank

Five Places to Anticipate Support Alignment Before It’s Too Late

A colleague and I made a rookie mistake in our very first work system redesign project.

Through a great deal of joint effort over many months, the organization had been transformed from a traditional assembly line where workers could only perform a few narrowly prescribed tasks to a high performance work system where, among other things, workers could:

  • Build the entire product from beginning to end individually.
  • Manage all aspects of process and product quality.
  • Plan and execute their own daily and weekly production schedule.
  • Continuously improve and innovate the process and the organization.

All of these activities happened in self-managed teams. It was a huge transformation for the organization and its team members.

It became evident pretty quickly that paying people according to their old pay grades, based on now outdated job classifications, no longer made sense.

The organization needed to pay people for acquired and applied skill. The client needed a skill-based pay plan.

Along with the client, we gave ourselves a crash course in skill-based pay plans and even sketched out a framework for what we needed. Armed with our homework, we met with the Director of Compensation in HR, confident that he would see the misalignment as we saw it and come to our aid in putting a solution in place.

His reaction surprised us.

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When It Comes to Change, How Fast and Agile Is Your Company?

I am delighted to introduce Pamela Dennis, Ph.D., a long-time friend, colleague, and former owner of Destra Consulting, who has graciously agreed to share her experience and wisdom on the subject of "change-ability" in this guest post.

I work with executives who want to grow their companies, but they’re concerned that creating change will slow things down and make their organizations ponderous.

When it comes to growth, they want their companies to be racehorses, not elephants.

But did you know that elephants, despite being the world’s largest land animal, run up to 25 miles per hour? Usain Bolt, currently the world's fastest human, averaged 23.3 miles per hour in his world record 100-meter race.

Growth and size don’t always have to make companies slow and unwieldy.

In my experience, the critical factor is having a company that possesses “change-ability” – the natural capability for speed and agility in response to an ever-changing environment.

The 3 Most Important Drivers of “Change-ability”

How do you create a company with speed and agility while at the same time maintaining current advantage? Your company must have these core abilities:

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Leading Change in the Middle

Leading change is challenging enough even when your job title is President or Chief Executive Officer. However, when your title isn’t President or Chief anything and you lead in the mid-level of your organization, leading change is even more challenging. That’s because:

  • YOU didn’t get to decide on the change
  • YOU didn’t get to set the vision
  • YOU may or may not have been involved in developing the change plan or the messaging
  • But YOU ARE expected to execute the change for the unit you lead

Businessman Addressing Meeting Around Boardroom Table

What can you do to lead change effectively in the middle? Continue reading

Impacts of Organizational Change

People prefer stability. It may seem odd to read that as the opening sentence of a blog on the subject of organizational change, but let me say that again. People prefer stability. It’s part of the human condition. For all of the inevitability and necessity of change that we talk about, we actually prefer things to be stable and predictable.

When change occurs – and it always does - we find it disruptive. Exactly how disruptive a change may be is highly individual. The amount of disruption we experience is a function of how much the change affects our individual construct of reality – the routines, preferences, habits, patterns, and ways we understand things. As we all know, this disruption can range from minor inconvenience to the “sky is falling.”

Sparks of blue water on a white background ...

It is axiomatic that the level of change management that must be applied to a change effort is directly proportional to the amount of change people will experience. If this is true, how do you assess the impact of change in order to plan for the level of support? Where do you look and what do you examine?

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Leading Change: The Special Case of the Middle Manager

Leading change is too difficult and complicated to accomplish alone. It requires a support network to augment your personal sponsorship and direct leadership. Much has been written about building an effective sponsor network and it’s all relevant and true. However, there is a significant resource at your disposal that is often over-looked and untapped.

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What Does It Take to Lead Change?

In today’s world, the pace of organizational change has increased dramatically and there’s no end in sight. This pace is being driven by escalating competition, globalization (including emerging economies like BRICS), the pace of technical innovation, and the demand for ever-increasing improvement in performance. Ultimately, this means that leaders have to execute change in timeframes that are increasingly shorter.

Given this challenging set of circumstances, what’s a leader to do?

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