Five Reasons for Creating a Change Network

June 25, 2019The Politics of ChangeGary Frank

No one knows for sure how many change efforts fail. An often-cited statistic is that nearly three quarters do. Some have pushed back at that number as being far too high. To complicate the matter further, when a statistic like this is mentioned, criteria for judging success or failure are never cited.

Leaving “failure” (however that may be defined) aside, a lot of change efforts, in my experience, fail to reach their intended potential. For all of the effort and disruption that people experience through the process of the change, there is often a considerable gap between what was initially envisioned and what becomes reality. Think of it as the change potential gap.

There are a variety of factors that contribute to the gap. I’m guessing that if I asked you to make your own list it might look something like this: Continue reading →

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

May 19, 2018Executing ChangeGary Frank

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

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It became evident pretty quickly that paying people according to their old pay grades, based on now outdated job classifications, no longer made sense.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

Continue reading →

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

April 13, 2018Change LeadershipGary Frank

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:

Continue reading →

How Do I Create Meaningful Engagement?

February 15, 2018Change Leadership, Engagement, Executing ChangeGary Frank

This is the third post in my series on meaningful engagement. You can check out the other two posts in the series here:

Meaningful engagement and the co-creation of change can produce much more commitment than simple buy-in can.

Organizations that settle for buy-in, rather than aspire to meaningful engagement, miss out on the opportunity to:

Deepen commitment to the change process
Stimulate co-creation of solutions
Build business literacy and other important business skills, and
Accelerate the pace of change.

I define meaningful engagement as:

“Any authentic involvement that allows people to make consequential contributions to the process and the outcome of a change and deepens their understanding of it, their commitment to it, and their ownership of it.”

As I wrote in Meaningful Engagement vs. Buy-In: What's the Difference and Why Should I Care?, leader commitment – including the belief that ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions and the willingness to commit time, effort, and resources to enable them to do so – is the pivotal difference between enabling meaningful engagement and settling for buy-in.

Without a leader’s resolute commitment to authentic involvement, the full measure of meaningful engagement will not be realized.

If we know that meaningful engagement is what we want and need in our organizations, how do we go about creating it?

Continue reading →

What’s the Driving Force Behind Engagement?

June 28, 2017Change Leadership, Foundations for Changebuy-in, change, change leadership, change management, engagement, leading change, meaningful engagement, organization change, organizational changeGary Frank

In my previous post Meaningful Engagement vs. Buy-In: What's the Difference and Why Should I Care?, I posed two questions.

“… why do we continue to manage change in ways that do not truly engage people and foster conditions where “meaningful engagement” can occur commonly?
Why do we continue to settle for “buy-in” when we want and actually need much more?"

I suggested five reasons why many organizations settle for buy-in rather than aspire to meaningful engagement. I refer you to the previous post for the specifics (Buy-In vs. Engagement: What’s the Difference and Why Should I Care?). Briefly, though, I argued that buy-in more often triumphs as the objective of change management because it doesn’t require the same level of leader or manager commitment that meaningful engagement does. Aiming for buy-in just doesn’t demand as much time and effort and, in the end, expediency wins.

BUT, and it’s a big but, I argued that tacit buy-in doesn’t produce nearly as much commitment as meaningful engagement and the co-creation of change can. Done right, meaningful engagement in organizational change has the potential to:

Strengthen everyone’s understanding of the need for and direction of change
Deepen commitment to the change process and objectives
Stimulate co-creation of solutions
Build business literacy and other important business skills
Accelerate the pace of change, and
Propel the change beyond the envisioned outcome

In this post, we’ll continue this exploration of meaningful engagement and pose two additional questions.

How does meaningful engagement produce more than simple buy-in?
What are the dynamics at work?

Continue reading →

Meaningful Engagement vs. Buy-In: What’s the Difference and Why Should I Care?

May 19, 2016Change Leadership, Foundations for Changeadmin

Many years ago, I came across a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. It read, “Change imposed is change opposed.” A consulting firm that was promoting its change management practice had placed the ad. It held my attention for a long time. I had been familiar for years with the adage “People support what they help to create.” I’d quoted it many times and thought it conveyed what people leading change needed to know about the essence of change management.

However, this new statement conveyed the idea more directly - even bluntly. It caused me to think about how many organizations go about managing change and it caused me to wonder the following all the more.

If imposing change provokes opposition and people do in fact support what they help to create, then why do we continue to manage change in ways that do not truly engage people and do not foster conditions where “meaningful engagement” can occur commonly? Why do we continue to settle for “buy-in” when we want and need so much more? Continue reading →

Leading Change in the Middle

April 6, 2016Change Leadershipbecoming an effective change leader, change leadership, change management, communication, leading change, organizational changeGary Frank

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

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

Who Should Be Responsible for Managing Change?

March 3, 2016Change Leadershipchange management, managing change, organization change, transitionGary Frank

Effective change doesn’t happen by accident. It is the result of careful planning and thoughtful execution. Leaders play a pivotal role in change because they possess legitimate power to authorize the change, establish the vision, provide direction and resources, and hold organizational members accountable. Everyone looks to the leader for guidance and that person must model the way for the rest of the organization.

Change would be a much tidier process if that were all it took – an effective leader who knows what to do and how to do it and is at the front leading the charge.

But as important as the leader’s role is, it isn’t the leader who ultimately executes change. Change (from simple to complex) is always a matter of people in impacted areas making the transition from the way things are now to the way they’re supposed to be in the future.

Transition at the people level involves, among other things:

Answering their questions about why and what it will mean for them
Describing how things will be in the future
Helping them understand whether or not they will be in that future
Involving them to co-create that future
Providing a credible plan for moving forward that speaks to them at their level
Communicating frequently and reliably about what’s happening now and what will happen next
Learning new skills and applying new knowledge
Becoming part of a new work group

How does this all get done? Who is leading the charge on this? More to the point, who should be leading the charge on this? Continue reading →

Impacts of Organizational Change

January 4, 2016Foundations for Changechange impacts, change management, impact of change, organizational changeGary Frank

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.”

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?

Continue reading →

The Utility of Resistance

November 4, 2015Foundations for Changechange practitioners, change team, organization change, resistance to changeGary Frank

Since man began to sail the open seas, sailors have used a very simple device to figure out how to take maximum advantage of the wind. Pieces of ribbon or yarn attached to the main mast and to the sides of the jib tell a sailor when the wind is up and how to trim the sails to use them most efficiently to make the best headway. These pieces of ribbon or yarn (three red strips in the photo below) are called a “tell tale” and “tell tales” are one of a sailor’s best friends.

When it comes to organization change, leaders, managers, and change practitioners also have a “tell tale.” It’s called resistance. However, resistance is rarely regarded as anyone’s best friend. Quite the contrary, resistance is usually regarded as something to be “overcome,” “managed,” “mitigated,” “addressed” or otherwise “eliminated.”

What if we thought about resistance and used it differently?

Continue reading →