January 1

12 important elements for successful change management effort

by Torben Rick 2 Comments
Categories: Change Management
Tags: , , .

change-road Sustaining success depends on an organization’s ability to adapt to a changing environment – whether it’s an external change, such as a transformative technology or a changing economy, or an internal one, such as a restructuring or key process overhaul. Unfortunately, 70% of organizational transformations fail. Why? Because to many crucial elements in the change process are skipped.

Sometimes we wrongly assume that change is all about improving financial results – stock price, profitability, sales. We forget that successful transformation also generates “soft” benefits, such as trust, new organizational capabilities, and emotional commitment among employees. But even if we strive for financial and non-financial results, additional perils await: painful emotions that boil up in our workforces whenever we ask people to think or do things differently. Whether it’s anger, alarm, or confusion, we must ease those feelings by cultivating an environment of trust, involvement and empowerment.

Nothing about leading change is easy.

  1. Create a sense of urgency based on the company’s financial performance, competitive situation, market position, technological trends – create a burning platform: What will happen if we don’t react now?
  2. Communicate this information broadly and dramatically, especially with respect to crises, potential crises etc.
  3. Ensure middle management is involved in the whole process
  4. Determine areas of improvements: Main- & Sub driver
  5. Create a shared vision and common directions
  6. Visualize the “journey”
  7. Communicate the targets in a simple way. A surprisingly simple image can express more ideas than a thousand complex words
  8. Create a dialog – Involve the whole organization
  9. Measure early and often …… and tell about it ……
  10. Create wins
  11. Continuously lookout for inconsistencies – Deal proactively with resistance
  12. Align performance management processes to drive desired behavior changes

Make sure that you don’t end up like Bad Schandau:

How to implement successful Change Management?

Short URL & Title:
12 important elements for successful change management effort — http://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/kho

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Change Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “12 important elements for successful change management effort”

  1. John on January 11th, 2010 at 9:49 pm

    Communicating during a “crisis” requires a different approach (message content, channels, messenger characteristics, etc.) than what works under BAU. Not shifting the approach is often one of the reasons that communicaitons during disruptive times tend not to be received well (or even received at all.)

  2. Joel A. Montilla on January 18th, 2010 at 6:50 pm

    …and more importantly –listen.

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