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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5. Battling with change resistance