Five questions to ask yourself when managing change

In the first of a series of blogs about culture, skills, leadership and change. Box SVP and EMEA General Manager David Benjamin looks at what it means to be a change agent

The most successful people crave the chance to make changes; they see change as opportunity not obstacle, and they accept that perpetuating the staus quo effectively means going backwards because rivals will accelerate past you. In my career to date at Guardian Media Group and BT there has been one big theme: I’ve tried to change things, rooting out issues and always asking ‘is there a better way to achieve the organisation’s goals?’

I think that the world is changing so fast now that all executives need to be change agents. They have to be capable of seeing issues, challenges and opportunities early, and address them head on.

Business is truly globalising and our new rivals, new markets and new supply-chain partners come from China, India and Brazil or dozens of other countries. Compliance rules are tightening and not being on top of those rules — GDPR springs to mind, of course — can shut down a business. We also need to keep a watchful eye on geopolitics and how regime changes, elections, referenda and policies are affecting us.

There has never been a time when companies have risen so swiftly nor plunged so dramatically, but it’s not all black and white, rags to riches or riches to rags. We all know the case studies of Nokia, Woolworths and Blockbuster but it’s more complicated. Look at Uber versus the traditional taxi business: the former has seen a dizzying rise only to be pegged back by managerial missteps and legal challenges.

Companies can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funds and they can disappear from prominence in a couple of years. About 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have gone since 1955 and one study by Washington University’s John M. Olin School of Business forecasts that 40 per cent of today’s Fortune 500 won’t exist in 10 years. Elon Musk’s Tesla, founded in 2003, has a market capitalisation well over that of Ford. Apple experienced a Lazarus-like recovery from the brink of irrelevance to become the world’s largest company. Business doesn’t respect age or the past, only the ability to adapt to a sea of changing circumstances.

In this dynamic environment where risks and rewards vie for attention, technology is your friend and we will come to its role in subsequent posts where I’d like to look more deeply at culture, skills and tools. But technology is not an end in itself, just a means to an end.

Embracing change will centre around five questions:

• What are the challenges and opportunities that face your organisation?
• How are those challenges and opportunities likely to change in the near- and medium-term future?
• Does the executive team and wider company understand the above?
• If not, what do I do to make them understand?
• Does my technology and other infrastructure support my organisation’s plans?

Some change agents undersell their employers by delivering quick fixes: sticking plasters that will fall apart under duress. Better to view change as an ongoing (and never-ending) process where you need a process with clear communications as to where you are going and how you plan to get there. Understanding your leaders’ appetite for risk is critical. Nobody wants an anarchist in charge but being a pussycat and ignoring the fact that big challenges mean big changes is no good to anyone either. Sometimes you have to challenge the status quo and rock the comfortable consensus of wisdom.

I’ll continue with this theme in two upcoming blogs, digging deeper into the ‘how’ and, I hope, providing some luminous examples from the real world of change in action. Please join me in contributing to the debate.