Making Change Happen. The three conditions
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These days may organizations engage in change programs, be it digital transformation, agile transformation or innovation transformation. A simple search on Google Trends for ‘digital transformation’ will reveal a hockey stick shape. This comes to show that companies are starting to realize that what made them successful in past will not carry them into the future.
But another trend is starting to emerge. Some companies that have jumped on the transformation bandwagon early-on are now disillusioned with the results. Probably the most prominent recent one being GE.
Change is difficult, for it is a complex task involving humans. However the successful transformation of a corporation starts with the successful transformation of its smallest operating element, the individual. The only way a company can reach higher performance goals is to change the way its people behave across the board.
Through observation I came to realize that change lies at the crossroad of personal willingness, capability and daringness. Employees will change their behavior only if they see the point for change, are equipped with the right skills and tools to change and are allowed to operate differently.
For an employee to be willing to change they first have to want to change. They need to be motivated to change by understanding why change / transformation is needed. If leaders fails to clearly articulate the need for change employees will be unwilling to operate in a new way.
In 1957 the Stanford social psychologist Leon Festinger published his theory of cognitive dissonance, the distressing mental state that arises when people find that their beliefs are inconsistent with their actions. The researcher observed in the subjects of his experiments a deep-seated need to eliminate cognitive dissonance by changing either their actions or their beliefs. Therefore the implication of this finding for corporate transformation is that if the people believe in the overall purpose of the transformation, they will be happy to change their individual behavior to serve that purpose.
Equality important for willingness to change is inspiration. Companies need to invest in their employees to be inspired to change. This can be achieved in many ways, as for example: send employees to conference where they get exposed to ideas from other industries might do the job. Or hiring prolific keynote speakers to do onsite talks can also help people be more willing to change.
Secondly for change to happen employees need to be capable of change. They need to be capable of operating in the desired new way. Many transformations make the error of asking employees to behave in a certain way without teaching them how to do it or providing them with the right tools to do so. The company may, for example, ask employees to be “customer-centric”. But if they haven’t done this in the past, they will have no idea how to interpret or go about this new directive.
To increase the capability of employees and team to operate in new ways — the best thing a company can do is to train them. Organizing workshops and capability development programs will allow employees to acquire new skills. Bare in mind that the capability development programs need to be in-sync with the goals of the transformation.
Lastly, for an employee or a team to dare to change, the company needs to create the right environment. Basically the company needs to create an adequate space for people to put to practice the newly acquired skills and inspiration.
For people to be daring the company needs to change its governance to accommodate for the skills the employees got in the training programs.
The disappointment many organizations experience with their transformation programs are rooted in the fact that they failed to synchronize the 3 elements.
Some companies only focus on upskilling the workforce but fail to to create the right environment for people to apply their new skills. Or forget to mention why is the transformation needed. In any case, the companies that only focus on capability, ignoring the other 2 conditions will soon realize that many of the people that have been trained will look for other employers. Research has proven that people will do so in search for a place where they can put their newly acquired skills into practice. Some will even consider starting their own businesses — in some of these case the employees leaving will create direct competitor products to the ones of the companies they just left.
Companies that only changed their processes and haven’t trained people on how to operate in a new way will soon realize that it was all in vain. People will continue with ‘business as usual’ as they don’t have the right skills to operate in a new way.
In other cases, companies that only focused on inspiring people without upskilling them (or changing the environment) can ‘take pride’ in having create a workforce of ‘frustrated enthusiasts’.
It is neither easy nor straightforward to transform an organization — many things can go wrong. However the only way for a company to reach a higher plane of performance is to alter the way its people think and act. Simultaneously working on the 3 conditions for change will make change happen.
