Introduction to Change Situations

There are many reasons why over 70% of Change Initiatives fail to perform up to expectations. This entry will introduce two change situations that will be used by future entries to demonstrate how Communications, Relationship Building and both Formal and Informal Leadership can impact a change initiative’s success or failure.

Below are the two change situations:

Situation one: A major healthcare institution has a sweeping long-term change initiative going on in a technical department. As part of this change two related but formerly separate department have been merged into one overall department with several specialized units. During the merger the small of the departments, which is the concentration of this case study, was positioned in the device support unit. Historically throughout the change initiative this former department, made up of mostly long-term employees, has had management issues. They have gone through a series of managers and team leaders that have not performed up to expectations. Additionally, during the early days of the change initiative the senior management and most of the now merged department was relocated to a geographically separate site due to space issues within the organization.

At one point during this still ongoing change initiative they reassigned the manager prior to hire a new manager. The unit’s senior officer stepped in to handle the management of this group while they searched for a new manager.

The situation during that time is bulleted below:

• The group’s client forms and process where being transferred over to the databases used by the rest of the department
• Most of the employees were long-term, between 5 - 20 years
• As part of senior management, interim manager was physically located in a different area of the city
• He came over to the office once a week
• He entered the office, rarely said more then hello and then only to the people he passed, before going into meetings with the team leader
• At the time only one of the team leads was actually an employee, the other had been brought in as a financial consultant (this was not a financial unit)
• Two long-term technicians who had functioned as team leads previously had been replaced by the current team leads
• The contractor had been in the department before and was disliked by most of the group because of questionable competency and ethics
• Group members felt the other team lead lack knowledge and experience to perform the position

Situation two: This situation comes from a job interview for a contract position. The company is a major retail organization. The interview was with two 20 year employees. The organization had recently changed CEOs. Their new CEO has stated that he wished to double the organizations size in two years. The organization is 20 years old and has a lot of long-term employees.

The situation facing the change initiative is bulleted below:

• Historically and currently the organization has a silo structure with limited cross-function between departments.
• The CEO is new
• The employees are mostly long-term
• The two senior employees conducting the interview describe the new CEO as wonderful
• The CEO is know for walking around the building and stopping to talk to employees and visitors

The organization faces several new regulations which impact operations

Why use Change Management

Why use Change Management? Change within organizations has always been around, but the pace of change has become accelerated in the last 50 plus years. There are numerous factors that force organizations to change; these include external factors like changing markets, global competition and technological advances, or internal factors like changing senior management. Change is inevitable in today business, so organizations that can handle change have a competitive advantage over their competitors.

Change Management provides a structured approach to change that allows organizations to discover change opportunities and better manage change initiatives. When utilized properly, Change Management allows organizations to move from their current legacy or ad hoc systems that can hinder efficient operations to a more flexible and unified system that better leverages the opportunities available.

Change Management (OD) vs. Change Management (Operational)

There are two types of Change Management programs; they are systematic organizational-wide change initiatives and specific internal Change Management/Change Control programs. Each use similar tools but have different goals and priorities. The systematic change initiative involves an organizational-wide transformation effort, while the Change Management/Change Control initiative involves providing tools and processes to control daily operational or project specific changes. Both types of Change Management are important to the organization success. Especially if developing an internal Change Management/Change Control program is included within the organizational transformation program.

For this blog the concentrate will be on the Change Management as it relates to systematic organizational transformation, though information on developing internal change controls will be made available in the links.

Understanding Change Management

To understand Change Management, first we need to know what Change Management means. There are many different definitions of Change Management. For the purpose of this Blog, Change Management can be defined as the controlled transformation of an organization from its current operational state to a future operational state.

There are currently at least two schools of thought on Change and Change Management. The first school of thought is based on Lewin’s Three Stage Model. The Three Stage Model uses the concept of Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze, which basically has the Organization moving from stability {Unfreeze from status quo} through change back to stability {new status quo}. (See link Lewin’s Three Stage Model for more information on the Three Stage Model).

The second school of thought, as articulated, in Herding Cats: Human Change Management and An Improvisational Model of Change Management, sees Change Management as an ongoing process not a temporary state. In this school of thought the desired future state is not a state, instead it is a stage in the ongoing evolution of the Organization. Organizations needs to stop viewing change as a project with a distinct beginning, middle and end as exemplified by the Three Stage Model. Instead of Refreezing and ending the change initiative, Organizations need develop structured Change Management as an ongoing operational process. This will allow the Organization to continuously adapt to the internal and external changes it faces.

While I was trained in the Three Stage Model of Change Management, I find myself in agreement with the emerging view that Organizational Change Management is an ongoing process allowing the Organization to evolve in the face of an ever-changing environment.