In many ways, the book Change Management: The People Side of Change (Jeffrey Hiatt, Timothy Creasey) is a introductory book that encourages you to visit ProSci’s website and purchase more of their products. It is written in way that demonstrates they understand the problems that you are facing, and it informs you that their ADKAR model will be an instrumental part of the solutions to your problems. It then tells you that you can learn more about their model by visiting their website and purchasing products X, Y, and Z. (sidenote: I did go and purchase one of those products.)
For the most part, the books guidance isn’t too ground breaking compared to other leadership and change enabled books (Company-Wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy; Decide & Deliver; The Lean Startup), but it did have a couple of points that I thought they highlighted better than others:
The Importance of Executive Sponsorship
They did a really good job of highlighting Executive Sponsorship and continued to bring it up through the text in order to reinforce it’s importance. They outlined that there is a difference between Executive Support, which they consider to be approving a project to move forward and providing funding, and Executive Sponsorship, which is active involvement in the project by the sponsor. The sponsor must continually be involved in the projects’ activities and repeat the Awareness goals to the team(s) so that everyone is heading in the same direction and they have the same expectations of outcomes.
The Acknowledgement of Resistance
The book brings up resistance to change over and over again, which is great. But, I was disappointed with the majority of the books guidance on how to deal with resistance; especially when it comes to people who will not change. In Chapter 2 (pg 40) of the book they put forward this bullet point:
- Employee resistance is the norm, not the exception. Expect some employees to never support the change.
I applaud the authors for writing that employee resistance is the norm, not the exception; as many books don’t spend time on that subject. But, I became frustrated with the book in it’s handling of the details for Expect some employees to never support the change.
What is the books advice for handling employee’s that will never support the change?
The main body of the book never gets into any details on this subject; and there are instances where the generalized advice would not work when an employee will never support the change (when they would always be combative and resistant). Because of this, the main body of the book never sets up how to handle conflict resolution and decision making.
Instead the book continually states that you should use the ADKAR framework to pin point where the resistance is coming from, how it’s being expressed by each individual, and that it’s the responsibility of the organization change management team to have strategies for group change resistance and individual managers should have strategies for dealing with individual change resistance. Great, but … what are those strategies?
By the end of the main body of the book (which ends on pg 95, of a 145 pg book), you are given no strategies. Then, in Appendix A they tell you that you can find the detailed strategies by purchasing their Best Practices book for $395. And, that you can have much more effective conversations with your “front-line employees” if you prepare them by supplying them with copies of Employee’s Survival Guide to Change for $15 each (<--- this is the product I bought).
The reason I bought Employee’s Survival Guide to Change is because Appendix D (pg 138-145) is a list of some frequently asked questions and answers from that supplemental book. And, in that appendix, they wrote something that surprised me. Something that I have seen soo many project management books try to avoid:
What are the consequences of not changing?
The consequences to you of not changing depend on how critical the change is to the business and your role. For changes that are less critical to business success or that do not directly impact you, the consequences may be minimal. However, if you elect not to support the change, and the change is critical to the success of the organization, the possible consequences are:
- Loss of employment
- Reassignment or transfer with the potential for lower pay
- Lost opportunities for promotion or advancement in the organization
- Reduced job satisfaction as you fight the organization and the organization fights you
They actually wrote that an employee might need to be fired. It’s not in the best interest of a book trying to tell you that there is a way to help your employees move in another direction to say that you may need to fire some of them. Because of the awkwardness of that dichotomy, I see many books either give the topic of employee separation a single line nod (The Machine that Changed the World, Gemba Walks) or a paragraph (Decide & Deliver), and then walk away from the subject. But, my hope is that the Employee’s Survival Guide to Change contains that really difficult to write text which explains that if an organization is going in one direction and an employee is going in a different direction, then it’s best if they separate ways. Without separating, it just creates conflict every single day which will cause emotional drain, blockages in work, and a dysfunctional environment.
(I think the book also did a good job of counter-balancing the quote from above with some other guidance which appeared directly following it; so I’ve added that guidance to the bottom of this post.)
It’s been a bit puzzling to me that some people who put up combative resistance to change do it believing that if things change they will lose their jobs, even when the company say’s that their not going to lose their job. What puzzles me is that when the employee becomes unwilling to change to the point of disruptive behavior, don’t they realize that by not allowing the company to pursue it’s goals they are forcing the company into a position where the company will need to separate from them in order to move forward. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, “I’m gonna lose my job if the company changes, so I’ll repeatedly push back against every change every day until they see the error of their ways. Dang, why did I get fired?”
Lack of Conflict Management and Timelines
I know the book points to further reading to find out how to handle resistance. But, nothing inside of this book deals with the concept of Conflict Management. The book puts forward that there will be resistance to change, not just from individual contributor’s but also from middle managers. Let’s imagine a situation where a “front-line employee” is resistant to a change, and the most effective person to be able to convince them that the change is worth while is their direct supervisor. But, what if the direct supervisor also doesn’t believe in the change. So, the direct supervisor (the book titled this person as a middle manager) is supporting the front-line employees resistance, and is expressing their own resistance to the change to the other middle managers. This could continue up the chain. The books advice is that eventually the Executive Sponsor is the one who will have to be the person with the responsibility to work through the change resistance with their direct subordinate. And, then once their direct report is convinced, that direct report should work with their subordinate and so on. But, none of these level’s of convincing has a time line set to them.
This is one of the most troubling parts of the authors message for me. They setup the idea that a Change Management framework will be used in conjunction with a Project Management framework. And, I have to assume, they are implying that timelines need to be an aspect of the Project Management framework (“earmarks adequate time”). But, in contradiction, they also say that each individuals change management process will not be on a schedule that you can control; people will change on their own timelines.
This creates a problem when a middle manager, who is critical to the approval of a decision needed to move a project forward is resistant to the change. That resistant manager can now block everything. It seems unreasonable to have everyone else have to wait for single individual to go through the non-timetabled individual change management process. So, when this occurs, how do you solve that conflict? For that, I think you need a Decision Making & Conflict Resolution framework.
I think the ADKAR framework gives concrete terminology to emotional aspects of projects which aren’t highlighted in many other frameworks, but I don’t think it can work without a Decision Making & Conflict Resolution framework. You need a methodology used within the business to handle conflicts which can block and derail progress. I have to assume that one of the reasons this book highlights the importance of Executive Sponsorship is so that the Executive Sponsor (the person with the highest authority) can push through these moments, ensuring that decisions are made in a timeframe that will not derail a project. If that’s the case, the problem I have with this books guidance is that the person at the top becomes their own bottleneck. They can’t be everywhere are once to instantly provide decisions; and if individuals realize they can bottleneck a decision by demanding that the Executive Sponsor is the only one that can make a decision they will use it as a weapon to delay and prevent change. It needs to be the responsibility of the Executive Sponsor to put forward a Decision Making & Conflict Management framework that can work when they are unavailable. It needs to be a framework that can be learnt and used by the lower levels. Ideally, at the implementation team level.
The timeliness of Decision Making is a key factor to the overall success of a projects outcomes (Decide & Deliver). ProSci’s book describes a world where Change Management is a critical factor to the success of a change. In the world that it creates, it doesn’t describe what success is; nor does it give any weights or measures on how it evaluates success (you’ll need to buy another book to know that information). But, from what I’ve seen in the world that I live in, success has many components to it. One of the most important is the speed of delivery, which is directly related to the speed of decision making. When making a decision, you want to make a good decision, but what you need is to make a decision. If you wait to have all the information in order to make an high quality decision, or wait to have everyone’s approval, you aren't going to make a decision in a timely manner. For many decisions, you don’t need to have perfect confidence that there is no risk, you just need to be able to reverse the decision quickly if you choose the wrong path. If you can recognize that a decision is a two-way door, one that you can reverse the direction of, then just choose a direction and go. You can always reverse it if you choose wrong. (High Velocity Decisions)
It's very difficult to get teams to change their thinking when they don't believe that a decision can be reversed easily. It's a practice that you have to show is possible, and show that it's possible frequently in order to build up confidence in the ability to change directions. You need to build an environment where change change occurs daily in order to change people mindesets on what's possible. To do this, encourage your teams to allow change on a daily basis and to become comfortable with experimentation.
Is Using Rewards Based Reinforcement the Best Way Possible?
ADKAR stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. These are the 5 steps they prescribe for viewing and understanding The People Side of Change.
In Chapter 5 (pg 87-88), the book give’s this definition for reinforcement:
Reinforcement - the organization encourages and rewards successful change through its culture, values and initiatives; support of change competency is reinforced and resistance to change is identified and managed; change is part of “business as usual”.
I immediately had difficulty accepting this definition because I believe that long term reinforcement is not created through rewards. The science for behavioral change sticking around after a reward-based reinforcement is removed is not entirely clear. Behavior Modification is sometimes referenced to support the argument that behavioral change will stick around, but there are studies that show that once the reward disappears then the behavior disappears (Todd, 2013 or Schedules of Reinforcement).
For me, a behavior sticks around if the person believes in the value that the behavior provides them. In the book they call this “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM). I believe that, as a manager, you have to demonstrate the value that the change will provide to your “front-line employees” and once they recognize the value themselves, they will self perpetuate the change in behavior. Rewards can be used between the Awareness and Desire stages in order to encourage people to try out a change; but the change has to create enough value to the employee on it’s own for that person to keep doing it.
My second thought is something I’ve already beaten to death in this post: what are the methodologies to implement “resistance to change is … managed”? Especially in the context of “Expect some employees to never support the change”, what then?
Change needs to become an expected part of every day work. As managers, you should strive to implement continuous improvement which comes in small incremental changes that are occurring every day. Managers need to coach their teams to embrace the Lean principles of using the scientific method to elicit concerns about change, develop ways to transform those concerns into measurable tests, allow the change to occur within a trial context and use the results and feedback to either refine the change, accept it or reject it (The Lean Startup).
Instead, what I continuously see around me is the mere mentioning of a concern being enough to not allow any change to occur at all. And unsubstantiated concerns being given legitimacy as an acceptable reason to prevent any experimentation from occurring. This is why I believe that having a Decision Making and Conflict Resolution framework is so important. It’s also a critical component to making fast decisions, which is the most impactful aspect of decisions for achieving business outcomes.
---------
(Change Management’s Appendix D follows the section entitled “What are the consequences of not changing?” (written above) with these sections. These sections give a good balance to the overall points that the authors are trying to communicate.)
What are the benefits of supporting the change?
The benefits of supporting the change, especially a change that is critical to the success of the organization, include:
- Enhanced respect and reputation within the organization
- Improved growth opportunities (especially for active supporters of the change)
- Increased job satisfaction (knowing you are helping your organization respond effectively to a rapidly changing marketplace)
- Improved job security
What if I disagree with the change or feel they are fixing the wrong problem?
Be patient. Keep an open mind. Make sure you understand the business reasons for the change. However, don’t be afraid to voice your specific objections or concerns. If your objections are valid, chances are good they will come to light and be resolved. If you feel strongly against a specific element of the change, let the right people know and do it in an appropriate manner.
I find the wording above to be understanding, supportive, and helpful; but it doesn’t come with a guide on how to handle disagreement and conflict when “[valid objections] come to light and [must] be resolved”.
0 comments:
Post a Comment