Why doesn't change work?

I came across the Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI study via The Street, with a quote from Kathryn Yates, global leader of communication consulting at Towers Watson, saying “less than half [of major organizational changes] stay on schedule, come in at — or under — budget or hold people accountable for deadlines... The average survey respondent went through three major changes in the past two years.” This set me thinking about some of the change programmes I’ve worked on and the things I’ve learned.

In my experience the challenges lie in four key areas: leadership, culture, engagement/ownership and management.

Leadership

Senior people sponsor all sorts of initiatives and there is always something new around the corner that will distract their attention. I think this is one of the reasons why there is often a fanfare at the beginning of a change programme – because the people managing it want to show the senior folk that they are getting on with it. However, the next change team will be doing the same thing, and the next, and so it goes on.  The ideal here is to try and link all the changes together, somehow, so that the leadership team don’t feel that they are sponsoring lots of simultaneous programmes, and lose focus or interest.

It’s easier to achieve change if people know that the senior leadership team want it but it’s not enough on its own. One place where I worked I countered some resistance with the immortal phrase “The Managing Director is really keen for this to happen” to which the response was, “Oh he’s always going on about that.”

Culture

Some cultures are just more willing to accept change than others. Some of it may be down to industry – where they are fleet of foot they may be more prepared to (and used to) change. Perhaps it’s more to do with longevity – the longer something has been the same the more difficult it is to change it. But I have also seen the other side of the coin – change had happened so often that people were fed up with it. The lesson here might be to let change settle in and learn from it before going on to change it again.

Engagement/ownership

These are not exactly the same thing, but the problems are the same so that’s why I’ve lumped them together.  For me, ownership is about taking something on, moulding it for that particular purpose or function and being accountable for it. Engagement (in change terms) is more about being willing to change behaviour so that the end result can be achieved. Either way, lack of it is the kiss of death.

The key is to get past the intellectual agreement to a change to it being embraced in practice. An early lesson I learned – just because somebody agrees that something needs to be done doesn’t necessarily mean that they will actually do something different when it comes to it.  Don’t walk away thinking, “I can tick that off my list now, they understand why change needs to happen.”

Avoiding the feeling of change being ‘done to’ people is also preferable. To help with this, I still like William Bridges' work on change/transition best (search for it if you don't know it, there's loads of references). 

Management

Well of course there are vast quantities of resources dedicated to the successful management of change so I’m not going to encapsulate this in a paragraph. I think the key problem is that there is a tendency to plan too far in advance. I can honestly say I have never worked on a programme where the original milestones were met. Something unexpected always happens. So plans need to be flexible enough to accommodate this.

I also think that many programmes are overly ambitious in their timescales and their budget (the latter often dependent upon the former, of course).  You can see why – you need to sell it to the leadership team and they want lots quickly for not much money.

And so?

Some things I’ve learned:

• Small steps are better – easier to sell to the leadership team (they don’t need to worry about a massive impact on their people); easier to plan; easier to achieve and quicker to get on with. Just make sure that the small steps are all going towards the right point on the horizon.
• Pilots are great – in line with the above, people will buy a pilot more than a wodge of change in one go. You also learn more, you’ll engage more people who will own it (champions!) as they have been involved in it and that will make the full change more effective.
• Keep everyone informed on progress – yes, they may think “not that programme again” but that’s better than them thinking “whatever happened to that – did it fail?” The right level of detail is important – keep it high, maybe even just a few bullet points with more information available for those that want it.

Anybody got experiences to share?

Helping your CEO listen...

Despite – or maybe even because of – the increase in social media in the workplace there is a need for organisations to demonstrate leadership. The notion of cascaded information going in a nice sequence from top to bottom with feedback going bottom to top is at best outdated and arguably was always a misconception.  Nowadays information of all sorts zaps about the place in all directions, like a million pinballs in play at the same time. We need to introduce some structure to it in order to help our people make sense of it, to separate the important stuff from the general noise.

There are a number of ways to achieve this but here I thought I’d concentrate on one – leadership demonstrated by listening and reacting to feedback.

I read an article in the McKinsey Quarterly from Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer (and what a good name for a communicator, by the way!) – it’s a really good article and shows how an enlightened leader can have a hugely positive effect both culturally and operationally through ‘proper’ listening.

Mr Sharer listens on a personal basis and has his own method of gathering information but not all of us work with CEOs who have the same outlook. So what can we do to help?

Firstly, to state the obvious, CEOs need to take the broadest overview of the whole organisation and even they have some limit to the amount of information they can absorb, however clever they are.  I think of this like a piano keyboard – there is a wide range of notes that they should be hearing, not just the few in the middle, even though those are the ones probably played loudest (usually the financials). Other notes can resonate just as much but they need to be played to CEOs if they are not able or willing to do it themselves.

So in internal comms we should look to drive or facilitate this as appropriate. First, analyse what your CEO already does, how well s/he does it and where the gaps are. Maybe they read a few reports but do little face-to-face, or maybe it’s the other way around. Have a look at the table below for some ideas – and add your own…

Unfortunately, some CEOs may do little or nothing, in which case you might want consider a phased program where they will see the benefits build up rather than looking for too big a change in one go.

Whatever you want to do, you’ll need the CEO to want to do it too and that means selling the benefits. CEOs are always busy and if they feel they don’t have time to do any more you’ll need to persuade them otherwise. Enlist the help of others if necessary – you might need a Board Member or two to help out or even sponsor the program on your behalf (the HR Director might be supportive if you don’t have a Comms Director).

From the employees’ perspective, it’s not just the CEO being seen to listen; the key is that people know something has happened as a result of this listening. We all want our voice to be heard, our opinions to be valued. So make sure you find effective ways of communicating this too.

Here’s an idea for a high-level plan of action:

• Analyse current position – what happens, when, how, why and where
• Define the desired future position
• Look at the gap – analyse how big a change is required
• Prioritise what needs to happen
• Write a (private) engagement plan for what needs to happen – whom do you need to consult, who can help you, who may be unenthusiastic about it and what will you do to change their minds – most importantly, how will you show the value of the activities to the CEO?
• Write a delivery plan – assuming your engagement plan is successful how will you deliver the activities? This will be your public plan so include the key tasks from your engagement plan
• Write a comms plan – how will you communicate the new activities to your people? How will you let them know what has happened as a result of the CEO listening? Include a review within this, where you look at how things have gone and what needs to be changed as a result. I’m a real fan of doing pilots – low risk, simple positioning and much easier to sell to the CEO than a big, high-profile program of action
• Implement, review, revise as necessary

 Any thoughts?

Trust = Loyalty = Retention

Flicking through Edelman’s Trust Barometer made me reflect on some solutions I’ve used over the years to build and maintain trust within the different organisations that I’ve worked with.

One of the things that Internal Comms should do is help build employees’ loyalty to the organisation but you can’t have loyalty without trust. So if it’s an issue – or might potentially be one – it needs to be fixed.

The first thing to address is what makes you think there is a lack of trust. Feedback is likely to come from a number of sources – could be formal employee surveys, direct feedback from people via intranet, feedback from managers as to what their people are saying, or just the general rumour mill. Gather it, analyse it, but then the key is to identify what’s causing the mistrust. My experience has been that these are the main reasons:

• Mixed messages – the comms they are given by formal channels don’t match what they are hearing elsewhere. Perhaps their managers aren’t engaged and just brush off their enquiries. Perhaps other people who seem to have more knowledge than them say it ain’t so.
• Unmatched expectations or unmatched experience – the comms they receive lead them to believe something is going to happen in a particular way and it doesn’t.
• Vacuum – they don’t hear anything at all! Beware: rumour rushes to fill a vacuum. One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is persuading senior management that keeping people in the dark doesn’t mean that they will hold their judgement until you decide to let them know what’s going on. By that time they are likely to have heard about it from someone else (probably a few someone elses) and no need to guess how accurate and balanced that information is going to be...
• Puff – this is to do with managing expectations. Not a good idea to puff up the importance of a change if it will fall flat when people hear about it. They just feel let down.
• Secrecy – if you only give the absolute minimum of information and refuse to answer questions with no explanation then people rightly feel aggrieved.
• Same old, same old – I worked with one organisation that was on its third transformation programme in five years. Not surprisingly they were unenthusiastic about ‘another change being done to them’ when the previous efforts had been unsuccessful. Why should they trust the next one to be more successful than the previous ones?
• Ivory tower – senior managers can get isolated from the people on the front line. This is difficult because senior managers are busy and, powerful though it is, making a personal visit is regarded as too time-consuming. Also, I have to say, there can be some reluctance from certain types of senior managers to expose themselves to a questioning front line.
• Wrong tone – a mismatch between the tone of the communications and the culture of the organisation can cause mistrust of the message. Social media may help over time here, but there is still a tendency for some organisations to adopt a very formal tone for ‘official’ communications. Stiff language provokes a stiff reaction.
• Geographical differences – there are differences between countries with regard to their culture and ways of working as well as their legislation.  I think that expansion into new countries without putting enough effort into bringing them on board can cause problems later. There can also be differences within countries.  Smaller locations can feel left out; bigger locations can develop their own sub-culture that affects their perception of the information they are given.

Once you know what’s causing it, you can decide what to do about it. This might be obvious – for instance, if mixed messages are problem, work for consistency; if it’s the tone, change it; if it’s a senior leadership team issue, maybe from lack of ownership or visibility, then you must find a way for them to demonstrate their ownership and support of what’s being communicated.

I always advocate communication to be made little and often. If you have built up trust through maintaining effective two-way communication, people will be much more likely to be understanding if something goes wrong. It’s surprising how people leading change don’t want to think about things not going to plan considering how often this happens. Not acknowledging something has gone wrong is short-sighted and undermines credibility, particularly if it transpires that people will be affected in a different way than they expected. 

I’m struck how young people are growing up in a world where there is less trust compared to when I was their age. The internet and emails suddenly dropping into inboxes looking to trick you into giving money or personal details mean they grow up to be on their guard, they don’t take things at face value. The integrity of politicians, journalists, the courts, even the police is questioned. That just means we will need to work harder and engage better to take people with us on the journey.