I started this Blog ten years ago as a way to engage business management students at Eastern Connecticut State University. For four years as adjunct faculty my goal was to take theory and provide students additional context to make sense of management. Today my title has shifted from instructor to Organizational Development consultant. I specialize in change management as I have my entire career. Change Management remains completely aligned to this Blog title. Change Management is wildly weird. As an increasingly emerging discipline that practitioners like myself attempt to market, practice, deploy, imbed and evangelize continuously, it remains a never ending battle to manage change effectively.
Why you may be asking? There are lots of variables that make it a battle - moving parts - and I'll capture a few "moving parts" below:
1. Change is needed too quickly - Many organizations are trying to catch up with technology and the desires and needs of their customers. Organizations expect employees to learn many new technologies, process and systems at lightning speed. And often before they've actually had time to sustain the change, the technology, process or systems they have become obsolete or shifted to something else.
2. Change is not measured - Change behaviors need to be measured to check if the technology, process, or systems are being accurately and/or effectively utilized as planned or expected. Sometimes it's not entirely known what those behaviors need to be because of the speed at which change is needed. We know change takes time especially when there are a lot of reasons to keep people from adopting them.
3. Change needs people who are messy - While leaders expect employees to do what they are told and adopt the changes that are needed they often don't, can't or won't. For a myriad of reasons people don't change and often the time isn't taken to understand what employees need to change. It's never easy.
4. Trust fuels change but often absent - Leaders need to trust employees to be autonomous and employees need to trust the leaders to lead. This all takes continuous and open communication - no matter the organizational size, structure, hierarchy communication generally fails. It's hard and often left to a small group of communicators to get the word out who don't have the details. Leaders are torn between keeping complex change messages to themselves to running themselves ragged in town halls, team meetings, lunch and learns, and walk arounds.
In my next blog I'll write about strategies for change that can help address these four factors.
