Today’s spotlight on business speed and
agility is magnifying the shortcomings
and frequency of poorly executed change initiatives. The truth is that nearly 70
percent of all change implementations never
bear fruit. There are many documented reasons why change initiatives fail.
“Often, the people leading the change think
that announcing change is the same as implementing it, so they don’t pay attention,” says
Patricia Zigarmi, Ed.D., organizational
change expert and Founding Associate of
The Ken Blanchard Companies. “They don’t
surface people’s concerns regarding change.”
Smart Business spoke with Zigarmi about
how change elements are predictable and
why leaders of successful change initiatives
involve a broad-based team to address
employee concerns on the front end.
Why do change efforts fail?
A big reason why change efforts fail is leaders often don’t surface people’s concerns.
The immediate reaction when people are
asked to change is, ‘What am I going to give
up?’ They’re talking to each other about
those concerns but not to the change sponsors. Leaders need to eavesdrop on the conversations about concerns people are having.
Another big reason change fails is because
the people who are asked to change are not
involved in the planning for it. These employees feel closest to the customer, the work
processes and the problems at hand, and
they want to influence the changes that are
being architected at the top.
Some initiatives fail when there is no communicated sense of urgency or when the
business case for the change isn’t made clear.
People need to see a gap between the what-is and the what’s-possible. People are smart
— if you help them understand the change
from the standpoint of the person deciding
the change, they’ll come to the same conclusions about compelling reasons to change.
Other factors for failure include misaligned
systems within the company and change
leaders who are not credible or trustworthy.
Are there predictable reactions to change?
Absolutely. People have predictable and
sequential concerns with change. In the 1980s, I worked on a study to find out why a
set of educational initiatives tested extremely well, but when they were rolled out, they
didn’t achieve results on a mass basis. What
we found out was that nobody had surfaced
the concerns of the teachers with regard to
the changes. We created a model and ended
up proving in subsequent change efforts that
reactions to change are indeed predictable
and sequential.
How can change leaders apply this model?
The model delineated six buckets of concerns with change, and if leaders would only
pay attention to the first three, the rest of the
change would take care of itself. The first
bucket is around information concerns.
People don’t want to be sold on the change.
They want to know what it is, what you are
seeing and why things have to change. The
second bucket involves personal concerns.
They’re the most ignored because they sound
like whining, but what they really are, are
clues about resistance to the proposed
change. People don’t want to know why the
change is good for the company; they want to
know why it’s good for them, and they want
to know if they will be able to master the new skills the change requires. The third bucket is
around the nitty-gritty implementation concerns like system alignment, best practices
and the daily mechanics of making the
change happen.
The remaining buckets of concern are
impact concerns — does the change make a
difference; collaboration concerns — who
else needs to be on board; and refinement
concerns — what’s even better than what
you’re doing right now?
How can leaders best communicate change?
I think the minute people sense a crack in
senior leadership support for the change,
they think they don’t have to get on board, or
they believe they can wait around and see
what happens. It’s really important for dialogue to happen around the change, at the
top. What is the compelling case? What is the
vision? What is the picture of the future if
this change were to be successfully implemented?
The real need here is for leaders to speak
with one voice, to communicate the same
message, no matter who is communicating.
Leaders must explain the priority of a change
against all the other initiatives going on in the
company. Leaders also should express trust
and confidence in the decisions of their colleagues because if that doesn’t happen, the
change is doomed from the front end.
What are the key steps to a successful
change initiative?
Top-down change efforts appear to get off
to a faster start, but many times, the reality is
all of the details aren’t thought out and ultimately the change doesn’t get implemented.
Leaders need to listen to people’s concerns
and find ways to address them. They need to
create a compelling business case and
expand involvement and influence to gain
the buy-in of those impacted by the change at
all phases of the change process. A high-involvement, collaborative change effort dramatically increases the probability of a successful change initiative. <<
PATRICIA ZIGARMI, Ed.D., is an organizational change expert and Founding Associate of The Ken Blanchard Companies, a global
leader in workplace learning, productivity, performance and leadership effectiveness. She can be reached through The Ken Blanchard
Companies Web site at www.kenblanchard.com/patzigarmi.
