In his Forbes article, Lipman (2013) revealed some interesting insights about change management and leadership. Although 55% of leaders felt the changes met the objectives, change management initiatives over the long term were successful only 25% of the time. More than 87% of leaders said they trained their managers to oversee the process of change management, but the changes, once implemented, didn’t last too long and it resulted to changes not stick for too long. In fact, training was effective among just 22% of those surveyed. A third of those understood the reasons for the organizational change, but that important message never fully trickled down to middle managers or front-line supervisors. This highlights the important role leadership plays in managing change.
According to Winer (2009), assessing organizational readiness plays a critical role, before even starting to manage change. In fact, fifty percent of the time change fails because of not establishing enough readiness for change (Winer, 2009). Living in a constantly evolving global economy where change is the norm if organizations are to sustain their success and importance, requires the right leadership (managers and bosses) in the front seat. Change without the right leadership can cause anarchy or distrust from employees and the vision of the change could be lost. Poor leadership results in poor execution and instability within the organization.
Leaders are responsible for demonstrating the need for change, establishing common goals, and making decisions by controlling resources such as people, budget, and infrastructure. Priorities may change and therefore, communication, collaboration, decisiveness and priority setting are key leadership functions in managing change.
References
Lipman, V (2013). New study explores why change management fails – and how to (perhaps) succeed [article]. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/09/04/new-study-explores-why-change-management-fails-and-how-to-perhaps-succeed/#4a7e07607137
Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(67).
February 24, 2019 at 11:35 pm
Hi Dino,
You bring up a very important basic point that I haven’t seen brought up elsewhere. As you noted, we live in a world where change is the norm. Adapting effectively to change is clearly a challenge. But it’s interesting to consider, as you note, that even when attempts to adapt to change are undertaken, the stats indicated they are cearly rarely successful. I would be curious to know if those failures are indicative of problems of leadership, or a results of improperly assessing the need for change. In my latest assignment, refer to the Gartner Hype Cycle, which claims that interest in innovations go in waves, where they first spike in excessive hype, before falling into pessimism, before finally becoming accepted. I wonder if the failures mentioned are the result of jumping on the bandwagon in some cases, and adopting change simply because there is a percieved need to do so. I’m sure we’ve all seen this in our own work environments, where significant expenses were made to adopt certain new technologies because it was the thing to do, without first asking the question of is it actually going to help. I think overall a problem is that technology involves a level of complexity that both intimates people, while they also don’t want to come off as ignorant, and so the bandwagon is the easiest way to seem up-to-date. So it would seem that an important quality leadership would have to be certain steady-minded visions that helped prevent getting caught up in the hype (hence my latest post).
March 3, 2019 at 12:37 pm
I think you’re right about the bandwagon effect, especially when addressing change in large organizations. There are some change management mitigation areas that need more focus, such as culture and working in silos. Based on my experience, the larger the organization the slower the change and acceptance of it. Not every manager has the same agenda and priority, so unless it’s a regulatory change requiring compliance then change is very hard to accomplish. Especially in the area of learning technology, people find technology intimidating, as you say, and see it as a burden financially. So unless you have a strong case and able to support a return on the investment, it is hard to create alliances to support your change project. The RSA reading (Conway, Masters, & Thorold, 2017) provide great insights into the areas that may affect successful implementation of innovation and highlight the importance of systems thinking to address the environmental risk surrounding your design.
Reference
Conway, R., Masters, J., & Thorold, J. (2017). From design thinking to systems change: How to invest in innovation for social impact. Royal Society of Arts, Action and Research Centre.