Help Your Employees Take Ownership of Change

Help Your Employees Take Ownership of ChangeHelp Your Employees Take Ownership of ChangeFew managers would reject the idea that the need to adapt to changing market conditions is essential for survival and success. Why then do so many firms struggle with the process of adaptation? Decoding the Mystery of Your Firms Failure to Change As mysteries go, this one is not too difficult to solve- at least on paper. Almost everything about how people run their businesses focuses on optimizing efficiency by simplifying processes, minimizing costs and doing mora of what works at a declining cost in pursuit of maximizing profits. Business society has wired its organizational thinking and its leadership and managerial practices to market, sell and support more of what companies make or do. A firms investments and improvements are linear in nature and support the theme of doing more of what works at progressively lower costs. A quick review of most firms product and project development pipelin es illustrates this principle at work. The gross majority of approved projects are focused on extending existing offerings by adding new features or mildly tweaking size or form factor. Instead of looking at discontinuous investments in new or emerging markets to fuel future growth, we place all our bets in the here and now. Think about the increasingly mature smartphone market where new product introductions are increasingly met with a yawn and providers struggle to eke out sales gains from these upgrades- a far cry from the stampede to upgrade they experienced with earlier versions of their offerings. 7Reasons the Social Pressure to Never Change Is Strong While companies are busy chasing efficiencies to reduce costs and tweaking their popular offerings to get incremental gains in sales, the failure to adapt has even deeper roots in existing organizational cultures and in the workers themselves. A firms organizational culture develops over time to reflect the values, personalit ies, and priorities of the people involved in building, growing and sustaining the firm.A startup is often a direct reflection of whats important to the founding team. This view of the priorities of the firm lingers long after the startup phase has passed, skewing thinking about new ways and different markets and approaches. Long obsolete practices and thinking are codified as Our Firms Way requiring it to be followed much like a recipe. The pressures of doing things by following the firms recipe and the human resistance to change naturally suppress the urge to look for or do things that potentially conflict with these idealized views of the organization. Investing in unlike or different activities is counter to what people in the firm express great pride in their daily work.A fierce commitment to serving customers with the know-how and offerings that the firm is expert at providing drives a never-ending stream of linear improvements to processes and offerings. A dominant logic emer ges that finds managers and leaders framing issues and opportunities based on their collective experiences over time. In a strong culture with long-tenured employees, all of the framing takes place through the lens of the firms past.Humans are wired to view change as unfavorable, parteicularly when the position quo is comfortable and arguably successful. People do not voluntarily seek out the opportunity to disrupt processes and approaches that are working, yet that is fundamentally what companies must do. Efforts to pursue discontinuous change are blocked or frozen, either passively or actively. Strategy becomes an exercise in justifying more of the same and new investment efforts in new arenas or with new technologies for different customers are starved for resources. The Danger of Resisting ChangeThe operation of a firm moves from a virtuous cycle that draws upon successes of the past and what has worked well to a vicious cycle of repetitive activities that no longer work in a wo rld where everything has changed. For example, Kodak, the once-great film giant, actually invented the digital camera but ultimately lost out because of its culture and old way of thinking that failed to recognize the new rules of digital. 8 Ideas to Help Your Firms Employees Support Change As outlined above, the organizational, cultural and personal forces resisting change are strong. Overcoming the gravitational pull of the present is a significant leadership challenge. Here are 8 ideas to help managers and senior leaders overcome this resistance Gaining support for the need to change is a full contact leadership activity. Recognize that promoting and gaining support for the active pursuit of new is a profoundly difficult task that cannot be achieved by giving lip-service to the topic. This work becomes one of the core functions of a firms managers and senior leaders. It must transcend just moral suasion and verbal fragegesprch and extend to key strategies and measurable objec tives. Leaders must articulate the need as well as teach, model and reinforce the needed behaviors. Avoid the classic mistake of insulting or trivializing the past. Often the words around change sound and feel like a slap in the face to the firms history, alienating those who participated in creating the successes of the past. Instead, the history should be celebrated, particularly as evidence that the firm was able to overcome obstacles and solve problems. Acknowledging the spirit and creativity that led to past successes is essential for building the future. Praise the past but educate on the need to use the tools of change to build on those victories. Make exploration and identification of new opportunities a visible priority. A firms leaders own the task of bringing the pursuit of new and different to life, not only through constant verbal reinforcement but through actions and rewards. From funding new ideas for exploration to celebrating lessons learned with failed experiments and celebrating new victories in big ways, constant, consistent reinforcement of the need to change is essential.Build a time machine. While it is unlikely that you can rewrite the rules of physics as we know them, it is imperative that your people and your investments take into account multiple time horizons. Use the Horizons Model where the plans and activities are divided into time frames referencing the next year, the next one to three years and beyond three years (horizons 1,2, and 3 respectively). Recognize that investments will be weighted to horizon 1, but that you must have some material percentage of efforts looking at new activities in both horizons 2 and 3. Make external scanning every employees business. Often, in firms struggling to adapt, the work of external scanning and new idea development are constrained to a few positions with the term strategic in their titles. This older, restrictive approach no longer hunts in a world where everyone has access to vast volumes of data in real time. Instead of suppressing ideas and input, find ways to engage and involve everyone in looking for new ideas and opportunities. Draw upon the tools of internal social media and learn and apply the concept of crowdsourcing to idea development. Know the links in the chain of success. The keys to success with this work of drawing input from employees include curating and making visible the many ideas that are generated andfacilitating an ideas to actions process. Actions require investment and patience, and most firms are too quick to allocate investment away from horizon 2 and 3 initiatives in pursuit of near-term challenges. Without support for these processes, initiatives will die due to loss of interest. And remember that without a solid pipeline of horizon 2 and 3 initiatives, future success is in jeopardy. Leverage new ideas and approaches as growth opportunities for employees. While often we need to hire new skill sets to succeed with different technologies or business approaches, make certain to find opportunities for willing and capable legacy employees to get involved as part of their own growth and development. Not every person is or should be eligible, but many curious and capable people will relish the opportunity to reinvent themselves as part of the process of reinventing the firm.Use successes to fuel the fires of change. From celebrating small and big victories to creating conventions to capture and teach the lessons learned in pursuit of change, this work must become part of the operating routine of the firm. Dont preoccupy on just short-term results with horizon 1 activities. Create visibility for horizon 2 and 3 work via carefully tailored scorecards that reflect the right measures for future initiatives. The Bottom LineIgnoring the need to change or simply acknowledging the challenge without actively supporting it leads to a firms demise over time. All of us must become time travelers, working in the here and now while hel ping support the creation of the future. Its time to teach our employees that fearing change is irrational when what we should truly fear is avoiding the need to change.