Why Organisational Change is Important

Heraclitus observed that there is nothing permanent except change (c.600 BCE). Therefore change is not a new challenge, but many would agree that the rate of change – in our personal and professional lives – is increasing.  Organisational change is more important than ever because the rate of change for businesses is ever increasing, driven by competition, technology and connectivity.

Why change is important

Change is important because things all around us are altering all the time.  At the cosmic scale, the universe is continually expanding.  Stars and planets accelerate away from each other.  At a global level tectonic plates shift on the Earth, continents move, mountains gain height.  Biologically Darwin said that change was essential for survival; a key tenant to the theory of evolution (1859).  Our lives are marked by change.  We age and we mature.  Our relationships grow and evolve.  Therefore we actually accept a huge amount of change even when we have a limited effect on it.

When change is hard

But if change is a constant fact of life why is it frequently so hard?  Change is constant, but the rate of change is not constant.  As Hawking notes “The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving direction to time.” (1988). And therein lies the issue.  It is not so much change we struggle with, but the pace of change.  The rate of development is such that what we learn in our education and preparation for our work is no longer sufficient to last us through our careers.

Supporting the individual for team success

Therefore personal development is more important than ever and if individuals are neglected then it affects the team as a whole. In John Adair’s leadership model the spheres of task, team and individual overlap.  A leader has to keep all the elements in balance to be successful.  You have to support and develop the individual to maintain the team and you need an effective team to achieve your goal.

Companies can often forget this simple truth. In organisational change, it is often the individual and the team that suffer at the expense of forcing through the task of bringing about a change programme. Often this comes from the assumption that traditional top-down management approaches and project management processes are sufficient to manage transformation.

Project management and change management

I worked for a time as a project manager on large commercial construction projects.  These were often expensive and complex but the effect of the change was broadly practical and linear.  By contrast, in my experience, dealing with cultural change in businesses is more ethereal and organic.  Mergers, handovers of leadership, implementation of new strategies or structural changes all result in a cultural change to one degree or another.

Changing culture means changing attitudes and behaviours at an individual level.  Changing behaviour can be far more challenging than project management in construction or even software development, as humans and emotions are less predictable.  The fact is that every individual will have a subtly different set of values and behavioural cues.

This is one of the first ways that coaching can be of help to organisations going through change.  Coaching gives an opportunity to help people understand their own motivations and why they behave in certain ways.  Understanding motivation is of critical importance to successful change.  It is essential that people understand why they must change as this creates the urgency that drives change at the individual and organisational level (Kotter, 1996).

Cultural change and the importance of values

Motivation affects behaviour, behaviour is built on habits, and these, in turn, are built on our values and beliefs.  Therefore the heart of the issue in change is ensuring that people are aligned to the values underpinning the change.  Simon Sinek points out that you need to start with understanding the ‘why’ behind any venture (2009).  Only once you can communicate the reasoning behind something will you have a change of aligning people and their values to the change.

Why do we fear change?

Even when people understand that change needs to happen there can still be resistance.  I experienced this first when working with a large local government institution facing budget cuts.  It is perhaps unsurprising that there was a lot of internal resistance to the cuts. But the resistance mainly stemmed from certain assumptions and fears that people held.

Some people deal with change better than others. Some people prefer to be more settled, others prefer constant challenge and adventure.  Sometimes, even for those that like variety, they suffer from change exhaustion just from the rate of change or number of changes imposed on them.

Everyone has a comfort zone that they operate in. People can manage a degree of stretch to this zone in line with their tolerance for stress.  Beyond this people start to feel out of their depth (Covey,1989). People desire a degree of control. Change imposed on anyone means that they lose control and this increases stress.

Wrong Assumptions

Under stress, people are more likely to jump to poor conclusions or harbour wrong assumptions.  Supporting people through change is therefore very important. Taking a coaching approach is important to ensure that people are listened to, and where necessary given practical support.

In the case of the local government, that I was working with, we used a coaching approach and a specific model developed for that situation.  This helped people to explore their work through the focussing on the service user and positive effects, rather than the service provider and the budget.  In this way people were able to reframe the problem, challenge assumptions, align values and discover effective ways of providing services.

A third-party, in this sort of situation, can be beneficial because they sit outside of the line management.  The coach or other third-party provides an environment where people feel they can be honest (Van Nieurwerburgh 2017). Once trust is established, a coach can provide an environment where fears can be discussed and wrong assumptions can be identified.

Coaching and change

Coaching as a profession and a process is all about supporting change.  John Whitmore’s definition of coaching, “Unlocking people’s potential to maximise their own performance” (2009:11) speaks of positive personal change.

Whether it is hard-pressed senior managers or pressured front line staff I have found that employees find coaching sessions with an external coach a cathartic experience.  It allows people to freely express frustrations.  Once this has happened, wrong assumptions can be identified and challenged.  This all comes through a supportive thinking environment, such as the one championed by Nancy Kline (1999).  This gives an individual the chance to explore their thinking and proactively seek solutions.  Coaching empowers people to start to embrace opportunities that arise out of the perceived crisis.

Coaching Leaders

For most leaders and managers the thought of providing one-to-one coaching support can appear costly in terms of money and time but this is likely to be a wrong assumption too.  As with much in life, doing things right takes longer in the short term but shorter in the long term.  Really listening to people, understanding their feelings, encouraging their thinking and ideas, aligning values and building a sense of ownership takes time.  These are costly, but not as expensive or time-consuming as dragging unmotivated, unwilling individuals towards a destination they are unsure of at best, and insubordinate about at worst.

Having worked as a leader, manager and external consultant it has taken time to adopt more non-directive leadership approaches. When under pressure it can feel like the best thing to do is to give people solutions but in the long run, people are generally more committed to the plans they have personal ownership for. I am continually learning to give people more time and space to think and act for themselves.  Therefore as a leader and as a coach, the role is becoming more about supporting than dictating.

Once fears and assumptions are addressed, people start to think.  When they start to think, they regain impetus, and with this, they can start to adopt new habits.

Change challenges our habits

One of the greatest reasons we resist change is that we are all creatures of habit.  Habits are very helpful and help us to be more effective.  They speed up decision making and produce efficient processes for repetitive tasks.

Every organisation has habits.  Some are deliberate processes or policy-driven, others are more informal, embedded in culture and passed on relationally.  Both types of habits are likely to be challenged in times of change.

People need to see the need an incentive to change habits, even if they know a pattern is a bad one.  They need a new cue and reward (Duhigg, 2013) in order to change. If they have a routine that they think is perfectly good then they need a reason to develop a new way of doing the thing.  As Jim Collins observes, it is often the good that is the enemy of the great, if people don’t have the incentive to change (2001).

Organisations need to embrace change

Change is important but of particular importance to organisations where the pace of change is challenging more traditional structures and processes.  Businesses need to grasp opportunities arising from flux without losing important values.  Fears need to be overcome and individuals need to be supported and developed through change so that leadership can emerge at every level.

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References

Adair, J (1973) Action-Centred Leadership, New York: McGraw-Hill

Collins, J (2001) Good to Great, London: Random House

Covey, S R (1989) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, London: Simon & Schuster

Darwin, C (1859) The Origen of Species By Means of Natural Selection, London: John Murray

Downey, M (2003) Effective Coaching: Lessons from the Coach’s Coach, London: Texere.

Duhigg, C (2013) The Power of Habit, London: Random House

Hansen, M T (2018) Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, And Achieve More, New York: Simon & Schuster

Heraclitus (c.600 BCE, cited in 2008) Fragments, London: Penguin Classics

Hawking, S (1988) A Brief History of Time, London: Bantam Press

Gawande, A (2017) TED, Ideas Worth Spreading, https://www.ted.com/talks/atul_gawande_want_to_get_great_at_something_get_a_coach#t-988662(accessed 08 Apr 18)

Johnson, S (1999) Who Moved my Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, London: Vermilion

Kline, N (1999) Time to Think.London: Ward Lock

Kotter, J P (1996) Leading Change, Boston: Harvard Business School Press

Losch, S; Traut-Mattausch, E; Mulberger, M D; Jonas, E (2016) Comparing the Effectiveness of Individual Coaching, Self-Coaching, and Group Training: How Leadership Makes the Difference.Frontiers in Psychology, 7, pp.629

Shaw, B (1944) Everybody’s Political What’s What, London: Constable

Sinek, S (2009) Start with Why, London: Penguin

Van Nieurwerburgh, C (2017) An Introduction to Coaching Skills: A Practical Guide, London: Sage

Whitmore, J (1992) Coaching for Performance, London: Nicholas Brealey

If you want the right answers you have to start with the right questions

About The Right Questions

The Right Questions is for people who want greater clarity, purpose and success. There is a wealth of resources to boost your effectiveness in achieving goals, your leadership of yourself and others, and your decision-making.

Wherever you are on your journey, I hope that you find information on this site to help you on the next leg of your quest. Even if that is just the inspiration to take one small step in the right direction, then that is a success. If you can take pleasure in learning and travelling as you go, then so much the better.

Need help navigating your journey to success?

I love to serve people, helping them unlock their potential, empowering them as leaders, and assisting them in achieving their goals. Please get in touch and let me know how I can support you!

Why Culture Will Eat Your New Strategy For Breakfast

Management guru Peter Druker reportedly said “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, but other leaders and strategists express similar sentiments. The underlying message is, it does not matter how good a plan you have, if you don’t consider the human element then your strategy is unlikely to succeed.

Having worked with numerous companies on developing a strategy it can be all too obvious when grand plans are doomed to failure. One key metric is the delta between a company’s stated values and the behaviour of the people within the organisation. But to address this gap you first need to understand the organisational culture.

Why strategy fails

A strategy is a plan of action to achieve a long-term goal. As Richard Rumelt notes in his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy, a good strategy must diagnose the challenge to overcome, create a guiding policy to address that challenge, and then produce coherent actions that ensure that the policy is carried out.

Most people get the essentials of what strategy is. Where it generally fails is in the third element, the implementation; ensuring people carry out the actions is where things go wrong. This is often because the board level strategists fail to take culture and values into consideration. Actions are just behaviours, but real change is not brought about by one single action. It is the compounding effect of multiple actions over time. If you want to shift the way you want people to act you need to change their normal routines.

Routines are just one element of organisational culture. Changing our personal habits can be difficult, so why – do leaders – expect to change a whole organisation and the habits of hundreds, if not thousands of people, just because they say so? Making this sort of transformation requires careful consideration and to make a change in behaviour you first need to understand all the facets of the culture of a given group.

The importance of understanding organisational culture

Every group of humans has a culture of some sort. Every family, company, and sports team – let alone a country or nation-state – has its own culture. The problem is when we live within these tribes the culture is so ingrained, we often don’t think about it or can struggle to express it.

Therefore, it is useful to have a model to examine and explain a culture. The Cultural Web, the tool developed by Johnson and Scholes, is a simple and effective lens to use in this context. Johnson and Scholes break down culture into six component parts: storiessymbols rituals and routinespower structuresorganisational structure, and controls.

The Cultural Web

The Cultural Web comprises of the following components:

Stories

These are the past events people talk about. The shouted successes and the whispered failures. The discussions around the water cooler. These narratives carry important messages about the underlying values of a people group. The language used to express these stories – the jargon, acronyms, and lingo of a group – are just as important. Every tribe has its own dialect.

Symbols

These are not just flags, badges, and company logos. Symbols are also expressed in how people dress, office décor, even in a preferred brand of software and technology! Every item you see around you is the result of a choice influenced by a principle. For example, why have that type of coffee? Because it’s the highest quality, a trusted brand, or the best value? Understanding the decision can reveal a value judgement.

Rituals and routines

Every tribe has its own rituals and routines. The time when people start and finish work, what people do for lunch, even how (if at all) people celebrate birthdays and successes are all cultural rituals. Meetings are one fascinating way of examining culture. The routines of how a meeting is conducted, who sits where, who speaks when, and the language people use, all speak volumes about the culture and values of a group.

Organisational structure

There are always formal and informal structures in any group. Both need to be understood. An organisational chart may capture the official structure but what are the networks that exist, the webs hidden below those regimented lines? Look to see the tribes that gather; the smokers and the lunch-time runners as well as the project or function-based teams.

Power structures

Power derives from people and particularly the individuals who are decision-makers. These power structures do not always follow the official hierarchy either. For example, the personal assistant who manages access to an executive can wield power that outweighs their perceived grade in any management structure. Think: who are the internal influencers?

Controls

Controls are the systems, processes, and regulations that an organisation develops. These controls assist the conduct of work but also regulate behaviours. These can include things like financial controls, contracts, and company articles but there are also a host of unwritten rules and ways of working in any group. If you don’t think that is true, then just ask the newest member of the team about what they had to learn to be accepted into the clan.


Culture is manifest in behaviour

Once a culture is understood you can start to identify potential levers of change. But that still does not mean it is easy, if you don’t believe me just try changing the dress regulations for any given team!

We are all creatures of habit and therefore change at any level requires overcoming inertia. We all know this. Habits can be changed but think back to the last bad habit you tried to modify. It is not easy, even when you do identify the cues, routines and rewards in a habit loop.

Therefore, even if the intellectual argument for change is compelling, there is a huge work to be undertaken once a strategy is agreed upon. As John P. Kotter shows in Leading Change, you must have leadership and a plan to take people through the change, not just set the target. To develop a plan, you need to understand the psychology of influencing groups of people and gently motivate them to act in the right way. This is the essence of nudge theory; people need subtle cues, personal incentives, and positive reinforcement to change.


How values should be expressed to inspire action

One way to engage a whole team or organisation in the change process is through a discussion of values. Values are symbiotic with culture, as it is our shared principles and corporate beliefs that are expressed in the symbols, structures, and stories that we share in an organisation.

The problem is the behaviour of many individuals and teams are not aligned to the stated values of their organisation. This is often due to one of these three problems:

The wrong values

Sometimes a company just picks the wrong values. The values are generally not bad in themselves – virtues such as creativity, inclusivity or productivity are all good – but that does not mean they are the right values for that given group or capture the drivers for change in a strategy.

Corporate values need to express the key beliefs of that given group. They express how that team makes decisions, how they are different and most importantly why they behave that way. If you want to change the priorities of an organisation, as happens in strategy implementation, then the values need to align with that strategy.

If this is the problem – and values do not express either the current situation or strategy – then it is worth starting again, examining culture, and engaging as many team members as possible to identify the true values of the organisation and the core principles of the new strategy.

Poorly expressed values

Expressing values poorly is the next common problem. This is often the case when companies choose single virtue words to communicate their principles. Take the word creativity. I have seen creativity stated as a value for schools, legal teams, and accountancy firms, not just the obvious ones such as advertising teams, tech firms and artists.

So, if you pick a term like creativity, the question is, what does that mean within your given context? One simple way to improve the expression of a specific virtue is by coupling it with another word. Creativity could become continual creativity, collaborative creativity, playful creativity, or something else. But suddenly, with just adding one (or two) extra words that value statement becomes more personal to the group and can better express the way that value informs choices and behaviours.

Misunderstood values

And that thought on behaviours brings us nicely to the third point – misunderstood values. Even if a value is expressed succinctly it may still need further explanation to describe how that value informs the actions of that group.

Therefore, when considering corporate principles (or personal values for that matter), once the value has been identified and expressed, the next step is to define its meaning in terms of how it informs action. Every value needs a paragraph of explanation that unpacks how a value should inform the thought processes and behaviours of the team.


Expressing organisational culture through shared values 

So, don’t let your organisational culture eat your shiny new strategy for breakfast. If you want a strategy to succeed, having a good strategic plan is not enough. You need to bring strategy, culture, and values together. To do this you must:

  • Understand the organisational culture
  • Identify values that align that culture with the strategy
  • Explain and demonstrate how those values should be expressed in behaviour and decision-making

This may not be a quick or easy process, but it is better to go slow than to race towards the strategy car-crash that is likely to happen if you try to enforce a change without following these steps. It is a thankless task – for managers and workers alike – to have to continually prod people to change direction.

But if a company’s strategy and values are aligned, and the team behaves according to those principles, then it is like a flywheel starting to turn. It builds up momentum to a point where the positive inertia pulls the organisation towards its goal. Then, as the boss, you can stop thinking about prodding and start thinking about what new ritual you might introduce to celebrate the success of the team!

If you want the right answers you have to start with the right questions

About The Right Questions

The Right Questions is for people who want greater clarity, purpose and success. There is a wealth of resources to boost your effectiveness in achieving goals, your leadership of yourself and others, and your decision-making.

Wherever you are on your journey, I hope that you find information on this site to help you on the next leg of your quest. Even if that is just the inspiration to take one small step in the right direction, then that is a success. If you can take pleasure in learning and travelling as you go, then so much the better.

Need help navigating your journey to success?

I love to serve people, helping them unlock their potential, empowering them as leaders, and assisting them in achieving their goals. Please get in touch and let me know how I can support you!