In a globalized and rapidly advancing economic reality, businesses must constantly re-evaluate their business model, tools, and internal processes or risk going extinct. When it comes to change management, the irony is that it isn’t actually the companies that are changing at all—it’s the people.
This guide will cover what change management is, a few guiding principles, and why transforming the way you work will better your organization…but be viciously resisted.
What is Change Management?
There was a time when things were simple; when stability and predictability were all shareholders and upper management cared about.
Enter: Instant Communication, Globalized Economy, International Competition, Fluid Work, and Rapid Technological Advancement
This cast of characters has taken the old business model and made it as useful as Blockbuster. To paraphrase a business professor: “successful companies have a culture that keeps moving”.
When you attempt to better your organization via altering its fundamental structure, your processes, systems, structure, or job roles will be heavily affected. Change management is a set of principles that guide how your organization prepares and supports individuals through the change process so that your goals are successfully achieved.
Think of it as thoughtfully realigning your company’s structure and managing the people side of change. After all, change does not happen in isolation.
There’s just one problem (and it’s huge)…
The Problem with Change
There’s just one slight issue with change: people hate it. Blame it on evolution, blame it on social psychology, blame it on anything you want (blame it on my ADD, baby?), the fact remains that when people have been doing something for a long time, they don’t like to be told to do it differently.
Change causes uncertainty, lack of communication, and power vacuums that create volatility. In short, it creates chaos. It takes planning, hard work, and dedication to overcome this challenge.
How to Manage Business Change
Whether or not the change is individual, organizational, or even enterprise level, it all comes down to your people. In fact, businesses never change, only the people within it do. Here are a few tips for managing business change:
– Define the Change: Just saying that you are changing to become more competitive and maximize potential isn’t enough. You cannot just expect the change to come to fruition. A company must fully define the change. You must transform your goals into the specific impacts on job roles, organizational structure and internal systems.
– Start at the Top: In times of crisis, we look to leaders to get us through safely. That’s a tad overdramatic for daily business, but you get the point. Your employees will look to upper management for strength, encouragement, and support. Leadership must embrace change and show that it is ready, willing, and able to see it through.
– Justify it with Rationale: Change management is a set of techniques that successfully take your company from its current reality to a future goal. Your employees are inherently rational—justify your change with logic, and they will follow. Show them how you all benefit from change.
Aside from these techniques, you must also understand the interworking relationship between project management and organizational change management.
Project Management and Change Management
As we said before, change management is the set of principles that takes your company from its current state through a set of changes and to a desired future state. Project management is the discipline of planning, executing, and closing the work of a team on a specific work project to meet specific goals such as budget or delivery date.
Whereas change management is more about people, project management is the technical side of things. Only when you aligned these two in harmony can you successfully achieve fluid change.
First, your project management needs to define specific activities that will move your company from A to B. Then, your change management team figures out how to handle the people who the change will impact.
As with all things in life, it is about finding balance.
Successfully managing change within your organization to make you more competitive on the market is vital to your company’s survival.
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