Sense of urgency can help with change

In the process of planning and implementing a major change in your organization, you have to prepare the staff for change. The first step in the change process is to create an understanding of the need for change. Once that understanding has been firmly established, the next step is to gather together a core change team, a team made up of people in the organization who have position power, expertise and credibility with the staff and management. All these steps can be taken in a rational and planned way. However, the next phase of the change process is where things get messy! It may look easy on paper but in practice it’s really the sticking point in the change process.

We are referring to the process of implementing changes in the organization. Many strategic plans have gathered dust on the top shelf. The plan may have been a thing of beauty and a joy to behold but nothing ever came of it. Why does this occur? Well a lot of the blame for failures in implementation lies in the definition of the task.

Most strategic planning task forces define their role as creating the strategy. It’s up to others to implement the strategy or so the thinking goes. The task force’s mandate was to create the strategy, not implement it.

Other reasons for failure in implementation of change initiatives include the phenomenon of the ‘urgent’ crowding out the ‘important’. Soon after the strategy is completed, the task force members return to their original jobs. Of course, there are many tasks that were left undone while participating in the planning process, so those tasks now have to be finished. They become ‘urgent’ things and little by little, the new strategy becomes stale and unimplemented. Finally, someone wakes up one day and says something like, “I wonder what happened to all that work we did on the strategy. It was good work. Too bad it never went anywhere.” Most readers will have experienced just this phenomenon at some point during their working life.

So, implementation, not necessarily the plan, is your most difficult challenge. Creating alignment to the new vision and strategy on the part of the executive or leadership team is a relatively easy task when compared to creating a broader, organization-wide alignment to the new direction and change.

The success of your change strategy will depend very heavily on the steps you take to help all the affected people connect to the new strategy, understand their new roles and embrace the change with energy and enthusiasm.

One chief executive got so frustrated with trying to align the organization with the new vision that he created the idea of “a burning platform.” Essentially he said to his employees, “Imagine that you are standing on the railway platform and the train is waiting to leave. I have just set the platform on fire. Your choices are to get on the train before it pulls out of the station or face the consequences.”

This is a rather dramatic way of creating a sense of urgency to motivate people to accept change and help make things happen. Of course you have to communicate a sense of urgency, perhaps not in such a draconian fashion, and you have to explain the change thoroughly before you can expect any action to take place.

You will only succeed if you are patient. People must understand the need for change. Even though they may understand, most employees long for the security of the status quo and tend to discount the significance of a new corporate strategy created in the ranks far above them.

However, it is important to help all employees at all levels to understand the business and personal consequences associated with doing nothing. In fact, in our ever-changing world, the status quo or doing nothing is just not an option anymore.

There is power in information and by sharing information that shows how your industry is changing. You can identify the potential threats to the business if you do not change with the industry and in this way, overcome many of the barriers to acceptance and motivation for the need to change your business model. Showing the employees their role in helping to adapt will bring many doubters on board the train.