Welcome back to the Every Tuesday Club. 

One of the biggest constants in today’s business world is dealing with change.  And no doubt, at some level you’re dealing with change right now in your organisation. 

There are three very important things you want to think about as you’re managing change:

1.         What is the level of change readiness of your department, your team or your organisation?  You can check that by figuring out how much resistance you have and how flexible or agile you are as an organisation.

2.        Do you have a change plan in place?

John Kotter is probably the guru of change management – take a look at his 8 step plan.

We found in working with clients that they often miss two or three of these critical steps.  Which ones might you be missing?

1.         Establish a sense of urgency

2.         Create a guiding coalition

3.         Develop a vision and strategy

4.         Communicate the change vision

5.         Empower employees for broad-base action

6.         Generate short term wins

7.         Consolidate change and produce more change

8.         Anchor new approaches in the culture

Most notably -is not doing a good enough job and creating a case for change.  What’s often called the burning platform.  If you haven’t communicated the rationale for a change plan, no doubt your employees will have a much more difficult job embracing it.

3.         And finally, have you built in a good transition plan?  Transition has three phases

1.         Loss

2.         Being in limbo

3.         The new beginning

 

Even if your change is overall positive, it will require some change and loss on behalf of your organisation.  For example, let’s say you are moving to a new office building, and it’s got much better equipment, and facilities.  Your employees are losing the comfort and familiarity of their old office space.  You may think there is no issue.  Why are they resisting?  But again, there is a loss involved.

So as a manager, there are three important things again that you can do:

1.         Test for change readiness

2.         Develop a thorough change management plan

3.         Properly account for loss and limbo that you will be dealing with in transition.

If you do those things, you’re guaranteed a much better success rate of any change you undertake.

 

Good luck with that and let us know how you get on.

 If you haven’t taken the opportunity to sign up to the Every Tuesday Club with MBE (Management & Business Education), then do so today by going to www.buseducation.com.