Handbook for Strategic HR - Section 6: Change Management

By OD Network, John Vogelsang PhD, Maya Townsend and 6 more

The pace of change is increasing and shows no signs of slowing down. This section brings you the best thinking from forty years of the OD Practitioner journal on:- The different kinds of change and what's needed to achieve each one.- What you must do to see change initiatives through to completion.- The enablers that must be in place for change to succeed.- Examining change from the change recipient’s point of view.- How to establish internal change agents who can help advocate for the change at ground-level.- Lessons on how to engage in change outside Western societies.- How to handle resistance to change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814437018

OD Network

OD PRACTITIONER is the quarterly journal of the Organization Development Network, an international association whose members are committed to practicing organization development as an applied behavioral science.

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Introduction

Maya Townsend

VOICES FROM THE FIELD

When I am at my best, my orientation is less as an expert or a recommender and more as a helper to the organization as it explores and discovers choices. Partnering with clients to develop design criteria and options fosters their ownership. I try to embrace the principle of people support what they help to create. It’s less about a particular method and more about creating space to allow people to be involved.

—Chuck Mallue

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS SECTION

• How to identify the type of change needed and utilize different change methodologies.

• How to structure an active and mindful implementation effort.

• How to build organizational readiness, engage employees in actualizing the desired strategies and goals, and develop change champions.

• How to work with resistance to change.

WHY CHANGE MANAGEMENT

The pace of change is increasing and shows no signs of slowing down. The major forces of globalization, hyper-connectedness, and immediate communication have changed the marketplace significantly and permanently. We now live in a world of constant flux. Organizations initiate a change only to have six or ten more significant initiatives emerge as necessary and urgent. As a result, 81% of managers in one study report that the pace of change in their organizations has increased compared to five years before. And 69% say that their companies experienced disruptive change within the last 12 months (AMA, 2007).

HR Business Partners have the unique opportunity to lead change in organizations and the responsibility to help business leaders manage change wisely. Changes often stem directly from HR activities, such as instituting a new talent management initiative, installing performance management tracking software, or implementing a work at home policy. However, HR Business Partners’ expertise is sorely needed in business-driven changes as well. These initiatives are, more often than not, disappointing. A McKinsey study reports that only 38% of change initiatives were completely or mostly successful improving performance (2006). Furthermore, 83% of CEOS reported that they expect significant organization change in the next two years, but 59% of change initiatives missed at least one objective or failed entirely (IBM, 2008). There’s room for improvement and HR professionals can help make that happen by helping leaders tend to the complex, tricky issues of helping people adapt to and implement change.

The Basics: What Do We Know About How Change Occurs?

Many ideas about change are based on the work of Kurt Lewin. Often considered the father of organization development, Lewin created seminal ideas about change and how the environment affects people’s and organization’s ability to change. John Adams (1988) explains Lewin’s approach to change:

Kurt Lewin taught us that we first have to unfreeze a situation before we can expect any movement. This means operating in ways that will destabilize the status quo. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways including: increasing dissatisfaction, threatening adverse consequences, and (preferably) building a vision of a better way of being that people can relate to. (p. 9)

In Lewin’s view, organizations move from stability through change to times of new stability. The change agent’s job is to identify and reduce restraining forces that prevent people from adapting and identify and add driving forces that encourage people to alter their behavior. This work was codified in a formula popularized by Dick Beckhard, Kathie Dannemiller, and others:

C = (DVF) >R

Change is possible when the level of Dissatisfaction with the status quo, the clarity of Vision, and the grasp of the First Steps to be taken can combine to be greater than the existing Resistance to change. (Adams, 2003, p. 24)

This formula worked for a while and still helps leaders think about the readiness of their organizations for change. However, practitioners soon learned that not all types of change are created equal. Linda Ackerman Anderson, first in 1985 and then in 2003 with Dean Anderson and Martin Marquardt, identified three major types of change: transitional, developmental, and transformational. Transitional change most closely resembles the type described by Lewin in his freezing-unfreezingrefreezing model. Ackerman Anderson, Anderson, and Marquardt (2003) explain:

Transitional change replaces what is with something entirely different. Transitional change involves the achievement of an existing state over a set period of time. It requires the dismantling of the old state and the creation of the consciously designed new state. Transitions include reorganizations, mergers, divestitures, implementation of . . . technology, or the creation of new products or services. (p. 7)

These are changes with a specific start and end date. They take the form of projects, drawing on project management expertise, and have a clear outcome that aims to improve operations, solve problems, or reduce threats to the enterprise.

Developmental change is simpler than transitional change since it focuses on improvement rather than replacement. The goal is to enhance what is rather than replace it. For example, a team may wish to improve its problem-solving capabilities. An organization may wish to reduce the time it takes to perform a specific process. Or an alliance may wish to improve communication processes. Whatever the specifics, the change is clearly defined and incremental and, thereby, usually less jarring to an organization. Ackerman Anderson, Anderson, and Marquardt (2003) write:

In developmental change, the new state is a prescribed enhancement of the old state, rather than a radical or experimental solution requiring profound change. The degree of pain triggering developmental change is usually low, at least in comparison to the other types of change. This does not mean that developmental change is not important or challenging; it is. However, the risks associated with it, and the number of volatile variables tied to it, are considerably less than with the other . . . types of change. (p. 6)

The third type of change, transformational change, is prevalent in organizations today. Ackerman Anderson and Anderson (2001) explain:

Transformation is unique in two critical ways. First, the future is unknown at the start of the change process and can only be created by forging ahead with the intent to discover it . . .

Secondly, the future state is so radically different than the current state that a shift of mindset is required to invent it, let alone implement and sustain it. This fact triggers enormous human and cultural impacts.

Each type of change requires that people shift—forging ahead into an unknown future, in the case of transformational change; replacing one known situation with another, in the case of transitional change; or improving the current situation, in the case of developmental change.

William Bridges (2003) explains what people experience during these processes. He differentiates the change event from the human process of understanding and accepting change. His transition model says that people go through three stages as they attempt to adjust to change. The first stage is letting go: releasing the hold on existing processes, services, mindsets, and/or ways of doing business. In this stage, people often experience sadness about loss, anger at the need to change, and confusion about what lies ahead. The confusion increases in the second stage, the neutral zone, in which people travel through a period of ambiguity before they arrive at the intended destination. While anxiety-provoking, the neutral zone can also generate creativity as people question what they thought were givens and experiment with new ways. The third stage is the new beginning, in which people integrate their learning from the neutral zone into their daily work, which now includes new priorities and routines. In this stage, people express excitement, optimism, and impatience to move forward. Knowing these three stages helps leaders understand the experience that they, and the people affected by the change, experience during the process and design outlets for people’s feelings and opportunities for stage-appropriate learning.

Later, Bridges updated his work to address a condition prevalent in most organizations today: that of constant change. In Lewin’s world, change was an event that had a beginning, middle, and end, after which the organization would achieve a new stability that would continue until the next major change process. Bridges recognized that, today, most organizations experience multiple, simultaneous changes that make stability a rare (and sometimes alarming!) experience. To cope with this environment—and the multilayered, concurrent transitions sustained by those impacted by change—he writes: The first thing . . . need[ed] in order to handle nonstop organizational change is an overall design . . . [in which] the various changes are integrated as component elements (2003, p. 101).

The issue of nonstop organizational change has been picked up by an emerging field called Human Systems Dynamics or organizational complexity. Proponents of this viewpoint see dynamic, continuous change as a natural an inevitable part of our world. Dudley Tower (2002) explains:

Our world is currently experiencing an escalating and irreversible trend towards increasing complexity. Old methods of understanding change and organizing human systems are inconsistent with this new reality. In the past, the world seemed a more stable place. Assumptions regarding cause and effect, prediction and control, and the desirability of semi-closed, equilibrium-seeking systems had greater merit. Today—with the rise of a global economy, increasingly interactive communications, continuous product and technology innovations, heightened competition, and rapidly changing perspectives—a new set of assumptions . . . are necessary. These new assumptions will necessarily re-define the practice of Organization Development—making planned change and traditional organization structures obsolete—while also providing us with a set of rules or principles that can be applied to all levels of human systems. (p. 4)

For practitioners like Tower, change is not something that can be managed. In fact, for complexity-based practitioners, the very term change management is an oxymoron. One can no more manage a change than one can control the weather. Instead, the role of organization leaders is to help the company adapt and navigate safely into the new world.

Complexity approaches do not make sense in all organizations. Organizations that operate in stable, predictable environments, such as a government-regulated monopolies, are insulated from complexity. Traditional change tools work well in organizations like these. In systems in which there is less stability and predictability, complexity tools are more appropriate and effective. (For more on complexity, see the chapter on Systems Thinking.)

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS SECTION

The articles in this section present the best thinking about change management that has appeared in the OD Practitioner over the last 40 years. The authors have led change in Fortune 50 companies, family-owned businesses, international conglomerates, nongovernmental organizations, and rural communities. They help HR Business Partners understand what they can do to foster sustainable change. The four segments are:

• Change by Any Other Name: Kinds of Change

• What Now? Understanding Change from the Change Recipient’s Viewpoint

• How to Make Them Sit Up and Take Notice: The Successful Change Agent

• Special Topics

Change by Any Other Name: Kinds of Change

Linda Ackerman Anderson and Dean Anderson open the section with Awake at the Wheel: Moving beyond Change Management to Conscious Leadership (2001), a powerful piece about the most startling and difficult kind of organizational change: transformational change. They describe a process for transformational change leadership and the steps towards building an integrated change strategy. Importantly, they discuss the requirements for successful transformation, which HR professionals and organizational leaders will find helpful.

While Ackerman Anderson’s and Anderson’s work will make intuitive sense to many with a background in Western thought, Robert Marshak in The Tao of Change Redux (2012) posits that there are other ways of thinking about change. Marshak draws on his depth of experience in the Far East, specifically Korea, to present Confucian ways of conceptualizing and relating to change. HR practitioners leading cross-cultural change initiatives will find this article particularly meaningful and relevant.

Closing out this segment is Nicole Stragalas’s Improving Change Implementation: Practical Adaptations of Kotter’s Model (2010). Stragalas provides an orientation to common ways of approaching change and then tackles what many see as the Achilles heel of organizational change: implementation. Drawing on John Kotter’s eight stages of change (2007; see Table 56.1), Stragalas details specific implementation actions that can be taken by HR leaders to successfully perform each stage.

TABLE 56.1   John Kotter’s Eight Stages of Change

What Now? Understanding Change from the Change Recipient’s Viewpoint

Levels of employee engagement and commitment can make or break a change effort. What Now?: Understanding Change from the Change Recipient’s Viewpoint examines what HR Business Partners can do to front-load their initiatives for success by considering the change recipient to be a critical stakeholder. Michael H. Vinitsky and Adam S. Kling, in Change from the Employees’ Perspective: The Neglected Viewpoint (2006), outline the eight questions that leaders must answer in order to maintain credibility and build employee commitment to change. Their actionable, precise questions can help HR Business Partners prepare for change themselves and coach leaders to develop coherent messages to staff about change.

Barry Dym (1997) and Thomas C. Head (2000) provide two perspectives on individual resistance to change. Dym sees resistance not as good or bad but simply a fact of life during change in Resistance in Organizations: How to Recognize, Understand, and Manage It. He explores the driving forces that fuel resistance to change and identifies ways to manage it.

In Appreciative Inquiry: Debunking the Mythology Behind Resistance to Change, Thomas Head (2000) takes on some of the unquestioned assumptions about resistance. He challenges the ideas that HR Business Partners must buy employee commitment and that there will always be resistance to change. Instead of accepting these maxims, Head offers an appreciative alternative to traditional methods of viewing resistance.

A third perspective comes from Barry Dym and Harry Hutson (1997), who address the issue of organizational—as opposed to individual—resistance and readiness in Utilizing States of Organizational Readiness. The difference between a responsive state and an unstable state of readiness can make the difference between change success and failure. Dym and Hutson help HR Business Partners identify the dominant state in their organizations and understand how to build responsive states of readiness.

Closing out the section is Don Warrick’s 2009 Developing Organization Change Champions. He shows how HR Business Partners can create what every organization needs: change champions. Related to, but different from change agents and change leaders, change champions are skilled at initiating, facilitating, and implementing change. They can be found at any level of the organization and, through their efforts, can help with the constant, necessary work of encouraging and reinforcing change at local levels.

How to Make Them Sit Up and Take Notice: The Successful Change Agent

How to Make Them Sit Up and Take Notice: The Successful Change Agent is the heart of this section. It represents OD Practitioner’s best thinking on how to successfully lead change. Edgar Schein (1994), in The Role of Leadership in the Management of Organizational Transformation and Learning, challenges leaders to consider the degree of psychological safety in their organizations and invites them to consider the connection between psychological safety and change success. He stresses that the role of the change leader is to help employees by creating the safety they need in order to risk, learn, and innovate.

In Change Mastery, Simplified, Chris Hoffman (2007) presents the helpful LEFSA model that leaders can use to focus their efforts on five factors that make a difference during change implementation.

Another helpful tool comes from Larry Hirschhorn (2007) in Backcasting: A Systematic Method for Creating a Picture of the Future and How to Get There. He presents a clear, actionable method for identifying the change goal and creating an implementation plan.

Arthur M. Freedman addresses a methodology that has received considerable attention and popularity in recent years in Using Action Learning for Organization Development and Change (2011), and explores how action learning can be used in change initiatives.

Linda Ackerman Anderson and Dean Anderson (2008), in Strategic Change Consulting: How to Leverage Your Work at the Enterprise Level, show how leaders can create infrastructure and support for ongoing, continuous change.

Special Topics

The last segment, Special Topics, explores specific types of change initiatives led by HR business leaders and provides specific guidance on how to manage them well. Robert Barnett’s The Executive Perspective on Mergers and Acquisitions (2005) presents research that identifies the factors that correlate with success in mergers and acquisitions.

Finally, An Appreciative Inquiry into the Factors of Culture Continuity during Leadership Transition: A Case Study of LeadShare, Canada, (1995) addresses succession planning, but from a totally different perspective: that of appreciative inquiry. This powerful and popular method was used successfully in a business services organization. Mary Ann Rainey explains the process and lessons learned.

FOR ADDITIONAL LEARNING

For more information about change management, you may want to read the following articles.

• Clarke, C., McAllister, B., & Swartz, D. (1998). The journey of organizational change in EPA Region 10. OD Practitioner , 30(2), 18–23.

The authors tell the story of a change in a US government agency.

• Crockett, J. (1978). No system is forever. OD Practitioner , 10(1), 1–11.

Crocket deals with how to go beyond the symptoms of a problem to deal with how people behave in the organization, which can lead to more sustainable change.

• Curran, C. (2009). Taking an organization to the next level. OD Practitioner , 41(4), 12–17.

Curran describes an organizational lifecycle change and transition process in an Irish nonprofit health organization.

• Heckelman, W., & Smith, R. (2004). Jump starting a corporate merger. OD Practitioner , 36(3), 9-13.

Heckelman and Smith offer a case study of a merger within a large, multi-national pharmaceutical organization.

• Holder, R., & McKinnney, R. (1993). Scouting: A process for dealing with the frontiers of an uncertain world. OD Practitioner , 25(3), 20–25.

Holder and McKinnery discuss the process of scouting, which helps catalyze change, create new roles, and provides information that can foster continuous improvement.

• Noer, D. (1988). Layoff survivor sickness: The issue beneath the symptoms. OD Practitioner , 20(2), 2–13.

Noer details the dynamics of layoff survivor sickness and its impact on individuals and organizations.

• O’Hara-Devereaux, M. (2005). The badlands: Future’s tool pack. OD Practitioner , 37(3), 5–11.

O’Hara-Devereaux describes the traditional and creative thinking tools for thriving in a highly uncertain and unpredictable future.

• Weisbord, M. (2004). Whose resistance is this anyway? OD Practitioner , 36(1), 32–36.

Weisbord recounts his experience with the University of Maryland’s primary care program.

• Zolno, S. (2006). Merger mayhem leads to whole system change. OD Practitioner , 38(3), 26–29.

Zolno examines the merger of four mental health service providers to create a new organization.

References

Adams, J. D. (1988). Creating critical mass to support change. OD Practitioner, 20(2), 7–10.

Adams, J. D. (2003). Successful change: Paying attention to the intangibles. OD Practitioner, 35(4), 22–26.

Ackerman Anderson, L., Anderson, D., & Marquardt, M. (2003). Development, transition, or transformation. OD Practitioner, 28(4), 5–16.

AMA (2007). The high-performance organization. Retrieved from http://www.amanet.org/research.

Bridges, W. (2003). Managing transitions (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

IBM. (2008). Making change work. Retrieved from http://www.ibm.com.

Kotter, J. (2007). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 85(1).

McKinsey. (2006). Organizing for successful change management: A McKinsey global survey. Retrieved from http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com.

Quade, K., Perme, C., Eoyang, G., Barton, K., & Holladay, R. (2004). Tried and true: How the emergent theory of human systems dynamics informs the long-term success of large group events. OD Practitioner, 36(3) 14–18.

Tower, D. (2002). Creating the complex adaptive organization: A primer on complex adaptive systems. OD Practitioner, 34(3), 4–9.

Zimmerman, B., Plsek, P., & Lindberg, C. (1998). Edgeware: Insights from complexity science for health care leaders. Irving, TX: VHA Incorporated.

CHAPTER 51

Awake at the Wheel

Moving Beyond Change Management to Conscious Leadership

Linda Ackerman Anderson and Dean Anderson

Imagine driving the Los Angeles freeways at rush hour with blinders on, or shutting your eyes to the traffic altogether, determined to plow through to your destination. You couldn’t possibly expect to get there safely, and would likely create havoc along the way. Not being able to see all of the signals and forces at play in your chaotic environment would make the journey impossible. How would you navigate? Maybe, if you were on a straight highway with no cars or obstacles, you might drive some distance with only minor mishaps. But driving freeways