Managing change
With today's advances in technology, your competition, your industry and your market, the only constant is change. Businesses must adapt to stay relevant. And it isn't enough to innovate and generate changes; managers are held accountable for sustaining change and making changes more profitable. Here are three things to keep in mind about business change:
Consider all angles. Phil Buckley of Bloomberg.com suggests five crucial questions to ask when you're trying to weigh the potential success of major change. First, ask how the vision is different or better. Then, ask if the leaders involved are committed to the change. “Does the organization have the capacity to make the change? How ingrained is the current culture? And will the change actually deliver the identified outcomes?” All these questions are crucial, Buckley says.
Let company culture lead the way. So says DeAnne Aguirre and Micah Alpern at Strategy-business.com. They cite a study that shows 76 percent of executives with failed change initiatives did not take existing culture into account. Making change isn't always about tearing down and rebuilding. The key, they say, is to tap into the emotional energy that's already there and “look for the elements of the culture that are aligned to the change, bring them to the foreground, and attract the attention of the people who will be affected by the change.”
Be a matchmaker. Keith Ferrazzi of HBR.org says 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use this method: pairing up people. Whether you call it mentorship or peer coaching, it can work. “Identifying and celebrating early adopters of the behaviors a company wants to instill can create positive contagion,” he writes. “Pairing these role models with slower-to-adopt colleagues can be far more effective than coaching by outside experts.”
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