Change Acceleration: Developing a Vision

Nothing energizes and enables an organizational change more than strong leadership effectively communicating a clear and compelling vision. Individuals at all levels can understand changing priorities, realigning resources, and supporting direction toward this clear vision once it’s understood.

Here’s an example of a clear and compelling vision:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” – John F. Kennedy Jr., May 25, 1961

This vision is SMART:  it’s specific (get a man to the moon), it’s measurable (is he there or not?), it’s achievable (we did it), it’s realistic (others were attempting it, too), and there was a timeline attached (end of the decade).  He went on in this speech to further define the scope and detail of the projects, and budgets soon to follow.  People from Congress on down to the average man on the street understood what needed to be done, and people involved in government and defense re-prioritized items to be able to meet the goal.

We prefer to use a “More Of…” , “Less Of…” exercise with the leadership or change acceleration team.  Get the team in a room and look at behaviors that will change as we go about seeking the vision. In the above case, we should see more defense dollars applied toward space exploration, we should see less antagonistic behaviors toward our global adversaries, we should see more collaboration with allies on technical initiatives.   Thinking through these things in a group setting help clarify and confirm the vision in everyone’s mind, which also helps communicating the vision to others.

Have you ever heard or used the elevator speech?  A good vision passes the test of an excellent elevator speech.  Imagine that you are riding an elevator from the top of your building and on the 20th floor a senior executive gets on and joins you on your ride to the ground.  If he or she asks you what you are doing, you have about 60 seconds to respond; give the listener a full picture of what is the focus and direction, as well as the importance and priority of the vision.  Your elevator speech needs to be compelling, to encourage the listener to engage and become invested in the direction you are taking the organization.  Good vision statements can pass as an elevator speech.

Last but not least, the vision needs to be visibly supported by individuals up and down the entire organization.  Nothing worse than spending the time to develop a vision statement that everybody agrees upon but nobody follows, especially if top leadership doesn’t follow it.  You’ve guaranteed a train wreck if it’s not clear and compelling enough to energize people across the entire firm to seek a different direction in their everyday jobs.   If the ‘clear and compelling’ test is not met, individuals will tend to revert back to their individual objectives being prioritized over the collective priority.

Make change more successful by communicating a clear and compelling vision.  It’s the foundation, the cornerstone, for a successful change.

 

Change Acceleration: Developing a Need that is Shared

In my mind there is no single factor that makes major organization change easier than when people want to see the change take place.  As we know, this isn’t always the case.  Different individuals see things from a different perspective and that makes alignment toward a common goal sometimes very difficult.  Do you recall Mayor Larry Vaughn in the movie “Jaws“?  The mayor wasn’t evil; he desperately wanted to believe that there wasn’t a big problem and there was still an opportunity to salvage the tourist season for the little town of Amity.  Police Chief Martin Brody‘s concern was to be sure, certain, that the beach was safe before allowing visitors to swim again, but when the first sizable tiger shark was caught the Mayor and many others wanted to believe the beach was safe and opened it again.  As movie watchers, we knew that the film was only about 1/2 over so the really big shark was still out there, but if the great white had moved to other hunting grounds no one would have been the wiser.

Vaughn wasn’t evil or maligned, he didn’t share the vision for what needed to take place.  Brody had this vision, but wasn’t able to communicate it effectively enough to gain alignment and all push in the same direction.  Now imagine this among a business’ leadership team of a dozen or so individuals all representing a different perspective and various functions.

The first step of gaining alignment is a clear understanding of exactly what the problem is.  Given complex business problems, people will quickly jump to conclusions about why this issue is occurring.  One way to do this is to dip into the Lean Manufacturing / Six Sigma toolbox and utilize a “Why-Why” analysis: in short, this is the practice of getting the right people in the room and looking at the current major issue occurring; then ask why this is happening.  Upon getting various results, you ask why each of those is happening, and so on… sometimes this practice is called the “5 Whys” because most groups find that once they’ve drilled down in the process 5 times, things seem to be as basic as they get (“root cause“).  One other interesting thing often happens: themes or perhaps common root causes often result, indicating that there are three or maybe five things that if the organization can influence, this will make a major effect on the end result that you’re seeing.  In the process of this, organization leaders gain alignment and agreement around what specifically are the root causes of the issues at hand.

In the Jaws case, there was no doubt what the problem was; there was a huge fish out there eating tourists for snacks. The questions were, can we agree on a solution and how do we know when the solution has been attained?  Clearly when the first tiger shark was caught, the mayor was convinced it was over.  Brody and marine biologist Matt Hooper are unconvinced and continue their search, and their review of the stomach contents of the captured tiger shark seem to confirm their beliefs.  Only when another great white attack occurs does the entire town commit to solving the problem right. By that time, significant time had passed; if this is your business or organization, significant progress or profits may be wiped out.

This is about mission.  Not the longer-term vision for the organization, but the mission for ‘how do we avoid this particular business obstacle in order to continue on toward our vision‘?  It’s typically short term, and if you’ve done a “Why-Why” analysis or other alignment exercise, you collectively understand what the problem is.  However, there’s one more problem to consider at this point: the organization’s willingness to challenge the status quo.  I once worked for a firm that said they wanted to see change and improvement take place, yet when anyone complained that we were playing in his backyard, it came to be an issue.  In short, the business was not willing to challenge the status quo.  As an HR leader, you need to test for this up front.  If the organization truly isn’t willing to challenge the status quo, perhaps now is not the time to embark upon the change initiative.  Work harder to try to understand how big of a problem this is (get data from internal and external sources) or partner with your business leader to develop the vision (find examples, best practices, model the standards for leadership more clearly).

Yet challenging status quo is essential and by very definition it embraces change, and accelerating change.  There is an early step here — your top leadership needs to be visible and credible about standing up in front of the organization and saying, “Here’s the problem… we need to fix it…. we are all going to join together and see this thing through to its conclusion.”  This combats the status quo, it effectively creates an internal crisis that we are all going to join together to fight, and therefore it develops a shared need.

The best example of this I’ve personally witnessed was in 1991 when General Motors ElectroMotive Division (EMD), which then held about 60% of the US market for sale of locomotives, was mentioned as a candidate for possible sale in some of the industry newspapers.  GE Transportation (GETS), then holding approximately 40% of the US market share, viewed this as a threat and then-CEO Bob Nardelli of GETS collected his management team together and brought with him Roger Penske, who as leader of Detroit Diesel Allison at the time, was a very likely successful bidder for General Motors EMD. Nardelli effectively used this discussion with the team to galvanize the need for change.  Everyone in the room learned that Penske had the capability of making EMD a much more dangerous competitor to GETS, which would translate to lost sales, downsizing, or even closure for GETS.  This drove the mission home, and GE was able to perform a remarkable series of cost-cutting and market development measures that turned the organization around and since that time has managed to win an approximated 70% of market share.  Nardelli effectively saw a risk, identified it as a crisis, and galvanized the organization to overcome the status quo.  This is the kind of thing your organization needs to do.  Warning: don’t “make up” a crisis — it has to be real and credible to be effective.  

One of the most effective tools I’ve used in this regard is the 4-block “Threat and Opportunity” matrix.  It’s structure is rather simple:  Threat and Opportunity are the columns, Short Term and Long Term are the rows.  Have the team identify short term threats and long term threats (“What are the issues to potentially overcome us in the short term or the long term if we fail to be successful making this change?”) as well as short term and long term opportunities (“What benefits or new markets are available to the business if we take advantage of making this change?”).

In short, your organization’s employees and leaders need to be properly aligned in the direction of change.  If your leaders aren’t ready, you need to get them ready, and test to ensure that they are ready before moving forward.  Use good leadership and communications strategies to confirm and demonstrate commitment to the success of this change to all employees.

Getting Started with Change Acceleration Focus

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

What is change management or change acceleration?  It’s a response to a business problem.  John Kotter of Kotter International has studied major change processes for over 40 years and it’s his estimation that over 70% of all major business change initiatives fail.  So astute leaders who don’t want change to fail decide to plan and create a program designed to improve our change’s factors for success.

Multiple practitioners around the world have studied change for many years.  The typical practice is this: line up a whole bunch of successful change initiatives on one side, a whole bunch of failed change initiatives on the other side, and compare and contrast.  In the end, most of the models developed have a whole lot of similarity.  General Electric’s model (GE has maintained change leadership as one of their core initiatives since the mid-90’s), for example, resonates with nearly all of the Kotter 8-step process.  In the end, we find that there are some tried-and-true methods or practices that leaders may engage to improve their chances for success.

Keeping with our practical but strategic focus of this blog, we’ll share some of the core principles and also some of the popular tools used with organizations seeking to improve change.  This is likely to take more than one blog due to the size of the topic.

First, a basic premise.  In addition to the major model components, many adhere to a basic concept, which I’ll refer to as “Q x A = E“.  That is, the Effectiveness (E) of a change initiative is directly proportional to the product of the change’s Acceptance by the population, and the Quality of the change initiative.  Few are the initiatives such as the Pet Rock (extremely high Acceptance but didn’t need high Quality) or the Concorde (extremely high Quality technology, but Acceptance challenges with regulations, maintaining technical standards, and just plain profit).  The practical point to this is that so many times we focus on the quality of the product or program when frankly a bit of attention to ensuring that it’s what the population actually wants may be in order.  Or, alternatively, that we’re trying to enthusiastically sell folks on our half-baked concept idea that just needs development.  Looking at both of these core elements might give us the first thing to improve on our program.  Hey, I certainly wouldn’t knock IBM’s Thomas Watson (above) for his belief that Acceptance of the computer was going to be very low, because eventually he got behind it and realized that computers by their very nature have both Quality and Acceptance, therefore hugely successful as a change initiative.  Do you remember life before the Internet?

Successful programs need a vision.  A vision helps to articulate where it is that we’re heading, and by definition a new program will almost always require a new direction.  The vision helps cut through the misconceptions of the population, the personal agendas of those seeking to counteract the program’s direction, and provide the ‘rallying cry’ for those still not clear about how he or she fits into this new program.  The vision needs to be clear and legitimate.  It is best to have it described in behavioral terms, so we know the way we should act when acting in accordance with that vision.  It needs to be communicated to the population, so all understand and also avoid giving rise to personal interpretations of what it means.  This is perhaps what was missing for Watson and the way he saw computer markets in 1943; there was no vision (from him or anyone else), no real understanding of what life could be like in 2015.  Vision came later; it came from the likes of Steve Jobs at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft as well as many, many others, and our world is not the same.

One of the most popular and effective tools I’ve seen to help shape the vision into actionable, behavioral terms is called a “backwards imaging exercise”.  If you have the leadership team together, ask them to do the following:

• Imagine a point in the future when this change initiative has been very successful.
• Use words to describe the way what you see, hear, understand in your interactions with your key constituents:  employees, leaders, vendors, customers, etc.  as they work in the new, changed state.
• Test, modify, improve.  The words and concepts you agree upon can help to articulate your vision.

Shaping this vision into an actionable, behavioral statement is important to leading the change initiative.  It helps to support strong, committed, visible leadership that provides a framework for individuals to take personal initiative, and to challenge the status quo.  The better leaders enable each individual in the population, the more likely our change initiative is likely to be.

Part of shaping this vision, and by extension part of leading change initiatives, is the leadership of a cross functional team and excellent facilitation skills to help guide the exercises to success.  This does not have to be HR, but often these kinds of cross-functional leadership wind up with HR support or leadership, hence its inclusion in this blog.  Also, since we’re clearly focused on major change initiatives of the firm, it’s definitely in the strategy camp.

In future blogs we’ll look at several other popular tools utilized for change management and other ways to improve the effectiveness and success of the programs.

Data Management Vision for HR – Yes, it’s important!!

Please — HR friends, do not run away from me because of used the word “data”!  I want to share a story of what and HRIS / Data Management vision can mean for HR and what may happen to you and your HR function if you choose not to worry about this.

I once worked with an HR function of a major corporation that had no time or interest for HRIS or good HR data.  Prior to my arrival, the business had begun a payroll / HR / Time & Attendance implementation that was rocky at best and I found a half-useful system that no one in the entire corporation knew how to properly run.  Good news is, at least the payroll part was running reasonably well (because it HAS TO).  (For those of you new to the HR function, I’ll share a bit of wisdom from one of my early mentors in the field:  “There are a lot of things you can do to employees from an HR perspective, but never, ever, ever, mess with people’s pay.”)

But there was no vision (think plan) for the system.  So in order for payroll to get themselves running properly, they bypassed HR and set it up the way they thought they needed to.  And, did I mention, there was no vision, so each individual location that ran payroll a little bit differently did exactly that, they ran it their own way.   So, for example, we had a field in the payroll system identified as “employee class”.  Now, we can all come up with a concept of what that term means, but in one of our groups they were using “Exempt – Non Exempt – Hourly” (ok, seems appropriate), but another was using “Executive – Professional – Administrative – Union”.  Ugh.  At that point we realized we could forget about any kind of future reporting or tracking using “class”.

Reporting was a mess.  Corporate employees housed at another location than HQ were sometimes HQ, sometimes local.  Affirmative Action (AAP) plans required twenty times the amount of effort to figure out who belonged to what job category because EEO code was tied to job titles, and most employees didn’t have job titles entered, because nobody shared a vision that said it was important.   Payroll and HR had different job information because they were working in their separate ways and not all data was shared.  When even an employee status is questionable — active in payroll, terminated in HR — what is the right answer, are they working here or not?  In the end, what happened was that the HR function became so challenged by just trying to make relatively simple processes work, we lost tons of strategic opportunity just chasing our tails for basic information.  So we had this powerful, capable information management system, and because we had communicated no plan, no vision we let it send us back to the administrative paper-pushing HR of the stone ages.  To make matters worse, it was terribly difficult to develop and commit to a new vision because people had learned to do it their own way so long ago it seemed to them that we were making their jobs harder, not easier.  You know, we’re HR:  we’re supposed to be dealing with people, not fighting ourselves within an HRIS system all day long.

Here’s the message.  Stay strategic, keep your head focused toward a specific direction.  Identify prior to implementation which (limited number) of files and fields are critical, which are helpful, and which don’t matter.  Train for proper application of the critical, give guidelines for acceptable use of the helpful, and communicate for people to NOT waste time on the ones who don’t matter.  In my example above, our system had 2,600+ fields per employee between payroll – HR/Benefits – and Time & Attendance.  It does matter that decisions are made and employees are trained because there’s so much potential work to be performed or time to be wasted with 2,600 data fields.  Eventually, we turned ourselves around and got a functioning system that was credible but by that time we had lost a ton of ground building a strategic advantage for HR.

HR information systems can make our lives a lot easier.  In order to do so, however, we have to develop a plan — think about these kinds of things in advance — and follow the plan with proper communications and training.  The vendor of the HRIS can’t do it for you, because they don’t know your business like you do.  (By the way, following implementation, the vendor is gone, and you’re stuck with their decisions.  Which are actually your decisions.)  And if you don’t know what the heck you’re doing on this subject, get a good consultant who’s been through this before to study your business prior to implementation and develop a plan.  Otherwise you can lose all your strategic time on chasing your administrative tail… which adds zero value to the business.