Creating Change Management Capability: Experience Success

Sara:

Creating change management capability, experience, success. Hosted by HRDQ-U
and presented by Mark Hordes. Today’s webinar will last about an hour. Note
that if you’d like to send in any questions you may have for us, you can do
that with the chat window in the upper right hand corner on most people’s
computer screens. You can type in there at any time during this session and we
will then either answer questions as they come in. We are planning on a live
Q&A at the end with Mark and if we don’t get to all of the questions, we
will do a follow-up by email. So go ahead and send your questions in using that
chat window. My name is Sara Montgomery and I will moderate today’s
webinar.

I’m in business development for HRDQ, a publisher of research based training
solutions that improve the performance of individuals, teams and organizations.
Our presenter today is Mark Hordes. Mark is the vice president of
organizational performance improvement and change management leads for the
Americas with Molten-Group. He is the co-author of S Business Reinventing the
Services Organization. Mark won the Houston Business Journal’s 2014 Award Who’s
Who in Energy. He is an alumnus of the American Graduate School of
International Management Thunderbird. He holds an undergraduate degree from the
University of Houston as well as an MBA and MS in Organizational Behavior from
Aurora University. Welcome and thank you so much for joining us today Mark.

Mark:

You’re welcome Sara and thank you all for attending. I know everyone’s
schedule is very busy and I hope the time you invest in the session today will
be worth your time and effort. This is a very profound and very interesting
topic, one of which most organizations will go through. Some of which have
difficulty, many have not been successful due to a variety of reasons so I
don’t want to focus the session today on what has not worked but rather what
will work as you embark on a journey of change management to support any other
business case you might have operating in your company. We will go through many
different steps and I’ll show you some very practical things you can do
tomorrow to make this journey successful. Obviously in an hour, you will not be
able to learn everything there is to learn about change management but the goal
is to make you more than dangerous on the things that you need to do so that
you don’t forget some important steps.

There are obviously some other things that require different scope,
different complexities and different paces depending on the journey of the
business change that you’re embarking upon. What we will highlight the most
essential and ideally you’ll find these worthwhile. Today we’re going to focus
on four key elements and I believe these are the building blocks of a
successful program. The first is how do you prepare to gain business readiness?
How do you manage to change program and how do you organize and execute the
change? So that will be one very large rock if you will. The second, probably
the most difficult one that companies experience is how to measure change and I
guess they’ve heard a hundred times when a CEO asks a change lead or business
project lead what has been the result of my investment in your change efforts,
the typical response has been, we really can’t measure change but I believe
things are better.

I believe qualitatively people are happier. I believe qualitatively people
are more brought in and the CEO’s response typically will be can you show me
quantitatively that that’s true and worth the return on investment that I’ve
made. So knowing that that’s a challenge, I’m going to show you a measurement
model which has worked very successfully in the client companies that I’ve
worked with. It’s not the only approach but it’s one that I have found answers
the CEO’s question- how can we effectively measure change? The third area of
focus today will be about how to manage resistance and unlike maybe many
professionals, I don’t see resistance as a negative factor. In fact I see it as
a positive factor because it’s simply an additional data point, one of which
you can learn something about; one in which you can move resistors to
supporters to help them understand what the effect is of the change process and
how to move forward collectively with you and then lastly, an area that’s often
left out, is fundamentally how do we sustain the change? How do we reinforce
the change?

Many organizations assume that once training is complete, if it might be a
simple technology implementation or an acquisition or a new leadership approach
but all they have to do is to train people up and communicate more and they
always forget about the sustainability piece. So I will touch on the most
prevalent way to sustain change so that it embarks upon and utilizes change
ideas to sustain an element of change that will ideally last the test of time.
Alright, in my background, I used to be a social psychologist. I coupled that
with business and international work when I went to a school called Thunderbird
and I was always intrigued by Rorschach tests that psychologists could tell a
lot about a journey to the mind, so to speak, and tell a lot about your
personalities by simply asking to look at certain pictures and to see which
ones you’re preferences are.

So if you don’t mind participating with me on the first step in a background
about change management, I’m going to ask you to take a journey into your own
mind and you won’t have the answers specifically because I can’t see your hands
go up but I’ll give you some trends here and the first exercise, if you’re
looking at the screen, you will see four images. An A which is a square; a B
which is a circle; a C which is a triangle; and a D which is a squiggle
diagram. So look at those four images for just a second and pick the shape of
the image that you most identify with. Let’s not try to make this into a mental
exercise or a rational exercise. This is strictly an emotional experience. So
pick the one that you most identify with. It may not be rational. It may not be
logical but it’s the one that you like the most. So why am I asking this? Why
is this an important element as we think about change and change management and
the journey to make this effort successful?

The main reason I’m asking this is because the perception that you have
around each one of these images, preferably the one that stands out the most in
your mind, will have a profound effect on how you go through change, how you
lead change, and the impact that it has on people who will be with you in the
change journey. And I really love this little cartoon by Wayne Dyer and the
heading says when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at
change. I had found that extremely true in my own personal life and
professionally as well. So if you look at the little cartoon, the guy on the
island sees an image out there and he yells boat. The person in the boat sees
it and he says land. So each one has a different filter. So the intent here is
that whichever image that you chose, if you only have a fixed point of view
about that particular image, it may not be the best approach to the
circumstance that you’re having to deal with and the impact it will have on the
people who are in the journey with you. So let me go through each one of these
and I think it will become quite clear.

Normally, and I would say I’ve done this session many times, there’s about a
25- about equal distribution amongst each of these- the square, the circle,
the triangle and the squiggle, depending on the audience but it’s usually about
a 25% each, more or less depending on the companies that I’m viewing with in
this type of workshop or presentation. But this audience may be a little
different but let’s say assumingly you picked the square. Now what does that
tell you about yourself? And again, I wouldn’t run to the psychiatrist if you
don’t like my answer here. This is based on a lot of experience of working with
multitudes of companies and how I’ve seen it play out. People who typically
pick the square often like a lot of order, logic, procedures, data, details,
neatness and particularly they like to see all four sides. This is often
referred to the window view and often you will see this as the forbearer of
what we know is a 360 multi-tiered feedback level.

In practical terms, we might see someone say before I go to make a decision;
I want to hear from the field people. I want to hear from the support staff. I
want to hear from our former employees. I want to hear from our customers.
That’s typically a window perspective. And none of these particular images are
right or wrong but if we simply take the orientation of this particular
approach, it may not fit every single circumstance that we have. It will
logically be like trying to fit a circle into a square so let’s just stay open
and flexible to each particular image. The next one if you selected the circle,
which a lot of people often do, this one lends itself to usually a high consent
for others, some kind of community action teams, a lot of harmony, inclusion,
collaboration, formal and informal networks and a lot of leverage around
communications. While that all seems quite logical in a change journey, it
makes a lot of sense. However, it can be rather time consuming if we constantly
have to go for consensus and involve everyone all the time before decisions are
made.

So like the square, like the window, if we place all our bets on just the
circle filter, it may lead to a degree of frustration because it may not be the
type of approach that makes the most sense for the circumstance that you’re
confronted with. Perhaps you picked the triangle. While this is neither
negative nor positive as well, a triangle often refers to, and you’ve probably
seen this in somewhat of a strong controlled and command orientation. Usually
top down, problem solving, fast decision, metrics, action path forward, a lot
of tracking and progress. Well that becomes quite important when we have to
make fast decisions and we don’t have a lot to time to socialize and to get a
lot of people to buy in. However, we do find we get less involvement, less
support but in certain circumstance, a triangle orientation makes a lot of
sense. And the last one, if I ask my team here which one they picked, they’ll
all raise their hand on squiggles which is the reason they’re all on
medication.

I will say that a squiggle is neither negative nor positive as well but it
does lend itself to an orientation that is focused on creativity, adaptive,
flexible, many cultures, agile, innovative, and there will be times in change
programs where innovation becomes absolutely critical so you have an
opportunity to think about multiple ways that we can handle our own filters and
see filters in others to be open to all four of these approaches because all
four of these will come into play as you move along the change journey. You
will not just be fixed on a triangle perspective, a window perspective, a
circle inclusion perspective. It is best to be open to all four orientations,
less the frustration, more the opportunity but knowing your own particular bias
if you will, your own particular filter, will help you be more objective, more
neutral as you decide which one is most effective for the circumstance that
you’re confronted with and ideally you can bring others along with you. Well,
let’s get to the kind of meat of the story if you will. First is a definition
of change management. There are many, many definitions of change
management.

You go on Google, the internet, you probably find hundreds. But I think
they’re all pretty much all bound to the same thing. It’s really the process of
aligning the organizations people and culture with changes in the business
strategy, organization and process assistance. In changes transitioning from
the current state of the organization to the future state and the future state
will be the business case for change and there lies the challenge- all the
emotions, all the behaviors, all the systems, all the processes that you’ll
have to get people to buy into to move from the current to the future state. So
alignment is the critical driver here. Well okay. What would a psychologist say
about how people perceive change on an emotional or personal level? The first
thing that they would say is they studied human behavior is that most
individuals, or humans if you will, prefer some sense of control. Nobody likes
to live totally out of control. We’ve got to be able to have some sense of
control over our environment.

They would also say that we have to have some predictability of the future,
that is just could not be just random. So we like to have a sense about what we
change and not change so that we can have some predictability of how we can
prepare our self for the future. They would also say that most people have an
absorption level. I think you’ve seen this yourself when confronted with a
multitude of crisis’s. You might yell out hey I can’t take it anymore like we
saw in that movie or TV news show. So most people have an absorption level and
that is the level of emotionality, the level of control, the level of sense of
being able to resolve the things directly in front of them so absorption plays
a very critical role as well. And then psychologist would also say that people
have often very high levels of resolve their ability to step up to challenges
when confronted with circumstances but often we have to tap into that. We have
to nurture that. We have to help that grow. We have to build the confidence for
resolve and give people the tools to understand how to do that.

While all that’s said and good and I have a particular point of view about
something which you may or may not agree with and that what I have seen in
organizations is something called the rule of three and what the rule of three
says is that it is very difficult, not totally impossible but difficult to
manage more than three very, very large change engagements at one time- three
large change business transformations at one time. Beyond three, I would hope
you have a lot of change support and understand the pace, the complexity and
how you’re going to sequence things is roughly I’ve seen people cannot
successfully manage more than three big initiatives at one time. They hit the
ceiling on absorption level. Okay so that’s interesting Mark so what are these
little boxes on the left mean?

Well the boxes on the left reflect we always want to always hurry up and get
through things but you know when you think about it, there’s a sequence to how
people adopt to certain things and the first check box is you will, we want to
be assured that people are aware of what we’re doing so as an encourager
encounters the change and they realize it’s coming that we have a high level of
awareness about the content and the context of what it is. So that’s your first
gateway- making sure that over 90% of the people affected by the change have
strong awareness of it. The second step if you will or gateway is
understanding. Now that I’m aware, gee how does this change impact me in what
kind of way- my job, my hours, my scope of work, who I work with? So the
second checkbox is understanding and only when we get through understanding can
we move people to the adoption level where we’ll pilot testing, trying some
things out, putting our toes in the water, a willing to perform as they change
requires and if you can get through the adoption checkpoint, then you can get
to the commitment level where I’m with you 100%.

I don’t know why we haven’t done this before. I had a circumstance once in
which I was working with a client and they assured me everybody was 100%
committed and I took the commuter bus in every morning to the project which is
out by the Houston airport and I said let me ride the commuter bus for a week
and let me ask people about the name of the project, which I can’t obviously
name, and see what their level of awareness and understanding was. Now this
project had been going on for eight months and as it turns out as I asked
people what do you know about this particular named project, let’s call it
Starburst for a second; that’s not the true name. I found that over 80% had no
awareness of it, no understanding of it and therefore was not willing to adopt
or commit to it. So don’t be fooled when people say everyone’s committed. Make
sure you have checked the box on awareness and understanding before you ever
get to adoption. These are tried and true gateways which I have found to be
100% true.

So let’s allow you to take a quick self assessment here and like a polygraph
test, this is real easy. This is just true or false right. So think about your
own company or the company you’re most comfortable with. It might be a former
employee or it could the one you currently work. There’s only six questions
here and probably I would have put number six first because that’s really a dry
verb but let’s start with number one and think about your own company, about
how they manage change and the first question is my company affectively manages
change. Do you believe that’s true or false? The second question on the self
assessment is that managers, and I would say leaders, serve as affective change
role models. They don’t say one thing and do another, they’re out there in the
front of the fray being optimistic, being positive, teaching people what needs
to be done, and showing incredible sponsorship and advocacy for the change.
True or false?

Third point, change communications are clear and consistent and that cuts
across the whole organization regardless of the type of communications that you
use? So have you found that to be true or false? Change impacts are identified,
gee, what’s it going to do to me, my coworkers, my processes, my teams, how we
go about dealing with customers, etc. Those are called change impacts. So have
we identified those impacts? True or false? Have we successfully measured the
change? When someone says how do we know anything’s been different? Do we get a
lot of qualitative answers or can someone show us a quantitative response to
show where we started as a baseline where we ended up? True or false? And the
last one that they probably should have put as number one is that we have a
clear business case for change- a compelling business case for change. Change
never happens for change sake. It only happens to support some other initiative
to ensure adoption of the processes by those who will be affected.

So the obvious answer is I hope you’ve answered true in every one of these
and certainly if that’s the case, you’re a step ahead of the 60% of people who
have failed in change efforts versus the 40% who tracked more success. So these
are just early earmarks if you will of what you need to have in place and I
would say number six is the first one that’s important. Anything that’s not
listed as true in your own self assessment clearly needs to be examined in
terms of what I would call business readiness. So that was a little bit
strategic. Let’s get somewhat tactical and if you didn’t have a roadmap; if
you’re taking a drive or a vacation somewhere and didn’t have a blueprint to
follow, you’d probably get lost somewhere along the way even if you have a GPS.
So it’s helpful to have a roadmap and I’ve laid out for you here an 8-step
roadmap and often the question is asked, can we just do a couple of these? Well
the answer is no. You got to do all of them and it’s probably some more things
you could do as well.

And I’m going to walk you through a roadmap and give you a tip of the
iceberg for each one of these so that you can find your way along the sign
posts to get to where you’re hoping to end up on a never-ending journey so to
speak. So the first one is business case for change and if I had you in the
room, I’d ask this hypothetical question relative to change is all around us.
Change is occurring all the time but what types of changes are occurring in
your company today? And I’m fortunate to have a couple of my colleagues from
Molten-Group in the room with me and they work with a lot of different
companies- big companies, midsize companies, etc. and Daniel and Iliad so I’ll
ask Dan first. Daniel, with the companies that you’ve worked with, what kinds
of changes do you typically see are occurring in companies today?

Daniel:

Well I work with a lot of oil and gas type companies and a lot of their
change is driven by a desire to have processes and procedures particularly
demanding the psyche on the growing concerns about the environment and how they
can demonstrate those processes and procedures are being affected.

Mark:

Thank you and as you can tell Daniel is from Brooklyn- right? Brooklyn UK.
Thank you Daniel and Elliot? What have you seen?

Elliot:

So I also work with a lot of energy companies and a big topic right now is
the talent gap that’s emerging with a new generation entering the workforce and
older generations retiring so this leads to emerging cross generational issues
especially the millennial generation having different communications,
strategies, different career expectations, which requires a lot of changes in
performance mismanagement, systems and reward systems, team orientations and
involvement.

Mark:

Okay thank you and Julia whose one of my other guys; I don’t know if she’s
available or not but she mentioned to me that some of the things that she’s
seeing as well had to do with new leadership teams coming in, particularly as
they have acquired new companies and it’s a whole different culture that people
have to adopt to and that makes those who were there being the inquirer and the
inquiree somewhat challenge. So if we look at our own organization and I’m sure
you had your own list, this field of around eight big topics for what I
typically have seen in terms of what I call the business case for change and
again you might check the box on how many of these are currently going on in
your company today. If you checked off all of these I will say you probably
need a lot of change management help.

So maybe you haven’t selected more than a couple here but in companies
today, the reason why they are doing change management has to do with one or
more of these compelling business case for change alternatives- strategy,
might be MMA work, organization, might be plant startups for commissionings,
big chemical plants, big energy plants from the ground up in the dessert to
reconstituting those plants. We’re seeing quite a bit of headcount reduction,
cost leadership; cutting a lot of money out of budgets and how people have to
adopt a faster cycle time, shifts in culture particularly with new leadership.
Safety is a whole big cultural orientation in getting customers aligned,
customer intimacy. A lot going on in technology. SAP, ERP, Maximo, IPSN, you
name it. A lot of new technology for people to manage and learn different ways
of operating information- both data management and big data. A lot of process
examination going on.

Everything from asset utilization to maintenance to prevention. A lot of
process changes occurring. New products and services, energy monitoring,
training, new orientations and new performance management systems; everything
from multi-tiered 360 feedback to shifts in talent management and awards and
recognition. So one or more of these has to be the business case for change. In
every one of these will require some kind of change management orientation to
make it effective. And again if you checked off more than four plus these, I
would say that your need for change management is pretty severe. So what’s the
problem? Okay employees, we’ve got this business case for change so what are we
asking of them? So what’s the big deal here? So we’re asking to do all these
things. Well first of all we’re asking you to respond fast, different and
perhaps multiple initiatives. Number two, everything is being told is your
priority. No prioritization but everything is a priority.

Number three, please understand the new direction. Four, at the same time
learn new processes, learn new ways of communicating, accept a different job or
new role profiles, and oh by the way, there’s a whole bunch of new tools you’ve
now got to learn. And by the way, keep the business operating and don’t disrupt
the flow of revenue and profits and most of all accelerate the performance of
the company while we’re doing all of these changes that were asking you to do.
So what does all that mean? It basically means you need an effective change
management program to prepare your organization because that’s a fairly healthy
list and that has an impact on people both emotionally, content- and
context-wise so that they can continue to be productive and there will not be a
dip or disruption to the way that work is being done. So what’s the problem?
Well, the problem is the thing to the right. Not a problem just a reality.

The answer is the thing on the bottom. So let’s look at change readiness.
Now if you were in the room, I would ask you to raise your hand and answer this
question- how many of you have children? Well a lot of hands go up and the
next question would be how many of you were totally prepared after your child
was born to know everything you needed to know about how to raise their
particular boy or girl? Well, hands will go down. I know in my own case, when
my son was born, I never read anywhere what to do about his colic at 2 o’clock
in the morning until I had to figure out to drive around my neighborhood and
the sound of the car will put him to sleep. Well let’s just say I was less
ready than more ready.

When we think about change programs, we learned through many, many
initiatives that there are certain things that we should have in place before
you are ready to embark on the journey. And the goal is to be more ready than
not; sort of break the 50% barrier and at least we want to have the
predictability of success a little bit higher than the predictability of
failure. So I’ve done a lot of research in this area and what you see in the
graph are the prevalent areas that we are required to have some sense of
readiness, at least at the 50% plus level before you go forward. And the top
five or six are probably most significant. The first thing- appropriate
resources and funding and what research and what Gardener and some other pretty
big research houses will say that whatever the journey happens to be, at least
15% of your budget needs to be dedicated to change management work as well as
the resource supply.

Number two- strong sponsorship- visible, highly active, proactive,
positive, strong sponsorship. Many people will talk a good show so to speak but
never show up. Number three- realistic expectations. We all of the buffet but
after the first two courses, we get kind of over full. So what is realistic we
can accomplish relative to action number one? We want the world but were only
willing to fund it at one half percent level. The case for change ought to be
pretty compelling. If we don’t do this, what’s the downside? Project management
skills, team skills are pretty, pretty important relative to some training that
needs to occur so that people can learn how to collaborate together and how to
manage many initiatives that will be under that umbrella. Having the sense of
clear scope as well as change history of successes; well I should say what has
worked and not worked in the past efforts before.

We don’t want to replicate the failures that have not worked. We do want to
continue to accelerate the actions, activities and the protocols that have
worked and last next two, probably the one that’s most difficult- how to
resolve current initiative integrate in with other initiatives that are going
on. And the last one- having adequate training capabilities. So it’s a little
bit of a checklist for you and there’s some obvious assessment instruments that
can give you some profile relative to where we are, where we need to close some
gaps. We don’t have to be 100% perfect or 100% ready, but we need to be at
least more ready than not in some of these areas which may cause some delay
until we can close some of the readiness issues because as you know, when
things are often left alone, they will widen and get worse. So as the last
tombstone tagline says, change projects are more likely to fail the readiness
for change is not addressed early in the process. Step two, step three. I have
seen massive numbers of stakeholder analysis and every change orientation
approach is that in their so this is nothing new.

I would take a different posture and basically say it doesn’t have to be as
elaborate as most change processes say they need to be. I think you only have
to think about four things and put several people into each of these boxes to
understand better who has the power and the interest to impact our change
efforts. First of all, the first one on the left top hand side, there are
certain individuals that we just need to keep satisfied. We may not fully
understand what their ultimate orientation is but we better understand what
their needs, wants, and expectations are. We better understand what they need
to know to be satisfied and obviously we would list their names and titles
there. There are some people that we need to manage quite closely. I would say
they are your wildcards in the bunch. These are people that often come with
hidden agendas to disrupt, dismantle, blow up your change process and say see I
told you so. And we better learn quickly who those people are we have to manage
quite closely.

I had a project once on a customer intimacy project which was very
successful in the US. We went to roll it out in Europe and we got blocked 100
percent. The key resistor as we found out blocked it because it was not because
it wasn’t successful; it was because he didn’t think people thought it was his
idea, which it wasn’t. So what we did, we did an article front page in the
company magazine. We interviewed him and everybody thought the project was his
idea. He lowered his guard, became more neutral and then we learned how to
manage him more closely. He was definitely a while part in the bunch. There’s
some people we just need to keep informed either because they’re in the
decision cycle themselves and we need to understand how they like to be kept
informed. A simple email, voicemail, a personal visit, a drop in, a heads up,
anything but we need to understand what their particular communication needs
are relative to the level of information that they need.

And the last one, we need to monitor certain people not because they’re a
danger but because their travels might embark on them going to certain sites
where we could have them talk about the change journey. They might be visiting
certain plants. They might be teaching something was sharing with an executive
team of which we could get on the agenda. So keeping up with people’s schedule
is the monitoring activity. So the change stakeholder process does not have to
be some massive thing. I think if you put a relative number of people in each
of these boxes, then you’re in better shape than coming up with a list of
hundreds and hundreds of people which you have more difficulty to fundamentally
manage in which you have a pretty large change staff. The next category I want
to mention is managing communications and this is a pretty critical one and I
don’t know how a change process basically succeeds without it.

The unfortunate thing is that most people feel that all you need to be able to
do is to send out an email occasionally or do an all-hands meeting and that’s
all the change in terms of communications that’s required. So what I put on the
slide are all of the things I would ask you to consider in the utilization of
multiple approaches to your change. And I think all of these play a critical
role in how you put your change strategy together. First and foremost would
clearly be doing a communication assessment to understand how people like to be
communicated. What you don’t see on this list is something which was very
effective that I did once. We set up a rumor hotline- a number they could dial
to post what they thought the rumors were about the project- that were
answered the next day by an executive to either dispel or confirm or change
what the orientation was.

I worked at a plant once where the literacy level was very low but everybody
sent out emails to the employees; of course they couldn’t use a computer, had a
hard time reading so I convinced them that simply using posters and pictures
was a better way. I also worked with the project once where everybody got their
information from Betty in a local café and never heard anything else, and
nobody questioned how Betty got her information. But all of these things, all
of these approaches, all of these orientations play a significant role in the
successful communication effort in your company. Knowing when to utilize them,
who the senders are and who the receivers are, what’s the impact you anticipate
and the timing for each and the vehicle used all come into play. But like I
said, you tell them once, you tell them twice, tell them 10 times and they may
understand it the first time, they may not.

By utilizing all of these approaches you get more than a shooter’s chance to
make sure the message gets out there multiple ways for people to understand. As
I mentioned early in the presentation, the measurement process is the most
challenging for people so let me walk you through a change approach here that
deals with measurement because I don’t really believe that you can really
justify any investment in change management without a measurement orientation
and so I will share with you first the field of play. Think of this like a
football field. If you look at number five, number five is the baseline and
across the top I’ve got five or six different critical areas; you might have
three or four, no more than what I’ve got up here but these are critical things
such as communications, team environment, technology support, engagement, etc.,
and number five is your baseline and there’s only a couple of ways to really
get a baseline.

The first is historical data. Now if we don’t have that, the second best is
go out and collect new data. The third is to go ask some organizations
benchmark information for each of these categories based on industry norms and
the last least effective but nonetheless a starting point is really best guess.
So we got up with a numerical range or baseline for number 5. And then what
were going to do is make the progression forward and backward from 5 to 10;
what we think the best case and 5 to one to what we think the best case either
appreciation or digression in terms of how that particular element is
succeeding or not. Then you’ll see the weight, and if we had 5 hypothetically,
we would give them the weight of 20 each if that’s the case. So that’s a
starter. 5 is the baseline, 10 is the ideal range of success, a digression down
to one is worst case scenario and they were going to put in our weights. So
what does it look like in real time?

Here’s a real time picture. Let’s take that current scenario. So you see
number 5 is the baseline; 3.1, 3.3, 3.1, etc. so we go out we collect some
information and do a survey and category 1 we went up two quadrants. That’s why
you see a score of 8. It was weighted 10. In category 2, dealing with
leadership and sponsorship we fell down to 2.5. The next one we stayed about
the same. The next one we went up one quadrant. The next one we went down one;
up two, stayed the same. So that becomes our current situation and what we will
see, number 10 over here is our best case scenario. So now we multiply the
score, like you’ll see business case for change, a 4 fell into category 8 times
the weight, that gives us an 80. Next one traveling to field number 3, a weight
of 20, that’s 60. The next one stayed the same at 5×20, 100. Next one 7 times
the way is 70; 4 times the weight, 40; 8 score times 10, 80 and score stayed
the same, 5, 100. Now if we ration it out like Las Vegas and hit 5555555 across
the chart, let’s assume for a moment that the ultimate score we could get on
rate success, rapid transformation is 1000.

So where are we in this given point in time? We are at 730 and we can tell
the story by just giving one number. Someone asked me Mark, so how’s the change
process going? I say well out of a maximum score of 1000, we’ve hit 750 and
this is what we need to go forward. Or we’ve only hit 250. This is what we need
to do better. And so many companies will organize either hybrid teams or
continuous improvement teams to understand why we’ve gone forward, what’s gone
backwards and what we need to do differently. Now this does require some level
of survey work and I would strongly suggest on a sample basis, we do that at
least every three or four months so we can keep a chart like this actively
operating and I’ve seen projects that blew these up and rewarded teams in
efforts to continue to move them forward. So that’s how we have to think about
measurement from a full on perspective. In terms of leadership and sponsorship,
as I mentioned this is a critical success factor. The first thing is they have
to set realistic expectations.

You can’t promise the moon and only deliver a spoon to eat tomorrow. The
second is that delivering quick liens or low hanging fruit develops a lot of
positive energy is bound to be something that we can go after change radically
in the beginning that will show people that it’s possible. Number three- the
element of recognition that supports a sense of urgency action results is also
critical on leaders point and also institutionalizing a new approach in the
culture as well as tracking issues and resolution lets the organization know
that the whole process is pretty serious. So leadership and sponsorship is
essential in an active role in front of the groups, in front of the effort lets
you know that it’s being highly advocated and supported. Now many of you I know
are trainers and the old adage that you think training is expensive, try
ignorance.

So you know that training is going to require a pretty hefty investment. But
really what the people who are experiencing the change want to know is how you
can connect me to the journey? What’s in it for me? What’s in it for the
company? How can you connect me emotionally to why I want to do this? The
second thing they want to know is what new skills and competencies will I need
to understand? How I can be a change advocate or a change agent? Or how do I
manage my personal or professional level what is being confronted and what I’m
having to go through? So the knowledge part of it. And lastly I have found, and
I’m sure most of you would agree, that having an experiential learning
experience so that I can be better at communications, aligning, teambuilding,
participation, decision making are an essential part of how people absorb
information and how they utilize new skills.

The last piece has to do with reinforcement as I mentioned. You know we can
say hey training we’re done but I think this picture really captures the
reality of what has to be thought about as we think about these nine types of
efforts going forward that we constantly have to be moving around all of these
to keep the whole thing alive. The first, keep explaining why we are changing.
Where possible, involve our teams in decision-making. There’s an old adage,
those who tend to create will tend to support. If I’m making an emotional
investment in the change and involvement, I will tend to support what we do
collectively. Minimize uncertainty. Let people know what will change and not
change and I would say probably understanding what will not change is probably
even more important.

Engage your legacy systems experts early on; the whole technology aspect of
it. Be as transparent as possible. Create learning opportunities for your teams
through training, through engagement, informal networks; communicate, I
shouldn’t say the thread of not changing, but the reality of not changing. Keep
listening to your people’s concern. Probably one of the most important points
is your change agents, you’re listening posts, getting feedback and taking it
to heart about what’s working and not working and then celebrate the shifts
toward your desire to save. Let’s never underestimate the power of rewards and
recognition- particularly recognition for a job well done. So how will we know
when this whole effort has passed the test of time and it’s actually working?
One, will see that the leadership sponsorship is visible and leaders are
committed and upfront.

Two, staff understands why the change is necessary, what’s expected of them
and what will impact them, what will change and not change. Staff and employees
a well trained in the work. They understand the new tools and skills they have
to utilize to be successful. Coaching is a reinforcer is active across the
organization and is perceived as the norm. Staff engagement, communication, and
consultation is managed timely and effective and that benefits are clear. That
the clear change processes has been beleaguered successfully and that we can
clearly understand and ensure that business continuity minimizing disruption
with targeted reinforcement are active every day to everybody’s advantage. So
that’s- oops, I forgot one. Gee, there’s something that creeps up here called
resistance and I’m sure no one has ever seen that.

Nobody ever resists right? Wrong but I think resistance is a pretty
interesting phenomenon. So why will people typically resist? One, they don’t
think it’s necessary or it’s unnecessary so they probably never gone through
the awareness and understanding cycle to see why it would be necessary. The
second is they fear the change. They’re not sure they have the fortitude, the
skills and understanding, the ability to deal with the change because they
don’t know how to predict the future or to manage it with and through other
people. They feel they have no input. Everything’s a surprise and the
interesting thing about surprises is the only time we really like that is when
it’s a party. We don’t really like surprises. We don’t like to not understand
what’s going on and be called short.

The last is…the next one that were not confident. We don’t have the resolve;
that we have the support, the tools, the understanding, the training, the
active things we need to do to be more confident to increase our results. The
next is that we don’t feel the company is supportive of the resources. There’s
not a change person assigned to each work string. It’s only one person doing
the work of 50 unchanged. And lastly, I feel no sense of control over what is
occurring here. It’s all being done to me, not with me. And lastly when I’ve
done exit interviews with people who couldn’t stand it anymore and quit, I
tried to get the heart of really why they resisted and they often said three
things: the first thing they said is I don’t get it. I know you guys try to
communicate. Maybe I’m just thickheaded or just an old guy. I’ve been here 50
years and I just don’t get it.

So we failed in terms of communicating, engaging that person, hearing from
that person and taking them in the journey. The second thing is that I don’t
like it. Well not everybody is bravely enthusiastic about change but if it’s
laid out in a systematic, managed and easy process to absorb, we can get people
through that threshold even if they’re not crazy about it. And the last one is
a little more difficult to manage when they say I don’t like you. Well, that’s
an important one. We can always send somebody like me to a change charm school;
better yet, have a change leader who was highly respected, who might come from
the field, who may not be a senior level person but has the respect, the
confidence and the transparency that people are willing to support no matter
what. So it may not be the rank in the organizations as opposed to the
personality of the individual.

So these are the reasons people resist change and these are data points. The
interesting one certainly if you consider in your journey. Lastly, what will it
take to gain support? Some sense of personal gain and benefit; both what’s in
it for me and what’s in it for the company? Getting people to believe it’s the
right thing to do now. Let’s think about the downside if we don’t act.
Involvement with the change. How can you share my ideas, my sense of what’s
working and not working and ideas for the future? Respect for the person
leading the change I just mentioned is really critical. Believe it’s the right
time for the change. Things are at a good turning point. It’s a good time for
us to do this for a variety of reasons. And I think most importantly what will
not change. Everybody wants to know what will change but let’s not forget the
sense of stability and predictability which is really all about what will not
change.

My desk, my office, my location, my job will not change. My tools will
change, my software will change, my coworkers and my team will change but
certain things I can count on will not change. This would give us a strong
sense of stability. So when you peel away this onion and we cut this apple up
into 9 million pieces, we can have all kinds of fancy steps and all kind of
fancy methodologies. At the end of the day when you take a magnifying glass to
it all, it’s really that people are the heart of a successful change manager
effort and as the Three Musketeers said- one for all and all for one. That’s
your ultimate goal. Everybody pulling in the same direction, not individual
contributors pulling against everybody’s efforts.

So hopefully these last 50 minutes I’ve made you more than dangerous in what
you know about change management. Obviously there’s a lot more to be learned
and a lot of processes to understand but I would wish you well in your journey
moving forward and we have time for some questions and I am always available to
answer anything online as well as our company Molten-Group who does this work
around the world, last year in 50 countries. So let me turn it back to Sara at
this point and I will answer any questions we have in the remaining 10 or 15
minutes. Sara.

Sara:

Wonderful, thank you so much Mark. Very insightful presentation today. We do
have some time for Mark to answer some of your questions so go ahead and use
your chat window there, send those in and while we wait for those to kind of
get gathered, let me just give you some information here on how you can keep in
touch with us. As Mark mentioned, he’s available through several channels
including phone, email, social media and then the Molten-Group’s website. So
take a look at that.

And HRDQ, you can keep in touch with us for registering with our very next
webinar and that’s also available through social media channels there and you
will receive a special offer for joining us today through your email after our
session and you can shop at our store and that is HRDQstore.com. So it looks
like we do have questions coming in here so let’s go ahead and jump right in
and get started. So our first question Mark is from Sam and she asks how can
you help people change their behaviors to be more supportive of the change
effort?

Mark:

Excellent question. This is all about behavior. I think part of this is a
sponsor’s responsibility to understand the types of behaviors that need to
change first and foremost so you have a going in blueprint. If the behavior
that you want to change that were more time sensitive to how we talk to
customers or we need to be more team oriented or collaborative or some
individual contributor, setting up with those critical behaviors are and then
putting it to the people’s performance management system ways in which they are
evaluated on how they behaviors are actually operating once the system begins.
So it’s somewhat of a two legged stool.

You have to have the sponsors clearly understanding what are the critical
behavior elements we need to see changed relative to the change journey and
number two, we want to make sure that the performance management evaluation
system highlights those new behaviors to see actually which behaviors are being
carried out. Now hopefully the organization has taken the time and effort to
teach people how to operate in that new environment either experientially or
through practice or mentoring or coaching or something but at the end of the
day, it’s really how people are going to be evaluated in the use of new
behaviors and how that’s happening. Thank you.

Sara:

And our next question here is from Nancy and Nancy asks who in an
organization, who is really the best person to lead a change effort?

Mark:

Well as I mentioned it’s a lot of times companies feel that it should be the
most senior level person. Not to take away from the sense of sponsorship but I
think there’s a criteria screen and the characteristics you’re looking for as
mentioned in the presentation having the local credibility, having global field
responsibility, having walked the mile and those who impacted by the change
itself, so having the local respect and credibility regardless of that person’s
rank; it could be an informal leader, is the best person to lead the change
effort. I’m dealing currently with a company now that the change leader happens
to be a woman who spent seven years working on an oil field platform which is a
real rarity.

I’m dealing with another company where the change leader came directly from
the field and had never worked in a major transformation or big program change
transformation but this individual has the respect of field people- engineers
and surveyors- who have to be intimately involved in the change. So having a
criteria, local credibility, local respect, high levels of transparency so they
are not shying away simply because as I mentioned I don’t like you, that’s why
I won’t support the change.

Sara:

And I actually have a follow-up then question to that. Based on then those
changes, do you see any the difference in your experience on the implementation
when it comes to different levels of an organization? Say it’s just a team
that’s going through a change or a whole project enterprise; maybe even a
global change. Are there any kind of difference and that sort of highlight for
you in your experience?

Mark:

Yes and that’s a great question. Actually there are. A lot of times, let’s
say they’re putting in an SAP engagement or some software, they may only want
to do the change at the project level and they will want the change built into
each step, each of the steps in that technology implementation. It might be
configuration, it might be conference room pilot testing, it might be the
rollout. So in that regard, when it’s more project oriented, they would want
the change intimately involved in each of these steps so they can regroup. When
it’s more a program orientation, more global in scope like big bangs or going
live one day, there’s somewhat more fear but at least people see what the
target is and quite a bit of more change preparation is required.

On some of these phase efforts we’ve seen, what happens is that they don’t
work as well as we’d like because people are still manages the old systems and
we’re requiring them to manage multiple initiatives and they get confused over
which is the right thing to do at the right time. So if were implementing
change at the team level, project level, program level, global level, we’re
really talking about the scope, the pace and the level of complexity. All of
these eight steps I just shared with you, is not one-size-fits-all. The most
important thing is it fits the purpose. To scale the supporting effect, if you
will, if you think about this as an accordion that fits the pace and the scope
of the change and the complexity that’s required. So you can bring it in, you
can bring it out, you can make music or you can make squeaky noises. Either
way, there are some components but the size and complexity of the scope will
drive it fit for purpose.

Sara:

Thank you. Thank you so much Mark for answering these questions live today
and really sharing all of your valuable knowledge with us.

Mark:

You’re welcome and thanks everyone for sharing the valuable part of your
time this afternoon and if I can help you in any way, please feel free to email
or call me and certainly HRDQ has been a great resource for me during my
professional life. I would encourage you to buy their products, work with them.
It’s a great organization and I thank them for the opportunity today to meet
and work with you in this particular session. Thank you very much.

Sara:

Wonderful. If we do not get a chance to answer your question, Mark will be
responding to questions by email so go ahead and still type those in. If you
have still some pressing questions, go ahead and send those along to us and we
really do appreciate your time today. We hope you found today’s session
enjoyable.

END OF SESSION