Boosting the ROI on Your Investment in People

Boosting The ROI On Your Investment In People – Part 3

By Paul Glen
Expert Author
Article Date: 2003-06-20

In the first two articles in this series, we discussed clarifying your purpose in transforming your organization and selecting the appropriate combination of tools to do so.

In this third article in the series, we will look into preparing to implement your changes. More specifically, we will examine how to structure a team of your people to ensure the best chances getting the desired benefits from your change program.

To do this, it's important to acknowledge that the vast majority organizational change efforts fail. Not only are there no guarantees that your efforts for improvement will work out, the odds are against you. To improve the odds, let's take a look at a few of the top reasons why these projects fail.

1. Poor executive support - Efforts to change an organization without top executive support are rarely successful. The top priorities of senior executives have a way of trumping other things that are deemed less important.

2. Middle management resistance - Middle managers are notorious for either consciously or unconsciously undermining change efforts. They occupy tenuous positions between decision-making executives and feet-on-the-street contributors. Their coordination and administrative functions are often undervalued in reorganizations and their feelings of insecurity can undermine support for changes.

3. No buy-in from staff - If the people who usually feel the disproportionate effects of change efforts do not feel that they had a say in planning the change, they resist it. If the staff doesn't agree that change is needed and that the selected changes will improve their situation, they can simply refuse to take part.

4. Total delegation to outsiders - Too often, managers hire outside consultants to completely take charge of change programs. Well intentioned experts diagnose problems and prescribe solutions but may fail to build the buy-in from executives, managers and staff. (As a consultant, I'm not trying to suggest that you not use the services of competent and ethical service providers. Many consultants can make the difference between failed change projects and successful ones. Just beware of those who try to treat your change efforts as an expert-mode service, as a doctor would treat pneumonia.)

To avoid these issues scuttling your change projects, there are a few things that I frequently recommend.

1. Use a process with explicit buy-in check points. As you plan the process by which the change will be implemented, make sure that there are explicit points at which executives, managers and staff have an opportunity to review and offer feedback on the planned changes and implementation approach. I'm not suggesting that you will be able to get a 100% consensus love-fest, but if people feel that they have had a chance to provide input into the process, they are much more likely to support it than if it is imposed upon them.

2. Assign a team of people from your own organization to guide the change project. I have found that groups that try to change themselves have a much better chance of success than those who have change prescribed above or outside. The change selections made by the team will be tailored to your organization and the group is less likely to resist changes prescribed by their peers than those from a consultant.

3. Structure your implementation team to model the interests of all stakeholders. Just assigning a group of employees to guide a change process is not enough. You've also got to structure the team with representatives of all concerned parties. For example, someone on the team should represent the interests of the executives. Another should be assigned to represent the interests of the staff, and another still to attend to the needs of managers. Just as parliamentary bodies are designed for representation, so too should your change teams. Each interest group in the organization should be able to look at the change team and feel that their concerns have been fairly represented in the decision making process.

4. If you choose to use consultants, understand the effects of their biases and tools. Every consultant brings both biases and tools to their projects which color their advice and the way in which they interact with your staff. There's nothing wrong with that. Just as technicians think about programming problems through the lens of the systems and languages that they are familiar with, organizational consultants think about your workplace through the lens of their biases and tools. When selecting who you will work with, ask about their perspectives before choosing who will best fit with your group.

5. Use consultants that will help your people reach their own conclusions. I suppose that I am exposing my bias here when I suggest that you select consultants who are comfortable working in an advisory mode rather than in the "doctor-patient" mode. When the team of people you have assigned reaches a genuine consensus, the change they guide is much more likely to succeed. They will be able to go back to the groups that they represent, explain the need for the change, the reasons for the process selected, and display their commitment to the project. If they are viewed by their peers as representative and fair, the change effort has a fighting chance of working.

One key to improving the chances of gaining the benefits of planned organizational change is to drive the change from within with appropriate support from outside.

About the Author:
Paul Glen is an IT management consultant and the author of the award- winning book "Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology" (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer,2003). He regularly speaks for corporations and national associations across North America. For more information go to: http://www.paulglen.com. He can be reached at info@paulglen.com.