What you need to know about organization changes

Ross Dawson, speaker, author of several bestsellers, President of the consulting company Advanced Human Technologies, offers a list of 10 “Yes” and “no” to organizational changes, which he shared with readers in his blog.

Need

1. To create a vision. The important thing is to have motivated employees, forced them to act. If you do it will come up and just put people before the fact, all your efforts will be in vain. So try to consider the benefits that will provide the vision everyone in the organization.

2. To develop a policy with a clear “game rules” for all employees and a clear indication of the boundaries of what you can do, and what not. Without this, people will be afraid to experiment, to try something new.

3. To initiate and support pilot projects. Select a few alternatives that you could try to do. Consider how you can implement them, and then spread to the entire company. Note, however, that a very valuable experiments may be carried out by your employees, and your task is to identify them and support them.

4. To identify staff leaders. Any major changes in the organization largely depend on the availability of the “pioneers” who will take the lead. In many cases it is the informal leaders. Do not disturb them and try to command them – instead, try to identify them and support their endeavors.

5. Retry. We live in a “heuristic century” – now everything is done by trial and error, and complex plans never get implemented accurately. Therefore, the main engine for change must be continuous attempts to do something, learning from the mistakes made (what works and what doesn’t in your particular organization), and new attempts taking into account the received experience.

Not

1. Ignore the concern. Everyone in the company, from Directors to employees of the lowest level – will have their doubts about the need for change. Do not ignore them, there needs to be an adequate response: if they are unreasonable is to explain to people why, and if justified to reconsider the balance of risks and benefits to offset it to the side of the latter.

2. To start with the technology. A huge number of new technologies may be considerable temptation for a leader. However, the error will be first to buy the technology, and then look for a use for – this approach, generally, is a failure. You should start with the business defining its problems and only then look for technology that can help.

3. The total plan. Even though you need the vision, but a rigid plan for its implementation is not needed. You only need a rough map to see which direction to move.

4. Allow uncontrolled conduction of “pilot” projects. “Pilot” is a tool that helps you quickly assess what is working and what is not. This means that it is necessary to clearly distinguish between these two categories of “pilot” and quickly make the decision to close. It’s a lot harder than “giving good” for experimentation.

5. Try to do everything. When a company decides to change, the leadership opens many possibilities, and want to implement them all in order to transform the organization into supereffective. However, in this case the chances of success will be minimal. Therefore, changing the company, should move by steps, not leaps, at least at first.