To remain competitive in the marketplace you must continue to improve your products, your work practices, your service, and your team’s knowledge, skills and attitudes. You need to look for, and successfully implement, new ideas.
John Browne, former CEO of BP, articulated this well:
“In order to control your destiny, you must realise that you will stay ahead competitively only if you acknowledge that no advantage and no success is ever permanent. The winners are those who keep moving.”
Successfully implementing new ideas has proven difficult for businesses.
Dr John Kotter, regarded by many as the authority on change, notes in his research that 70% of change programs fail! And why? Usually, he says, because those driving/implementing the change tend to neglect or underestimate the impact of people’s attitudes and actions/behaviours on implementing change successfully.
We often think about the change process and describe organisations as changing.
In fact, organisations don’t change. People change, and this in turn changes the organisation.
Before people change, four criteria must be met. The people must:
- Trust the organisation’s leaders
- Buy into the vision
- Buy into the reason for the change
- Be involved in planning the change
Change is about the vision or desired outcome, implementation plans, new systems or structures. It is equally about people’s hearts, minds and actions/behaviours.
For a change initiative to succeed, the attitudinal and behavioural aspects must be addressed as thoroughly as the operational issues.
Businesses that implement change successfully utilise the four criteria above to be guided by three critical principles:
- They have a clear change vision
- They write a detailed implementation plan
- They genuinely engage people and deal effectively with their reactions
Agile businesses apply these three principles to all change projects so that they become the ‘modus operandi’ with clear expectations surrounding each principle. This makes the end-to-end change process much quicker and the business more agile and therefore more competitive in today’s market.
To your success,
