Change Management

Date: 2005-08-15 | Tags: leadership

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Rob Rutledge talks about 'Why Change Management is done so Poorly' in his blog. His conclusion is that the employees are not given enough time to actually make the required changes because they aren't part of the up-front process. The CEO comes up with a briliant idea that the company needs to change its culture as a result of a bad quarter, then tells his/her VPs, who then sit around and come up with some strategy, which eventually is told to the rest of the employees a week before they are all suppose to embrace the change.

Yuck.

The hierarchial nature of most old-style command-and-control organizations dictates that the 'individual contributor' is the last to know, even though they are the ones who the success (or failure) lies mostly with.

Managers need to come up with the direction and high-level goals, hand the task over to their teams and get the hell out of the way. This way the employees who need to effect and understand the change are in control of its definition and execution. The manager/CEO/VP only needs to support and guide this process. Sure the executives need to buy-off on the changes, but more importantly, the employees need to back it because if they don't nothing will change.

Too many times old-time managers get in the way by defining too much strategic detail (that was created in the closed-off boardroom) and then not allowing their employees to come up with their own way to execute.

Why else do we hire people if not to empower them to execute their own way? Or do these 80's management-types think that they can just hire 10,000 monkees to execute?
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