The HR & Recruitment firm Mercuri Urval commissioned a very interesting survey about change in SME’s (companies counting from 50 to 500 employees) across 8 European countries. The report, available here , shows that:

• 55 % of respondents (managers and executives) definitely or possibly expect change in their company in the coming year. I would have expected more and I wonder if the “yes” part of the pie wasn’t accidently reversed with the “no”. Interestingly France is where this number is lowest (29%) and Italy where it is highest (77%). An indication of the French legendary fear of change and Italy’s enthusiasm?
• Totally unsurprisingly, cost and process efficiencies are ranked as the top reasons for conducting change. Better customer/market orientation comes third and actually first specifically in Switzerland where adjustment to technical changes/innovations is also seen as an important reason for change.
• When it comes to the most important capabilities to successfully lead a change process, the respondents emphasize the importance of soft skills: ability to communicate, motivate and take on responsibility. Empathy is ranked 15 out of 16, which to me doesn’t reflect reality as understanding what the others go through is a big necessary first step to get them onboard.
• Improving change processes requires first of all a more open attitude of people towards change. It would be interesting to know if the respondents count themselves in that statement. I think that whenever we conduct a change we complain about that lack of openness from others while when change is imposed upon us we tend to put ourselves in the complaining position.

The wave of democratic change that started in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia and has since hit the rest of the arab world carries significant lessons not only for autocratic state leaders but also for business leaders.
The Arab dictators are being removed from power because they haven’t been able to foresee and implement an unavoidable and massive change: the democratization of their regime. It will only have taken this single additional act of tyranny in Sidi Bouzid to start an unstoppable process: the change supporters, who had until then stayed passive, suddenly decided to become active, starting a group dynamic, encouraged by the belief that there would now be far more to lose staying silent than taking action. Suddenly the barriers to change don’t seem unremovable anymore; change is at hands. Things can then turn into chaos, such as in Lybia, or into a (relatively) smooth transition if a sufficiently supported leadership or coalition emerges, such as in Egypt or Tunisia.

Business leaders, although some of whom may show signs of autocracy, are luckily far from mad and dangerous dictators. They can even be inspiring and brilliant. Nevertheless, the same rationale is absolutely applicable to a leader who has neither the vision nor the courage to implement unavoidable change. The organization is then in danger of losing touch with its people who suffer from the situation. Until an apparently unimportant event occurs that triggers an uncontrolable chain of events, ultimately bringing a change that would have been much less painful and chaotic, had it been anticipated and prepared in time. What lessons can be drawn? I suggest the following three.

First that no strategy nor modus operandi is sustainable without a critical number of people supporting it. This may seem naive or idealistic to a GM whose unpopular task is to cut costs by 20%. Well the danger is precisely to by-pass the necessary dialog, and I mean not one-way communication but real two-ways conversations, that will help establish clarity, a necessary first step to adhesion.

The second lesson would be: watch out for signs of change, by listening to your stakeholders: clients, employees, local authorities, suppliers, labour unions, ONG’s,… Of course a leader would have to clone himself several times to achieve all that by her/himself; so another solution is to organise this process , make sure to spend selected time on the field and share this state of mind with her/his teams.

Third, there is no limit to the energy created by a group of people who have taken full ownership of a change that touches them individually as well as collectively. Too often change leadership fail because leaders don’t sincerely apply those principles that they are very well aware of: involvement, dialog, empowerment, transparency to name a few.

In a growing number of organizations, leaders are applying these lessons to drive a change that proves to be more and more inevitable: Corporate Social Responsibility.

This post is an adapted english version of this french post: “Mais Qui Conduit le Changement à la Poste?”

A couple of weeks ago I facilitated a workshop about knowledge sharing within a large multinational. Several middle managers were brought together to define a new way forward to accelerate internal collaboration across regions and departments; what they had until now was a best practices database, more or less successful, and now they wanted to gear the initiative up so people would really start collaborating on important business issues.

I’m sure this problem statement is one that many of you have experienced; I worked myself on a similar project about 5 years ago and was a bit frustrated that eventually only the top-down, pushy part of the program was retained while most of the transversal and collaborative part, that would have been materialized through the rise of communities of practices, was left out officially for cost reasons and I suspect more for political ones. We were still very much in a “knowledge is power” kind of culture.

Since then linkedIn, facebook, twitter and in general Web 2.0 have risen up to the success we know. We use those tools to meet and collaborate; if we have a problem, we google it, we chat or ask a question in the relevant linkedIn group. All of this has tremendously increased our collaboration skills and the younger generations are natural born collaborators. So in this workshop the good old best practices database and the good old reward & recognition system that goes with it, were pretty much put away, and it was decided that the in-house social networking tool (sort of a mix between facebook and linkedin at company level, similar to what many large corporations are currently lauching) would be the platform for the new way forward.

Of course this is still only a tool, although with many possibilities, and people need to figure out what hot business topics they could be working on together. Some of them also need to learn the tools available and be encouraged. But it’s not the fact that you have a knowledge sharing KPI, an award, or even that your boss orders you to collaborate that you will sustainably do so.  These are all artificial motivators that could in the worst case turn counterproductive: like in the case of this company where each plant was expected to submit at least one good practice every month on the database. Coming at the end of the month, the plant managers would just tell somebody to write anything they could come up with, just to tick the box.

“Best practices is a mistake, it doesn’t work”, I heard recently. What has become clear is that complexity is rising and local specificities are very much counterbalancing standardization and globalization, making the copy and paste model obsolete. Instead, people, competencies and experiences need to connect to co-design specific solutions for specific problems in specific contexts. To do that, databases are useless. Platforms where people can connect, get to know each other, discuss issues, work together ,confidentially or not, in their own pace, are very useful and yet it will only work if people feel free enough to contribute.

4 interesting HBR blog posts related to change management and leadership have been published recently:

• Peer to peer interactions may be the single most neglected lever of change, say Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan in their interesting post “Positive Peer Pressure: A Powerfull Ally to Change“. Hence the necessity for change leaders to know the internal social dynamics. To me, this also fits very well with step 2 of Kotter’s 8 steps framework: building a guiding coalition for change, which is not necessarily restricted to senior rank executives but all people in the organisation who will be able to positively influence the rest.

• The Ford turnaround: a year ago, the carmaker reported a +14Bn$ loss; this year it reported a profit of 2.7Bn$. Tony Schwartz writes about the strategy enabling the turnaround and also the huge role played by CEO Alan Mulally to embark all his staff on a change journey to make Ford a higher quality/more fuel efficient/safer cars manufacturer. A key ingredient in this success is the trutrh telling culture he has been able to install.

• Design for behavior change: in this post, Tim Brown shares 3 tips for designing products, services, and/or basically anything meant to make people change their behaviour: 1. Create simple new digital tools to provide feedback – 2. Invent to the future consumer not the present customer – 3. Be patient with monitoring success

• Finally, my favorite HBR blogger Rosabeth Moss Kanter shares 13 unlucky mistakes in managing traumatic change and explains how to avoid them:

1. Pressure to act quickly undermines values and culture
2. Management exercises too much control
3. Urgent tasks divert leaders’ attention from the mood of the organization
4. Communication is haphazard, erratic and uneven
5. Uncertainty creates anxiety
6. Employees hear it from the media first
7. There is no outlet for emotions
8. Key stakeholders are neglected
9. It seems easier to cut than redeploy
10. Casualties dominate attention
11. Changes are expedient, not strategic
12. Leaders lose credibility
13. Gloom and doom fill the air

Good reading

This week I enjoyed reading 2 articles from the HBR blogs on 2 very different subjects:

1. Scott Anthony reveals the results of his survey about the most disruptive companies of the decade. Precisely, the question was: “Which companies do you think have done the best job of driving growth through disruption — transforming what exists or creating what doesn’t through simplicity, convenience, affordability or accessibility — between 2000-2009?”.  Scott Anthony grouped the nominated companies in 3 categories: established high-tech, established non high-tech and emerging companies. The winners of each category were respectively Apple, Walmart and Google.  The runners-up were Cisco systems, Verizon and Amazon. Number 1 lesson for me is that they are all american companies; I don’t know about the geographical spreading of the survey but still: US-based companies are unarguably the leaders of change and innovation.  Scott Anthony predicts this won’t be the case in this new decade, but gives no explanation for that and I don’t really see why it shouldn’t be true anymore, despite the rise of  emerging country based businesses: it seems to me that change, innovation and research have always been at the forefront of the US economy (baring in mind I’m not the most competent person to make realistic predictions on the subject!) . Read the full article here
2. Gill Corkindale gives a set of useful tips about how to keep your action plan  on track. This may sound very basic but many change efforts, individual or organisational, fade simply because the ambitious action plan that was so enthusiastically set up is not followed through. Of course this may just be the symptom of a lack of stakeholder engagement or generally weak change management efforts. It can also be at the cause of a failed effort, for example if the potential threats to the plan have not been well anticipated. Among Gill’s advices, I find the following particularly important (full article here):

• Ensure that notes are taken at meetings and distributed afterwards, appoint project managers and allocate key responsibilities.
• Hold team members to real deadlines and schedule regular meetings to give updates and monitor progress
• Remind people that day-to-day business must not marginalise or overwhelm change initiatives
• Bring in external consultants and external stakeholders to provide new perspectives and energy when plans are flagging (probably a bit of self-interest in this one)
• Ensure you have backing at the highest levels for change initiatives and appoint change champions across the organisation

Happy reading! More web reviews here

This week:

• Managing the Transition (of british public service) to Total Place: on PublicNet, the UK public service community website, a look at the new major initiative launched in the Treasury’s Operational Efficiency Programme. Total Place is designed to map, analyse and eventually improve the way public money is spent in a selected area. More power to communities and more collaboration between public service bodies are the levers of this massive change. The initiative was launched in April 2009 with 13 pilot projects that have apparently given satisfying results. However, according to PublicNet, the roll-out could turn out to be more challenging if a change management strategy is not put in place allowing people to get on board.

• Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: I already mentioned here the way Booz Allen massively invested in change management efforts to successfully implement its Enterprise 2.0 model. The FastForward Blog gives a more detailed look at the journey undertaken by the firm. We learn that the project team was populated with as many change management people as technical ones. We learn that the group of early adopters were specifically targeted for their ability to positively influence the rest of the organisation. A couple of the many reasons why the initiative lead to a success.

• A bit of fun to finish: the new VW campaign, The Fun Theory, tells us that behaviours can be changed for the better (and for the “greener”) not through complex change management models but simply through FUN. I find the thought refreshing, although I can’t help thinking: is fun enough for sustainable change? Below one of the 3 campaign ads

My pick of this weeks change leadership related web content:

• GM: cultural changes are apparently under way according to this article from the Detroit Free Press. A less formal dress code, “dress appropriately”, has been decided to encourage personal decision-making; it’s probably a good initiative when you think that one person called HR 2 or 3 times to ask if he could wear jeans! Other changes include new names for conference rooms such as “groovy room” or “zen room” apparently to encourage risk-taking. One wonders though whether there is real change beyond the cosmetical side of these new decisions? Yes, according to Susan Docherty, VP of US Sales, who describes how the decision to cancel a new product after bad initial customer feedback, was taken fast by a small number of top executives.
• 3M: On Paul Williams’ excellent innovation blog, which I’ve already mentioned, an interesting insider look at 3M’s innovation story and its 6 pillars of innovation: R&D, Corporate Culture, Diversified Technologies, Networking, Recognition, Measurement, Connection to the Customer. What I like about these pillars is the way they cover a wide range of technological, management and more human aspects of business

The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) just published the outcome of a survey conducted among Fortune 1000 companies to identify the Top 5 leadership competencies of tomorrow. Respondents were asked to write in the top five words or phrases that came to mind to describe the leadership competencies they perceive will be critical in the future. This is what came out (for some strange reason, only 4 headings are listed, 5 though if you count leadership agility and flexibility as separate items).


Leadership agility and flexibility

“Tomorrow’s leaders will need to be able to manage on the fly,” says Kevin Oakes, CEO of i4cp. “Not only will they need to be mentally agile and flexible, they’ll need to instill those qualities in others, even while keeping things from becoming chaotic. I picture them as excellent business athletes.”

Innovation

Another of the top five competencies is innovation. “Innovation is, in fact, one way to stay agile,” notes Oakes. “You react to changes in the business environment by doing things differently and by quickly inventing new products and services that help you gain a competitive advantage.”

Communication

In an environment where the world is awash in social media and instant messaging, leaders will need to be exceptional communicators, able to cut through the morass of information overload with well-honed messaging.

Change management

The critical nature of change management is highlighted not only in the write-ins but in other parts of the i4cp study as well. When i4cp asked about the degree to which organizations emphasize certain management competencies, it found that the more that organizations stress change management skills, the higher they score on i4cp’s Leadership Success Index.

“From this perspective, the future is already here,” notes Oakes. “Change management skills will not only be needed for the future, they’re paying dividends now.”

Here is my pick of recent change management articles and interviews :