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.

A few months ago, Stephen Elop stepped in as the new CEO of Nokia to stop the company’s decline and regain its leadership. In an e-mail sent to all employees, he shared his conclusion after having taken the company’s pulse around the world: Nokia has lost time and lots of opportunities, it now needs to wake up and jump from the burning platform on which it is standing.

The famous “burning platform”. Has any change leadership metaphor been as used ? I doubt so and probably because it’s proven to be a simple and effective way of communicating the urgency of a change to a group of complacent people. So Elop is hoping it will do the trick on his staff. I’d be curious to hear how they will have reacted to the email; did it come as a surprise? Do they share Elop’s analysis? How does it make them feel? Has the email triggered discussions or has it just been back to business as usual?

Whatever the answers are, let’s hope for Elop and Nokia that there is much more to his change communication strategy than a one-shot e-mail that may end up in the bin. Elop’s message needs to fully penetrate the minds of the “boardroom people” who are often the first responsible for complacency.  This is condition #1 for the new state of mind to be broadly adopted; condition #2 is that it gets translated into actions, daily and strategically. It’s all well to jump from the burning platform but doesn’t solve your problem unless you know where to go and how to get there . This is probably why Elop, an ex-Microsoft, has just released the company’s new Windows Phone 7 strategy.

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

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I already mentioned IBM’s The Enterprise of the Future survey, revealing that companies are more and more bombarded by change. The winning businesses will therefore be the ones having developed a real appetite for change. Lead, drive, facilitate or manage change: the wording isn’t really relevant; what is important is that the people impacted by change eventually adhere to and take ownership of it. The fact that some changes  (M&A’s, cost reduction plans) seem more difficult to adhere to than others (HSE initiatives, implementation of attractive tools) should not mislead managers from the principle that what really counts is what is done to prepare and implement the change. So let’s start with preparing. Here are 5 ways to be on good tracks:

1. Adopt a project approach not only to bring structure but also visibility to what you are trying to accomplish. As soon as possible, you should select a project team that will cover a wide range of skills (managerial, technical, behavioural) and business areas. For a Product Quality project you should have people who know what they’re talking about but not only qualiticians! People who represent various areas of the quality chain, different sites if it’s a multi site project, 1 or 2 person that may seem reluctant to the change but can bring an expertise, are all possibly good candidates. Then of course there is a question of team dynamics. Adopting a project approach is also about defining your project terms of reference: “plans are nothing but planning is everything” said Eisenhower. In other words it is not so much the result but the process that counts. Take time to define your ojectives, deliverables, project milestones , scope and activity plan. Identify and analyse the risks. Determine your project KPI’s.
2. Decide on a vision, a main goal for the change. Do it in a simple, clear and precise style. Avoid business buzz words and ask yourself if any of your shop floor or front office people would understand. As an example, Shel, for its Technical Integrity program came up with: “our assets are safe and we know it”, simple and compelling. Asking yourself “what could success look like?” should get you on good tracks.
3. Identify the key benefits of the change for each group impacted. Bare in mind that what seems a benefit to you as a manager (profits, performance improvement) doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody else. People have different views about why something is attractive and this is what must be identified. If your project team is sufficiently mixed they will find answers.
4. Find out how the various stakeholder groups will react to the change. An excellent tool for that is to design a stakeholder map: start by listing all key stakeholders (groups or individuals who have an interest in the change), position them on a matrix indicating their level of support to the change and their level of influence in the organisation. Doing this job will help you determine how to speak to and involve those various groups. Which leads me to the last point
5. Involve people and assign responsibilities as early as possible in the process. Set up additional teams, tasks forces, action teams or whatever you want to call them to work on subjects, tasks that will make the change real. Give them enough responsibilities so they can heavily influence the way the change will eventually look like. 

The recent Toyota crisis reminds me of an MBA course session by Pierre Casse about the emotional cycles of life: happiness and depression. I can still hear his words when he introduced his model: “life is good; you feel great, confident, everything is going your way to the point that you become a little complacent and…You make a big mistake and you slowly realise the consequences, you sink into deep depression…” I wonder to what extent this fits with the Toyota leaders’ current emotional state. I don’t doubt they will manage to come out stronger from this crisis although this is based on nothing else than intuition. Here are a couple of interesting insights I came across:

• Joel Kurtzman from the HBR reminds us of his consulting experience with Toyota 30 years ago and tells us that their problems start at the top. The company he experienced back then was one in which the leaders, among whom Eiji Toyoda at the forefront, had tremendous respect for their workers. He listened to them, trusted and empowered them. For example he gave the workers on the assembly line authority to stop the line if someone detected anything that might affect product quality.  In fact everybody considered quality more important than profits. This common purpose is precisely what Joel Kurtzman believes has been missing recently, starting from the top: a failure of leadership and a loss of respect of the workers.

• Robert E. Cole, also from the HBR tells us that the crisis didn’t come out of nowhere, significant warning signs had been detected. For example, the number of vehicles recalled had increased sharply from 2003 to 2005.  Apparently Aijo Toyoda, the current CEO, has been attributing the crisis to the recent rapid growth of the company, leading it to invert its priorities: volume and sales became nr1 while quality and safety fell to nr2.

However challenging a context is, I don’t believe it can be seen as the root cause of your problems but more a highlighter of its consequences. I trust Joel Kurtzman’s judgement that Toyota has partly lost what lead it to success. The challenge  for them is that they will never be able to get back to what they were 30 years ago. They must change to reinvent a new Toyota way that builds on their traditional strengths and fits with the demands of a growing world leader. And eventually go from depression to happiness again until…