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. 

I recently  had the pleasure to meet Lizette Tucker from US based firm Arrowhead Strategic Consultants in Paris. Lizette is looking to expand her business in France, as she seems to like our country very much. I did warn her that the initial enthusiasm may fade away as she slowly discovers the downsides of our country: in other words she may go through a steep change curve!

• Avoid bad surprises: anticipate, understand resistance to change, and therefore prevent it from causing damage at the wrong time and jeopardising the project.
• Help building momentum: by installing a sense of urgency to change and giving people responsibilities, opportunities to take ownership of the change. The result is that they will start taking their own initiatives that will install the change, initiatives that the change leaders wouldn’t have thought about themselves
• Develop a know-how: engaging, empowering, explaining, listening, adapting; all of which are actions that, done over and over again change after change, will enable the organisation to change faster, naturally.

The Blogue Marketing Interactif, from Quebec, features an article about how Booz Allen Hamilton successfully implemented its Enterprise 2.0 solution. The case was presented at the Montreal Webcom 09 conference by Walton Smith . The key learning for businesses interested in implementing new collaborative solutions is that not less than 50% of the budget was spent on change management. That includes:

• Tool training with demos and hands-on activities
• Incentivising usage: the tools bring recognition to main contributers
• Tracking adoption metric and other relevant indicators
• Identifying and reporting benefits

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.”

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The McKinsey Quarterly published an excellent paper by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, that explains why change management theory often doesn’t work just like that. The background to their work is a 2008 McKinsey survey confirming that the success rate of change programs remains stuck at around 30%, more than 10 years after John Kotter’s similar survey leading to his famous 8 step approach for leading change.
Aiken and Keller’s approach is not to challenge the widely accepted principles of change management but to look at what makes the theory successful or not, from a psychological angle. In other words, this isn’t about the right change management things to do; it is about how to do it right.
The base to their work is a McKinsey model suggesting that four basic conditions are necessary before employees will change their behaviour:

• a compelling story
• role modeling
• reinforcing mechanisms
• capability building

While the model makes perfect sense and is a good reflection of common change management theory, things can be quite different in practice as Aiken and Keller explain:
“The prescription is right, but rational managers who attempt to put the four conditions in place by applying “common sense” typically misdirect time and energy, create messages that miss the mark, and experience frustrating unintended consequences from their efforts to influence change. Why? Because when they implement the prescription, they disregard certain, sometimes irrational—but predictable—elements of human nature.”
From their research they have therefore identified nine insights into how human nature gets in the way of successfully applying the four basic conditions for behavioural change:

1. What motivates you doesn’t motivate most of your employees
2. You’re better off letting them write their own story
3. It takes a story with both + and – to create real energy
4. Leaders believe mistakenly that they already “are the change.”
5. “Influence leaders” aren’t a panacea for making change happen
6. Money is the most expensive way to motivate people
7. The process and the outcome have got to be fair
8. Employees are what they think, feel, and believe in
9. Good intentions aren’t enough

Each insight is described in details in Aiken and Keller’s article. As simplistic as these 9 points may sound, I think they will help change leaders tremendously .
Access the full article here (free access through the Forbes website) and see other selections of change articles 

The well known UK based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) conducted an online poll among its HR community to determine the most important “HR skills for survival”. More precisely, the respondents were asked to chose three competencies they believed were most important to establish the function’s effectiveness and credibility in the organisation. The following results came out:
1. Effective management of change (46%)
2. Strategic thinking (44%)
3. Business knowledge (36%)

I am not surprised to see those 3 items on top of the list but, I have to say, am a little surprised to see change management coming out as number 1. This does however fit quite well with IBM’s Enterprise of the Future survey which key finding shows that businesses are being “bombarded by change”. HR managers will typically find themselves in the middle of the battlefield, trying to keep the link between ground troops and generals, sometimes a very difficult challenge during significant change initiatives.
More details about the survey here on the CIPD website.