Making Important Changes Within Your Organization
Posted July 5th, 2011
Dealing with change is difficult. It’s not something we enjoy. People usually respond to change with resistance. But if businesses want to continuously improve, they have to keep changing.
So, how do you make change possible in your organization? There are useful techniques that some successful, change-oriented businesses use.
The first technique is really an attitude, one of paranoia. You have to set things up so that it’s actually more uncomfortable not to change than it is to change. Everyone needs to know about what not changing will mean, and the problems it will bring. You have to think as if your business were constantly on fire. To make constant improvement, a company has to get good information about customers and competitors and disseminate it throughout the organization. The people in charge have to show how important customer satisfaction is. The difference between what people are doing now and what they need to do to stay on top has to be on everyone’s mind.
As Andy Grove, the former chief of Intel, has said, the main job of a leader is to guard against attacks and get everyone in his or her organization to assume this guardian mentality as well. He said he worries constantly about competitors, about other people finding ways to do better than his company does and taking away customers.
Businesses also need to encourage innovation, trying new things, and not be so quick to criticize or negatively evaluate employees for experimenting. Companies need to give people a little more room to use their imagination and be more encouraging of people trying new things. While short-term results matter, that should not be the exclusive focus. To deal with the cost and risk involved in experimentation, companies can guide their innovation through an experimentation process, where the tests are designed to be fast, cheap and flexible. Ideas should progress through levels – developing and testing, a pilot program, and rolling out the final version.
Also, change should be seen not as something that disrupts the normal course of things, but as a chance to learn new things. People will be more accepting of change if they see themselves as change agents and if they become more effective in their jobs as a result.
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