Change is good, we’re told. Resistance to change is natural, but we all need to get past it we’re told.
We’re told a lot of dopey things, aren’t we? It’s worth remembering that in World War II we considered the various European resistance fighters to be the good guys and the agents of change to be the bad guys. Sometimes resistance to change is a good thing. It all depends on the nature of the change, and what side you’re on.
We’re continuing our discussion of how to facilitate organizational change. So far we’ve talked about the importance of communication, involvement, and making sure that to the extent possible the change is personally beneficial to those it affects — concepts that aren’t especially profound, but are ignored with astonishing frequency.
To continue the discussion, here are two more not-very-profound ideas that will help you ensure successful change: Don’t skimp on training, and define suitable measures of success.
Some tips on training:
- Include a trainer on your design team. This helps you design for trainability, and also makes sure the trainer’s understanding of the subject is more than superficial.
- Train just-in-time. Skills acquired in the classroom have an amazingly short half-life if they aren’t put to practical use.
- When you put implement any change, turn the entire project team into floorwalkers, so that when an employee has a question it gets answered immediately.
Some tips on measures:
- Don’t start with measures. Also don’t start with the desire to track the performance of individual employees. Instead start with business goals. Then express each key goal in the form of an equation. This keeps your focus on improving business functions, which is where it should be.
- Fine-tune each measure so employees can’t manipulate it. The world of business is filled with measures that can improve while the business actually deteriorates.
- Automate the data collection needed for each measure. For the most part, employees are too busy doing the work to spend time logging data as a separate activity, and managers are better off spending their time tracking results than computing them.
One last thought: Don’t waste your time and money on a “change readiness assessment.” Some change management gurus like to start an engagement by discovering the level of change resistance in an organization. So here’s my question: What difference does it make? What are you going to do, cancel the change if change resistance is high?
I didn’t think so.