Change management faces all organisations at some point. Such a challenge can be by design, or it can be a crisis issue. Treating the process as a superficial item can have adverse or even catastrophic consequences. The best way to manage change is to be prepared for it, and use the tools at your disposal to minimise the opportunities for unexpected things to create situations that you do not have control over.
Many people can see the obvious, but the key to being successful in a change situation is to see below the surface, and find the major hurdles to improvement. Five steps that are useful and effective to dealing with change management are set out here. You can following them to create a start point for approaches to the challenges that you are facing.
1 Planned urgency
Creating urgency in a structured way will help motivate your people to act in a timely fashion whilst producing their actions in disciplined way.
2 Commitment
To cope with change management successfully, there needs to be a positive commitment from all people involved as soon as possible. This approach will identify at an early stage where the potential blockages to the change might lie.
3 Communicate
Once the decision has been made to consider or introduce the changes, there must be an effective communication strategy put in place to assure people of the way forward, and how they will be affected. This should be employed across all of your organisation’s channels, and deliver a consistent message that gives real clarity.
4 Quick Wins
As part of the process, there will be some progress that can be achieved in a short time period, and may be seen as easier than other areas. The level of difficulty is not as important as the actual win itself, and such forward moves will serve to re-enforce the effect of your team on the overall objective that is required.
5 Embed the Culture
Once the experience of dealing with change management has been tackled by your organisation, then the processes involved in that can be used again for other parts of your operation. Where these processes are designed and documented, they can be embedded in your organisational culture , and used for improvement on a continuous basis.