Forming and effective organisation
Nothing stays still for long in the life of organisations. It is important to identify how things are moving so leaders and teams can make decisions about maintaining the status quo or changing things.
Michael Watkins, in his book, The First 90 Days 1, presents the STARS model as a simple framework for grasping the situation a business is in and selecting the type of leadership and action that matches.
It has a simple flow:
An organisation begins as a Start-up. This requires quick and decisive leadership, sometimes requiring decisions before all of the relevant information is available.
If the Start-up goes well, the organisation can expect to continue as a Sustaining Success activity. Here, considered, well-paced decisions are possible. If it goes well the organisation can trigger a growth cycle, initiating new start-up activities leading into ongoing success.
As an organisation continues in its success it might find that things are generally ok but not going as well as expected. The gap is widening between what the organisation does and what gets results under current conditions. It requires Realignment before the gap starts to cause critical failures in projects, products, sales and services. Leader and teams have to make changes to adapt to current conditions.
If the organisation fails to see the need for realignment or events occur too quickly to anticipate the need for change then the organisation finds itself facing catastrophic conditions. It has become an organisation in need of Turnaround. Fast, decisive action is needed to react to the changing environment, figure out a way to get the organisation healthy again and act to return it to sustaining success. Here leaders and teams must again be ready to act quickly, even before they have all the information or resources they may have used in more stable times.
The two critical conditions, the Start-up and the Turnaround, have little room for failure. If they don’t succeed then they can quickly create an organisation, product or service that is Shutdown or Divested. It is this high level of risk in these conditions that drive the need for fast action.
The value of Watkins’ model is it helps people understand the basic dynamics that lead to decisions about stability and change in organisations. There are other models and frameworks, one of the most useful being Frederic Nortier’s phases of change. In the next section we look at Strebel’s framework, which goes into more detail about whether an organisation takes a proactive or reactive position regarding change.
____________
Michael Watkins, in his book, The First 90 Days 1, presents the STARS model as a simple framework for grasping the situation a business is in and selecting the type of leadership and action that matches.
It has a simple flow:
An organisation begins as a Start-up. This requires quick and decisive leadership, sometimes requiring decisions before all of the relevant information is available.
If the Start-up goes well, the organisation can expect to continue as a Sustaining Success activity. Here, considered, well-paced decisions are possible. If it goes well the organisation can trigger a growth cycle, initiating new start-up activities leading into ongoing success.
As an organisation continues in its success it might find that things are generally ok but not going as well as expected. The gap is widening between what the organisation does and what gets results under current conditions. It requires Realignment before the gap starts to cause critical failures in projects, products, sales and services. Leader and teams have to make changes to adapt to current conditions.
If the organisation fails to see the need for realignment or events occur too quickly to anticipate the need for change then the organisation finds itself facing catastrophic conditions. It has become an organisation in need of Turnaround. Fast, decisive action is needed to react to the changing environment, figure out a way to get the organisation healthy again and act to return it to sustaining success. Here leaders and teams must again be ready to act quickly, even before they have all the information or resources they may have used in more stable times.
The two critical conditions, the Start-up and the Turnaround, have little room for failure. If they don’t succeed then they can quickly create an organisation, product or service that is Shutdown or Divested. It is this high level of risk in these conditions that drive the need for fast action.
The value of Watkins’ model is it helps people understand the basic dynamics that lead to decisions about stability and change in organisations. There are other models and frameworks, one of the most useful being Frederic Nortier’s phases of change. In the next section we look at Strebel’s framework, which goes into more detail about whether an organisation takes a proactive or reactive position regarding change.
____________
- Watkins, M. (2003). The first 90 days: Critical success strategies for new leaders at all levels. p.63
Most people appear to think of change in reactive terms, associating it with restructures, downsizing and mergers. There is usually a crisis to precipitate it, often financial but sometimes technical or regulatory. This is only one part of change. A strategic approach to change, dealing with questions of stability and renewal, can approach change and the status quo proactively. In the context of the Performance Panel it is about Design, how we can keep creating value in ways that are relevant to our customers and stakeholders.
Paul Strebel proposed an eight part framework for addressing the question of change, which looks at proactive as well as reactive stances to forces for change. His provides a decision tree process to help people select a suitable strategy for their situation. There are four proactive options and four reactive ones.
Reactive Change
Proactive Change
As can be seen, the proactive approaches still recognise the reality of threats and competitors to the organisation. Rather than wait for them to force the organisation’s hand, it takes the initiative to use organisational dynamics, people’s participation, benchmarking measures or competition to draw out the nature of the threats or opportunities. This in turn shows the corresponding areas needing change and the pace required for that change.
This summary doesn't develop the full details of Strebel's approach. It serves to highlight the importance of recognising that there are many approaches to change and, most importantly, that it can be proactive and organisations don't have to wait to be forced into reactive change. It is worth looking at Strebel's decision tree to address the questions that help organisations to determine a suitable approach to change.
____________
Paul Strebel proposed an eight part framework for addressing the question of change, which looks at proactive as well as reactive stances to forces for change. His provides a decision tree process to help people select a suitable strategy for their situation. There are four proactive options and four reactive ones.
| Change Path | Scope of Change | Pace of Change Process |
| Resistance | No internal change | Depends on ability to contain change force |
| Renewal | Change limited to parts of the organisation | Periodic stepwise change |
| Revitalisation | Ongoing change throughout the organisation | Slow continuous adaptation |
| Restructuring | Intense change on a few dimensions | Sudden change jump |
| Change Path | Scope of Change | Pace of Change Process |
| Corporate Realignment | Organisational contrast with another approach | Challenge to resolve organisational tension |
| Cascading implementation | Progressive adaptation to change forces | Participative commitment |
| Focused Re-engineering Benchmarking | Explicit focused comparisons | Threat implicit in performance of benchmark |
| Bottom-up Experimenting | Learning by example from successful internal change | Competition to match example |
As can be seen, the proactive approaches still recognise the reality of threats and competitors to the organisation. Rather than wait for them to force the organisation’s hand, it takes the initiative to use organisational dynamics, people’s participation, benchmarking measures or competition to draw out the nature of the threats or opportunities. This in turn shows the corresponding areas needing change and the pace required for that change.
This summary doesn't develop the full details of Strebel's approach. It serves to highlight the importance of recognising that there are many approaches to change and, most importantly, that it can be proactive and organisations don't have to wait to be forced into reactive change. It is worth looking at Strebel's decision tree to address the questions that help organisations to determine a suitable approach to change.
____________
- Strebel, P. (1994). Choosing the right change path. California Management Review, 36(2), 29–51.
Getting people through change requires attention to a lot of variables.
Essentially it is about moving people from a familiar way of doing things to a new way. This happens through a combination of phases and levels. A change goes through phases. What people do and need in each phase varies. Likewise, it happens at different levels of the organisation. The role, experience and assumptions are different for executives than for managers or individual contributors.
Change also varies by location and nature of the change. For example, a restructure will impact on some parts of the organisation more than others. This can be true down to the level of the individual. For example, relocating an office may benefit one team member and incur costs for another.
There are many other factors: technical factors, regulation, business continuity, customer engagement, brand attributes and logistics. All of these have different degrees of relevance depending on the nature of the change.
With all this complexity, change management becomes a process of understanding different needs, the dynamics that go with them and balancing the issues and steps that need to be address. There is an increasing body of research available about the facts of change in real life. We are less dependent on untested theory, through there is still a great deal more research required. At this stage, change management is, and my always be, an art.
Various avenues of research have highlighted different areas you can focus on during change. Below we have clustered some key ones in thematic groups. It is important to use these as a reference point, not a check list. Approaching change management as a check list exercise will blind you to what is really going on and what needs to be done.
Phase Management
Executive Actions
Management Actions
Individual Contributor Actions
Communication and Consultation
Organisation and Culture
Business Continuity Monitoring and Management
Productivity
Relationships
Personal Needs
Organisational Goal / Vision
The Change Team
Essentially it is about moving people from a familiar way of doing things to a new way. This happens through a combination of phases and levels. A change goes through phases. What people do and need in each phase varies. Likewise, it happens at different levels of the organisation. The role, experience and assumptions are different for executives than for managers or individual contributors.
Change also varies by location and nature of the change. For example, a restructure will impact on some parts of the organisation more than others. This can be true down to the level of the individual. For example, relocating an office may benefit one team member and incur costs for another.
There are many other factors: technical factors, regulation, business continuity, customer engagement, brand attributes and logistics. All of these have different degrees of relevance depending on the nature of the change.
With all this complexity, change management becomes a process of understanding different needs, the dynamics that go with them and balancing the issues and steps that need to be address. There is an increasing body of research available about the facts of change in real life. We are less dependent on untested theory, through there is still a great deal more research required. At this stage, change management is, and my always be, an art.
Various avenues of research have highlighted different areas you can focus on during change. Below we have clustered some key ones in thematic groups. It is important to use these as a reference point, not a check list. Approaching change management as a check list exercise will blind you to what is really going on and what needs to be done.
Phase Management
- Initial status quo
- Emerging forces for change
- Recognition of forces for change
- Choice of how to engage change
- Personal decision to engage in change (multiplied by the number of people involved)
- Exploring, developing and building the changes
- Normalising, reinforcing and standardising the changes
- Resolving consequences of the change experience
- New status quo
Executive Actions
- Identify the drivers and need for change
- Analyse options and adopt a strategy
- Build the case for change
- Explain the need for change and the need to act now
- Implement and pursue intense, multi-layered and multi-directional communication
- Develop and promote a practical vision of what things will be like after the change
- Create a momentum for change, putting it at the top of the executive agenda
- Build a team of change champions and agents
- Engage supervisors and influencers through the organisation to promote and facilitate change
- Link executive rewards (financial, professional and social) to change outcomes and the quality of the change process
- Take responsibility for the project plans and dynamics for the change
- Remove obstacles, authorise decision makers and resource the change
- Create short term wins throughout the change to build confidence
- Measure and track progress, addressing variations and delays
- Ensure systems, procedures and cultural norms are changed to match the change
- Stay the course until the change is fully embedded and don’t assume success early
Management Actions
- Identify what has to be done to make the change work in practice in your area
- Define local tasks and responsibilities with the executive or project team
- Exercise consistent responsibility, direction, control and implementation of these tasks
- Explain the reasons for change to team members
- Listen to team member concerns and issues regarding the impact of the change
- Work with team members to resolve local concerns about the change
- Keep team members up to date with the progress of the change, addressing rumours and answering questions
- Monitor impacts on ongoing business and team conditions, such as productivity, relationships and personal impacts on team members
- Ensure the team business and personal performance plans are adapted to match the new vision and operating conditions
- Work with team members to resolve issues and make the change work
- Raise with executives and project leaders issues that could hinder the change, preferably with local solutions for endorsement
- Raise with executives and project leaders opportunities or processes that can facilitate or enhance the effectiveness of the change
- Develop and implement effective local project plans for implementing the change
- Track progress and actions to meet or exceed expectations for the quality, cost and schedule of the change in your area
- Ensure the local change implementation team, whether formal or informal, is pacing itself, managing stress and working effectively
- Work with team members to re-prioritise tasks and responsibilities to start demobilising redundant activity and to implement and increase new activity
- Identify and implement actions required to ensure team members have the knowledge and skills to work effectively during the change and in the new status quo
- Ensure technology, tools and resources and put in place to match new performance requirements
- Ensure customers, suppliers and other stakeholders are informed of any impacts on their activities, explaining the changes and facilitating their commitment to adapt to them
- Acknowledge and reward performance that helps the change succeed
Individual Contributor Actions
- Keep informed about the change, learning about the reasons for change and its relevance to what you do
- Assess personal and professional impacts as the change proceeds
- Raise concerns with your supervisor to develop positive ways to deal with impacts
- Access change communication up-dates, FAQs and help-desks to address questions and issues that cannot be resolved locally
- Adopt a practical approach to the change, looking for realistic ways to deal with it, avoiding short-sighted or non-viable decisions
- Monitor where you feel resistance to change and raise that with supervisor to check for whether it is simply a personal adjustment or an indicator of quality or implementation issues
- Promote the benefits of the change to yourself and peers as you identify them
- Identify what you will have to do differently and what assumptions have to change about how the things happen in your team
- Set up a plan with your supervisor and peers to develop or refresh the skills required by the change
- Keep informed about the purpose of the change and check that what you are doing suits that purpose
- Update tools and resources to match what you need to do in future
- Raise critical issues that could undermine the change, especially considering the relevance of procedures, quality, resources and schedules
- Look for local solutions to critical issues and propose them
- Address and resolve trust issues head on, especially if you have experienced disappointing change processes in previous changes
- Avoid gossip and rumours by seeking clarity from informed change agents about impacts on working conditions, the process of the change, personnel changes and quality and performance standards
Communication and Consultation
- Ensure executives raise the need for change whenever they meet with people and all current activities are discussed in the context of the change
- Establish consultation structures to facilitate communication between executives, managers and individual contributors
- Implement regular and frequent consultative meetings during the change, scheduling them to match the relative intensities of different change phases
- Set up formal communication channels for official information, project up dates, FAQs and the distribution of documents, policies and procedures
- Develop editorial policies to reduce uncertainty during the change by focusing on facts, processes and responsibilities
- Adapt the content of communication to match the phase of the change
- Use feedback and consultative mechanisms to ensure communication addresses current and emerging priorities and issues that people are dealing with
- Ensure supervisors are kept up to date with information, resources and processes so they can have high quality conversations with their team
- Track and monitor the effectiveness of all communication, especially through supervisors and their feedback
- Ensure strategic and formal communications remain informed by the consultative structures and processes
- Encourage people to raise concerns, their reasons for resistance and recommendations for improvements as part of a quality improvement process for the change
- Address legacy issues from past change that could be undermining this change
Organisation and Culture
- Ensure coordination between sponsors, champions, change leaders, work teams and other key stakeholders
- Maintain responsibility and accountability by tracking progress against plans and commitments.
- Manage the change in a long term context, resolving negative legacies from past change, capitalising on positive legacies and working to build constructive legacies for future changes
- Engage the organisation at all levels to maximise positive participation
- Link changes back to the purpose of the change
- Implement practices and forums that cultivate problem solving practices
- Invest in and encourage people who a promoting the change throughout the organisation
- Take critics seriously, addressing their concerns with facts and evidence
- Ensure that communication and actions match the current phase of change, recognising that people and groups move through the phases at different times and speeds
- Clarify concerns as they surface to avoid feeding gossip and rumour, with transparent processes for decisions that affect people
- Be sensitive to the power changes people experience as the change increases or decreases people’s sense of relative power, autonomy and influence
- Identify existing cultural norms and assumptions that won’t fit the change and work to cultivate new understanding and practices
- Facilitate opportunities for people to cultivate and build new functional relationships that support the changed requirements
- Encourage process innovation and adaptation to help facilitate the policies and practices that go with the change
- Match strategies to risk, investing in more intense, formal processes for high risk matters and less intense but transparent for low risk matters.
Business Continuity Monitoring and Management
Productivity
- Loss of time due to change activities
- Down time due to unavailable tools/resources
- Process delays caused by unfamiliar situations
- Disrupted client service channels
- Skills gap between old and new work requirements
- Learning about new products or services
Relationships
- Lost or disrupted networks
- New or changed work relationships
- New or changed client relationships
- Loss of valued (or unvalued) relationships
- Lost ‘givens’ or familiarity in existing relationships
- Lost or reduced access to ‘gurus’ and mentors
Personal Needs
- Changes to role and work identity
- Changes to travel and start/finish times
- Career paths/plans open up or close down
- Skills gap between old requirements and new
- Uncertain about health and/or special needs issues
- Affect on scheduled leave
- Changed work arrangements or contract renewals
Organisational Goal / Vision
- Confusion how the change fits with the corporate vision or existing business plans
- Uncertainty about what is core business, non-core business or business to be stopped
- Reduced commitment to the organisation due to changing identity and/or business direction
The Change Team
- Pressure of work demands, especially if team members are still responsible for their regular work role
- Low level of teamwork if team is ad hoc for the purpose of the change
- Increased emotional stress, cynicism or defensive detachment, especially for trainers, due to having to be the ‘bearer of bad news’ to people
- Increasing group think and isolationism driven by focus on trying to perform against key measures
- Poor feedback or contextual information if stakeholder trust is low
The role of the supervisor is crucial for organisations, whether in times of stability or change.
Supervisors have rich relationships and conversations with everyone throughout the organisation. As such they have the capacity to work through issues with team members and address the fine detail of how to make things work. Investing in supervisors is always important. The lists below highlight some of the key investment areas for periods of stability or change.
Stability
Change
Supervisors have rich relationships and conversations with everyone throughout the organisation. As such they have the capacity to work through issues with team members and address the fine detail of how to make things work. Investing in supervisors is always important. The lists below highlight some of the key investment areas for periods of stability or change.
Stability
- Supervisor skills - The role of the supervisor is to help everyone succeed in their role. If this is done well the organisation succeeds. The shift from individual contributor to supervisor is a critical time as a person has to learn how to work with and through others.
- Performance Planning - The ability to convert business goals and targets into a balanced array of individual performance plans across a team is fundamental to the life of and organisation. Supervisors don’t only need planning skills for this. They need to assess abilities, develop abilities, negotiate and coach to help team members succeed.
- Stakeholder management - If team members are going to succeed then the supervisor has to cover their backs. This is done my ensuring they have realistic expectations, the skills and resources they need, suppliers who deliver on time, resolution of customer issues and recognition within the organisation.
- Peer cooperation - While supervisors are responsible for the team they supervise they are also a part of a team of supervisors gathered around their boss. Supervisors have to build the self-reliance of their teams so they have time to work with their peers on the projects and innovation their boss needs.
Change
- Supervisor skills - If a supervisor’s skills are lacking in times of stability a competent team can still perform well because they know what needs to be done. However, during change, predictability evaporates and teams don’t always know what to do. Inadequate supervision will soon have negative impacts. Change requires refreshing and reinforcing supervisor skills.
- Supervisor autonomy - During change everyone is extra busy with the additional responsibilities of implementing the change. It is important that supervisors have a clear understanding of their responsibilities and the decision making authority delegated to them. Get this wrong and bottlenecks and errors increase, as they either go to their boss for decisions they could be making or make decisions out of context that interfere with the change.
- People skills - During change it becomes harder for people to motivate themselves unless they are enthusiastic advocates of the change. The heightened sensitivity that can occur during change requires a corresponding social-emotional capability on the part of supervisors. It is important that supervisors increase their awareness of the personal and social dynamics of change and how they might affect their teams.
- Project and coordination skills - Change requires project style actions, that is, tasks that aren’t part of a recurring business procedure. Supervisors have to implement project skills to manage people, resources, schedules, quality assurance and costs.
The performance of the organisation and it success at creating value have to be measured and tracked both in times of stability and renewal.
The Watkins’ STARS model introduced in the Recognising movement in conditions section above provide a practical, high level framework. But to used the STARS model organisations need to know what’s going on. They need criteria for what to track.
It is important to avoid over reliance on financial or stock price measures. The GFC and many other company crashes have taught us how a narrow focus on finances can destroy a company. Finances can’t be neglected either. Every organisation has to pay its way and return value for investment. Rather, there is an array of factors that indicate both the short and long term progress of the organisation.
The risks of focusing only on financial value is especially true when we remember that finance is only an interim measure of value. People translate finance into real value in the form of goods, services and lifestyle choices. Some of this can be generated directly for stakeholders. In the not-for-profit sector investors often look for the direct value outcome without the interim transition through financial measures.
The Performance Panel’s Validation Hexagon combines finances, quality, inputs and outcomes to nominate key areas to measured. Their relative significance varies for organisations and their stakeholders, depending on their priorities. Each organisation has to work out its targets and metrics to suit its needs.
In times of change additional measures are required, addressing both the project activity for implementing the change and the change dynamics arising from the change. The project builds the vehicle for a different future. Managing the change dynamics builds the capability of the organisation to use and adopt the change and so gain its benefits. This is what makes implementing and tracking change management so critical.
Evidence shows that change management is the deciding factor for whether organisations benefit from change. Doing project management well is still crucial. But a project can succeed in terms of meeting its objectives on paper. Change management brings those objectives to life in the organisation. Current practice in some places now integrates change elements alongside of the technical elements of change projects.
Factors to track and measure can be selected from the list in the Balancing the dynamics of change section above. Which of these elements you track and measure will depend on your context. There is no generic check list that can be applied without addressing the organisational context.
A key attribute of measuring change progress is to measure the impact of the project itself. Change measures have to look back on themselves, constantly looking for ways to improve how the change is implemented. Change planning cannot predict how the change will unfold. There are too many variables. It relies on known factors, evidence from research and the realities of the organisation to select the right strategies. Since the variables are unique to the people, organisation and context of the change, change management must constantly review its performance and that of the project.
In both times of stability and times of change a critical element of validation is to communicate the results to stakeholders. Ultimately measurements, dry as they sometimes feel, are a device for building people’s confidence in the organisation so they will commit to helping it succeed. This is the end goal for all measures, demonstrating that the organisation is succeeding in creating value for its stakeholders and identifying and overcoming the obstacles to this success.
The Watkins’ STARS model introduced in the Recognising movement in conditions section above provide a practical, high level framework. But to used the STARS model organisations need to know what’s going on. They need criteria for what to track.
It is important to avoid over reliance on financial or stock price measures. The GFC and many other company crashes have taught us how a narrow focus on finances can destroy a company. Finances can’t be neglected either. Every organisation has to pay its way and return value for investment. Rather, there is an array of factors that indicate both the short and long term progress of the organisation.
The risks of focusing only on financial value is especially true when we remember that finance is only an interim measure of value. People translate finance into real value in the form of goods, services and lifestyle choices. Some of this can be generated directly for stakeholders. In the not-for-profit sector investors often look for the direct value outcome without the interim transition through financial measures.
The Performance Panel’s Validation Hexagon combines finances, quality, inputs and outcomes to nominate key areas to measured. Their relative significance varies for organisations and their stakeholders, depending on their priorities. Each organisation has to work out its targets and metrics to suit its needs.
In times of change additional measures are required, addressing both the project activity for implementing the change and the change dynamics arising from the change. The project builds the vehicle for a different future. Managing the change dynamics builds the capability of the organisation to use and adopt the change and so gain its benefits. This is what makes implementing and tracking change management so critical.
Evidence shows that change management is the deciding factor for whether organisations benefit from change. Doing project management well is still crucial. But a project can succeed in terms of meeting its objectives on paper. Change management brings those objectives to life in the organisation. Current practice in some places now integrates change elements alongside of the technical elements of change projects.
Factors to track and measure can be selected from the list in the Balancing the dynamics of change section above. Which of these elements you track and measure will depend on your context. There is no generic check list that can be applied without addressing the organisational context.
A key attribute of measuring change progress is to measure the impact of the project itself. Change measures have to look back on themselves, constantly looking for ways to improve how the change is implemented. Change planning cannot predict how the change will unfold. There are too many variables. It relies on known factors, evidence from research and the realities of the organisation to select the right strategies. Since the variables are unique to the people, organisation and context of the change, change management must constantly review its performance and that of the project.
In both times of stability and times of change a critical element of validation is to communicate the results to stakeholders. Ultimately measurements, dry as they sometimes feel, are a device for building people’s confidence in the organisation so they will commit to helping it succeed. This is the end goal for all measures, demonstrating that the organisation is succeeding in creating value for its stakeholders and identifying and overcoming the obstacles to this success.