Change Management Success

Why is it so difficult to motivate frontline workers to change they way they work, after managment make the changes mandatory? Well most would declare that the anwser is as enigmatic as the meaning of life. A recent article in the Mckinsey Quarterly, 'The irrational side of change management' by Aiken and Keller, explains a number reasons and provides some hopeful solutions. Below is a brief outline of the 9 areas covered in the article, plus my own 10th point at the end.

1- What motivates you doesn't motivate your employees.
Zohar '97 demonstrated 5 areas of impact which motivate managers and employees.
(a) Impact on society
(b) Impact on the customer
(c) Impact on company/shareholders
(d) Impact on the working team
(e) Impact on "me" personally.
The issue is that leaders end up pitching a message that is skewed towards 80% of the areas of impact important to the leader and not 80% of the worker's primary motivators.

2- You're better off letting them write their own story.

People are more likely to believe in ideas they have produced than one force-fed to them. They are also more likely to implement their own ideas with passion. Get the workers to design the change program themselves. It takes longer but has better traction and is longer lasting.

3- It takes a story with both positve and negative elements to create real energy.

As humans we are more willing to take risks to avoid losing what we've got than we are to gain something more. Jack Welch used to say "What's wrong here", followed by "imagine what might be"

4- Leaders believe mistakenly that they already " are the change".

How many leaders bang on to workers about being customer focused, yet don't demonstrate how they themsleves are focused on their own internal customers.

5- "Influence leaders" arent a panacea for making change happen.

While persuasive idea champions help, many organisations make the mistake of relying soley on these passionate leaders when success depends more on how receptive the targets are than these influencial proponents.

6- Money is the most expensive way to motivate people.

Many studies have found that satisfaction = perception - expectation. Unexpected rewards have a disproportionate effects on employee's satisfaction with a change program.

7- The process and the outcome have got to be fair.

Employees will go against their own slef-interest if the situation violates other notions they have of fairness and justice.

8- Employees are what they think, feel and believe in.

You can't motivate customer-shy employees to spend more time with customers just by reducing their non-customer activities.

9- Good intentions aren't enough.

Workers may intend to implement changes, but if they return to the 'coal-face' without space to practice the changes on the job, they will revert to old habbits. There needs to be daily feedback of change metrics for more than a month. It takes at least 21 consecutive days to make or break a habbit. As most workers dont work 21 days in a row, initiatives need longer than a month to gain traction. One inservice meeting without adequete no follow-up, just wont cut it.

10 -Dont ignore behavioural preferences (my own point not in the Mckinsey article)

It is easy to understand the mismatch between managements desire for change and resistance at the frontline when looking at the situatuion through the basic psychometric behavioural preference tool - DISC, created by Marston in the 1920's. Most managers who embrace change have high D and/or I profiles and make decisions quickly, while most coal-face workers who resist it have high S and/or C profiles and prefer to make decisions slowly. The problems occur when the D/I managers get fed up with the slow traction of their initiatives and rush to new ones with the hope of better success, while S/C frontline staff are still trying to learn the last change initiative. It then becomes a case of 'the boy who cried wolf', when staff who have witnessed a number of these change cycles give up even attempting the latest initiative, because they view it as "management's latest flavour of the month......soon to be replaced with next month's flavour"

Please feel free to post your workplace experiences here. I'd post my hospital experiences both as a coal face clinician and a manager, but I'm keeping my mouth shut while the State Government hands out my department's budget this month. I'm then going to spend the few roubles they give us as efficiently as i can using the principles above.