REFLECTIONS ON CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN UNCERTAIN TIMES

Part 1 (of 3): What’s been disrupted?

Recent events have disrupted the way we’re all working. Change Managers in particular are used to adapting to new situations. Now everyone is taking part – in real time – in the biggest workplace change in decades.

The Gunter Group hosted ACMP Pacific Northwest’s April Coffee Chat and discussed topics with the change management community such as: What’s been disrupted in your way of working?

– What’s been disrupted in your way of working?
– What leadership challenges are you facing in this new reality?
– What does relationship building look like now?

View a replay of the discussion or download the slide deck below

Be sure to check out the remaining 2 discussions in our three-part series.

May 8, 2020 @ 9–10 AM PDT  | Watch Now
Part 2: How we are adapting

 June 12, 2020 @ 9–10 AM PDT  | Watch Now
Part 3: What we will carry forward

Hosted by:
Stephen Bacon
Senior Consultant
The Gunter Group

TGG HOSTS ACMP’S APRIL COFFEE CHAT

We are excited to be hosting ACMP Pacific Northwest’s April Coffee Chat for an online discussion around ‘Reflections on Change Management in Uncertain Times.’ 

It’s no surprise that recent events have disrupted the way we’re all working. Change Managers in particular are used to adapting to new situations. Now we’re all taking part – in real time – in the biggest workplace change in decades.

We invite you to take part in this conversation and share with us your experiences of working through this time of change. Your feedback will directly inform our conversation this month around the changing nature of our work lives and what’s been disrupted. 

Join us in May to continue discussing how we are adapting and in June to discuss what we will carry forward into the world that emerges. 

EVENT DETAILS:
Reflections on Change Management in Uncertain Times
April 10, 2020
9:00AM-10:00AM PDT
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

TGG STORY PUBLISHED IN OREGON BUSINESS MAGAZINE

After being named the #4 Best Company to Work For in Oregon (medium business category), Oregon Business connected with us to publish an article highlighting The Gunter Group’s story.

We were excited to share our holistic, Non-Negotiables approach to client delivery with Oregon Business and to be highlighted in their magazine alongside the other 2020 winners on the ‘100 Best Companies to Work for in Oregon’ list. Congratulations to all these awesome organizations! Read the full story at OregonBusiness.Com to learn more.

THE WORLD NEEDS GOOD CHANGE MANAGERS

Ebola broke out in Congo last summer for the 10th time in 43 years. Doctors had a powerful toolkit for fighting the disease, but without change management their efforts would have had little success. 

Doctors in Goma Use Change Management to Save Lives

This summer, an outbreak of Ebola raged through the Congo. On July 14th, the first case was diagnosed in Goma, one of the largest cities and transit centers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international public health emergency, and the response was an influx of funds, resources, and health workers.

NPR describes what came next. Citizens of Goma “threw rocks at health workers, suspicious that they were profiting off the response… They barricaded roads; they refused to wash their hands.” This was the same response health workers received in the countryside, but in a city of 2 million the stakes were far higher. 

Here’s the thing: in the past couple years, scientists have made significant advances in the treatment and prevention of Ebola. In addition to two new treatments, an experimental vaccine looks to be highly effective. The last outbreak in the Congo was contained in a matter of months. Health workers had all the tools they needed to stop the outbreak, except for cooperation from the people in need of treatment.

Enter change management, stage left. Prosci, an international leader in change management training, lists 7 best practices:

— Mobilize an active and visible executive sponsor
— Dedicate change management resources
— Apply a structured change management approach
— Engage with employees and encourage their participation
— Communicate frequently and openly
— Integrate and engage with project management
— Engage with middle managers

To foster cooperation with the people of Goma, health workers embraced these best practices. “They went deep into the neighborhoods, explaining the disease and the treatments. They talked to leaders. They convinced more than 1,000 people to take an experimental vaccine.” Within months, they were able to control the outbreak in Goma. 

With sponsorship by the WHO, health workers were able to dedicate adequate resources to the problem. They then engaged with the community and developed advocates for change. They communicated with citizens, educating them on the disease and the treatments. In doing so, they were able to build momentum and encourage enough people to receive the vaccine.

Health workers used change management to provide life-saving interventions to a community that was resistant to change, potentially saving millions. Change management is well-worth our attention. 

Change Management: How Did We Get Here? 

The field of change management is young but complex. How did we get here? It will help to briefly travel back in time to understand the foundations of the formalized practices that flourish today.

Rooted in Psychology

Change management has roots in the study of human behavior. The intellectual beginnings trace to the early 1900’s, into the work of the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. When looking at rites of passage in different cultures, Gennep began to notice common behaviors. 

Even though he was looking at a variety of different cultures, he noticed that there were three overall states that ran common in the experience of social change. The first state was a “pre-liminal” stage, where the coming change was acknowledged and prepared for by the community. 

The middle state was the “liminal” stage, which he defined as a threshold of ambiguity and disorientation. Change managers everywhere will chuckle at the accuracy of adjectives like “ambiguity” and “disorientation” when describing the liminality of change. 

The final state in a rite of passage was “post-liminal,” where the transition in status was recognized and normalized in the community. Across cultures and belief systems, Gennep was able to identify these common movements in the human experience of change. 

By the mid-20th century, when psychology began to blossom into a robust and complex discipline of study, Gennep’s three states gained popularity. In the 1940’s, Kurt Lewin became a pioneer in social and organizational psychology by turning his attention to understanding change.  Lewin borrowed from Gennep’s structure and described a three step process for change: unfreezing, changing, and refreezing.

Business Consulting & Change Management: A Love Story

There was some academic buzz from several sources in the years following Lewin’s work, but no substantial leap from psychology to business had yet been made. This changed in 1982, when a consultant at McKinsey named Julien Phillips published an article in the journal Human Resource Management. 

In his article, Phillips introduced a model for organizational change management specifically designed with businesses in mind. His model defines four steps that were intended to build momentum for change within an organization: creating a sense of concern, developing a specific commitment to change, pushing for major change, and reinforcing the new course of action. 

In the years following, change management took off. Books were published; articles became more frequent; new models were advanced. Businesses were in need of assistance with change, and consultants pursued thought leadership that would help address this need and grow their business. Peters, Waterman, Kotter, and dozens more developed robust philosophies and methods for change, and organizations bought in and helped the field to grow.

Today, there are as many models for change management as there are consulting organizations. Looking for a 4 step process? Try PDCA. Interested in 5 steps? Try ADKAR. How about a 6 step approach? Try Pulse. Need more? Try Kotter’s 8 Steps, or Prosci’s 9 Steps. There are symposiums and communities of practice such as Prosci and ACMP; and naturally a veritable cornucopia of certifications abound. Change management is so saturated with models and approaches that some even try to push “beyond change management,” whatever that means. 

100 Frameworks, 1 Idea

The Gunter Group does not subscribe to any one framework. Our clients are too unique for a single set of steps to be the answer. We proudly proclaim ourselves to be “methodologically agnostic,” much more interested in understanding the organization than blindly peddling a process that fails to fit the people it is meant to help. 

That is not to say that we don’t know the methods. Our consultants have expertise in Prosci and ADKAR; we are trained in Six Sigma; we attend local ACMP events. We do not, however, learn a method to become disciples. Rather, we expose ourselves to frameworks and study methodological vocabulary to leverage those aspects of the frameworks that might be helpful for our work. Our clients appreciate a tailored approach that is grounded in the best practices of 100 frameworks.

This approach to consulting reveals something obvious: all change management methods are basically the same. Decades of scholarship and praxis have not changed the core phases of change, and wisdom that dates back a century still lies at the heart of responsible change. There are 3 basic phases in change (before, during, and after), and every change management framework simply iterates on the approach taken within those three phases.

So what runs common throughout all change management? What activities should you keep in mind as you tailor the process to your specific organization? We’ll run through the basics below.

Step 1: Pre-Change

Change is coming. Perhaps it is a changing regulation, a new technology, an upcoming merger, or a poor quarterly report; whatever the reason, you see change on the horizon and understand that preparation should naturally precede. Though the various frameworks approach this preparation differently, three key activities take place during pre-change: analysis, planning, and influencing.

Analysis comes first. Before you can plan for change, you have to understand the people and processes that will be impacted. Who will be your champions, sponsors, and resistors? Helpful tools for this phase include stakeholder matrices, process maps, and change impact assessments. The change manager must also understand the change itself. Without a powerful grasp on the “why” that is causing the change, planning and execution will absolutely fall short. 

Plans come next. Change management often occurs somewhere between an intersection of strategy, people, and execution, and planning is the bridge that brings these three elements into alignment. This includes planning  for the change itself, communication that will accompany the change, and the training that will make the change possible. 

Influencing should follow. ADKAR describes this as fostering awareness and desire. Prosci speaks of sponsors and champions. Others schools of thought suggest using concepts like vision or need, and still others recommend introducing guilt and anxiety. We have found that a cocktail of all these approaches is usually the best way forward.

Step 2: Change

You’ve spent time interviewing stakeholders, mapping processes, and planning training sessions; now it’s time to introduce the change. This is messy, confusing, and difficult for the people impacted so change managers often rely most heavily on a methodology in this phase. However, mid-change is where a generalist approach could be most advantageous, adapting to the ongoing needs of the situation. There are four activities that always occur in any well-managed change approach: communication, training, changing, and reinforcement.

The most important activity surrounding change is communication. This is where you lean heavily on the results of your analyses. You know who needs communication, what they need to hear, and how it will affect their work flow. Armed with this information, you can plan accordingly, communicating the upcoming movements to the right people, early and often.

Another helpful activity is training. This often goes hand-in-hand with communication, and is best when designed from the viewpoint of those impacted. Recent developments of tools such as Human Centered Design help maximize the value of training.

At a certain point, the change will happen. Kotter recommends an approach of small-slicing the change to create short term wins, but often the change manager is not the one driving the project timeline. When it comes to go-lives, change managers serve a thousand roles. They become SME’s for elements of the change impact; they serve as blockers attempting to remove obstacles from stakeholders; they act as cheerleaders or bulldogs, whatever is called for in the moment. 

As change occurs, another important activity is reinforcement. This activity truly begins in pre-change and extends through the end of post-change, but it becomes extremely important in the midst of the change. There are approaches coming out of organizational psychology that can be helpful here, such as Vroom’s Theory of Motivation, McClellan’s Theory of Three Needs, or McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y.

Step 3: Post-Change

Follow-through is a must. As Gennep would say: the new status must be confirmed and the change must be reincorporated as the new norm. This is done a little differently in each framework, but necessary activities include reinforcement and reanalysis. 

As said above, reinforcement is heavily featured in post-change activities. The goal is longevity, driving the change through ongoing champions and dwindling resistance. Success is celebrated, momentum is reinforced, and improvements are consolidated. Through these activities, the new order is anchored in behavior.

One often-forgotten activity that takes place after the change occurs is reanalysis. Throughout this whole process, you’ve generated a mountain of information, from stakeholder input to process metrics. Current-state assessments performed before, during, and after the change are a great way to analyze that information, evaluating the effect of the change. 

Let’s go back to Ebola in Goma. Upon review, we can find the three stages of change management in this case study. In advance of providing saving care, health workers analyzed the neighborhoods they would need to enter, planned ways to connect people with treatments, and influenced communities by winning over their leaders. They communicated the need and effect of the cure, trained communities to embrace treatment through a successful pilot of an experimental vaccine, and built momentum for changing attitudes. After change began to take effect, their efforts were reinforced by positive clinical outcomes and they reanalyzed future need for treatment with ongoing screenings. 

Change management is the study of human behavior. Human beings hate change, yet change is unavoidable. As professionals in change management, we bring a people-centered approach to our work.  This is undeniably good for business, as evidenced by a flourishing market of change management consultants and frameworks. But often the stakes of change management are higher than the bottom line, and the WHO’s heroic efforts in Goma are a testament to that.

SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP

“In the past, a leader was a boss. Today’s leaders can no longer lead solely based on positional power.”

– Ken Blanchard

Our understanding of leadership must continually evolve to remain relevant and impactful in today’s business climate. One method of leadership that develops an ability to meet the ever-changing needs of an organization and its employees is called Situational Leadership.

Situational Leadership is adaptive, flexible, weighs variables, and provides us with the tools to best suit our current circumstances and meet our desired goals. A leader who is capable of this approach will embody the following five characteristics (1):

1) Insight: A Situational Leader understands the needs of their employees, then adjusts their leadership style to meet those needs.

2) Flexibility: A Situational Leader moves seamlessly from one leadership style to another to meet current demands.

3) Trust: A Situational Leader gains the trust and confidence of their employees.

4) Problem Solving: A Situational Leader solves problems using the most applicable leadership style for the current challenge they are facing.

5) Coach: A Situational Leader is capable of evaluating the maturity and competence of their employees and then applies the best strategy to enhance their employees’ skill sets and goals.

Two researchers, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, developed the Situational Leadership model during the mid-1970s and subsequently developed separate, revised models. The underlying concepts of their models focus on adaptive leadership styles tailored to a group’s maturity/developmental level.

Pictured below is a graphic, combining elements from the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory and Blanchard’s revised Situational Leadership Theory II. It depicts four leadership styles on a supportive/directive scale, based on the developmental level of those being led: Delegating, Supporting, Coaching, and Directing.

Next, let’s discuss situational factors to consider when determining the best leadership style to use (2).

Begin by considering interpersonal factors. For example, a group lacking in efficiency and productivity might benefit from a style emphasizing direction, organization, and clearly defined roles. On the other hand, a highly productive group might benefit from a more democratic style allowing greater independence and input in decision making.

Secondly, you should consider the actual task at hand. A Situational Leader needs to have a clear idea of what a task entails to successfully guide a team or employee to accomplish it. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is not uncommon for a leader to lack the appropriate understanding of what’s required to complete a particular task/project, leaving a major gap in their ability to lead effectively.

Thirdly, consider the maturity levels of each individual based on ability and willingness. For example, assigning a project to a member who is willing but lacks the appropriate ability level is a recipe for failure (and vice versa). This is why the developmental levels were a key element of the Hersey-Blanchard theories.

And lastly, consider the situation you’re facing—hence, situational leadership theories. There are also instances when the situation itself will override all of the above factors. To help us visualize this, we overlaid the graphic below with some situational examples:

If there were an innovative change occurring in your organization, you may want to use a Delegating approach to encourage idea generation and collaborative teamwork. An interpersonal conflict may be best served by a Supporting approach, offering a high level of support but low amount of directives. A major reorganization prompting new processes/structure may call for a Coaching style with high support and high directives to guide your team through the changes. A major crisis would require you to immediately default to a Directing approach, overriding all other situational factors.

An additional Situational Leadership style that is helpful to use or combine with the Hersey-Blanchard model is called the Just Ask leadership approach (3). The Just Ask approach uses questions to increase alignment, engagement and accountability. It’s best used when working with a group of varying abilities or if you’re unsure about an individual’s ability.

The Just Ask approach requires comfort in not knowing. Leaders often find it difficult to allow their team to work through situations instead of just providing the answers for them. This approach is a great tool to release an answer-providing habit and learn how to ask more questions to guide your team to their own solutions.

There are four styles of questioning in the Just Ask approach: Professor, Judge, Innovator, and Director. The Professor style is best used to generate ideas, build understanding, and expand insight. The Judge style is most helpful when analyzing and prioritizing ideas, reaching decisions, and focusing on shared understanding. The Innovator style is helpful when exploring new directions, identifying opportunities, improving current methods, and rallying a team. The Director style is best used when implementing a plan, focusing your team to get specific results, and to spark action.

Here are some sample questions:

Ultimately, the key learning to take away from Situational Leadership approaches is that is a necessity in today’s business landscapes. By adding to our leadership skills toolbox, we can continue to grow in our own abilities and encourage our employees’ growth in the process. This will, in turn, promote growth and innovation in our teams and organizations.

References:

(1)–https://online.stu.edu/situational-leadership/

(2)–https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-situational-theory-of-leadership-2795321

(3)–https://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/just-ask-leadership-why-great-managers-always-ask-the-right-questions/

Interested in what we have to say? Check out our article on Employee Engagement.

Ashleigh partners with her clients to solve their most challenging problems. Her practice focuses on the intersection between strategy and people. She has deep experience in strategy development and implementation of key strategies, organizational design, executive coaching and change management. Ashleigh combines her experience, an understanding of organizational culture and a practical mindset to meet her clients’ needs.

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

By Ashleigh Gunter, Managing Partner, and Laura Magrone, Consultant at The Gunter Group.  

If you could improve your company’s profits by 21%, reduce attrition by 24% to 59%, and improve your employees’ morale—all without significant cash outflow or investment—would you do it (1)? It is doubtful anyone would answer no to the above question, although that is what many are essentially doing when they don’t make employee engagement a priority in their organization.

Employee engagement extends far beyond simply measuring employee satisfaction; it can be defined as a measure of employee commitment to the organization, which drives company performance and outcomes. It is the act of including all employees in a conversation about what would make your organization better and then including each and every one of them in an action plan to drive changes.  This is a proven effective approach for organizations of all sizes.

Business outcomes are directly impacted by employee engagement and are a key driver for implementing an employee engagement program. In an analysis completed by Gallup, a popular vendor for employee engagement surveys, results revealed that groups with higher employee engagement ratings significantly outperformed groups with lower ratings on crucial performance outcomes, including decreased turnover rates (2).

Establishing an Employee Engagement Program

Once you’ve decided to embark on improving employee engagement, you need to first consider how you will measure engagement. There are a wide variety of tools and vendors you can use, ranging from self-administered surveys to integrated platforms with extensive consulting support. If you choose to create your own and use something straightforward like SurveyMonkey, keep your survey simple. We recommend using publically available engagement questions rather than trying to develop new questions on your own. This will save you the time and effort of figuring out how to ask the right questions.

The Gallup organization has spent years developing the science around employee engagement. After millions of surveys, interviews, and significant in-depth analysis, they devised 12 statements as the key drivers of employee engagement. In the book 12: The Elements of Great Managing, Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter, Ph.D. describe these elements in detail. Here they are at a glance:

The 12 elements can be categorized based on four key areas: Basic Needs, Management Support, Teamwork, and Growth. These must be viewed as foundational. Basic Needs must be met before shifting to Management Support. Management Support must be solid before focusing on Teamwork, and so on. When using an engagement survey provided by Gallup, the results include these 12 elements and are helpful in honing focus areas to ensure your employees’ needs are being met.

If you choose to engage with a vendor that provides an engagement survey tool or provides a package of tools and consulting services, make your selections based on the availability of benchmark comparisons, confidentiality, cost-effectiveness, ability to view segmented results (department, tenure, function), and flexibility of question format. Take time to carefully consider these criteria and select something that will work for your organization in the long-term.

After selecting a tool/vendor, you should determine an effective communication strategy to launch the program, ensuring employees know why, how, what, and when the program is happening. Participation is critical. If you only get a small percentage of your organization to respond to the survey, you won’t have meaningful data. Too often, only the employees who are really unhappy or are really happy end up responding, leaving the employer with an inaccurate view of true engagement across the company. It is okay to provide incentives to encourage employees to participate in the survey. It is not okay for managers to tell employees that they have to take the survey. We’ll review more common pitfalls when implementing an employee engagement program below.

Once the results are received back from your employees, it’s time to get to work! Most employers make the mistake of assuming that they should take the results of the survey and ‘fix things’ for their employees. However, what we find is that this leader-led approach doesn’t improve engagement. What actually improves engagement is including all employees in the process of reviewing the results and making a commitment to change one item in each work group and then following through on that commitment. For instance, one of the clients I work with had a team who worked through how to improve vacation coverage for one another. The approach provided a softer re-entry to work and enabled employees to enjoy their vacations more and not stress too much about coming back. This led to increased engagement within the team and was a win for all involved.

While this approach sounds easy, it still requires very clear communication to employees and good engagement meeting facilitation. When employees review engagement results, they often want to focus on what they cannot control. For instance, “If I just got paid more, I would be so much more engaged” or “If I had five more days of vacation each year, things would be so much better.” The leader in the conversation must focus the discussion on what your team can change rather than what the team wishes the leadership would change. Once they can land on a specific thing to change, then the team needs to collectively commit to an improvement plan and determine how best to track and report progress against it. Don’t forget to share your results with others so that successful ideas can be replicated across the organization when appropriate. Sharing results also builds momentum and motivation to continue building on your employee engagement program. 

There are some common pitfalls many organizations encounter which can undermine an entire employee engagement program. They are (3):

Lack of trust in confidentiality. Employees will not answer questions honestly if they aren’t confident that their answers will be confidential. Once confidentiality is compromised, it’s very difficult to rebuild trust in a survey. This often occurs when management attempts to determine by process of elimination how employees responded.

Lack of transparency. If scores come back low, an honest conversation is necessary—don’t just gloss over the low scores for fear of adversely affecting morale or to avoid difficult conversations. Focusing on problem areas and developing an action plan to address them will yield the greatest results. 

Preferring high scores to honest feedback. Treat low scores as an opportunity for improvement and encourage employees to provide honest feedback without fear of repercussion.

Measuring managers by their scores. This can have a two-fold effect. Managers may pressure their employees to respond favorably in an employee engagement survey leading to skewed results. Alternatively, employees may not answer questions honestly for fear of negatively impacting their manager’s success. 

Poor change management. If you don’t explain the survey and provide enough support to ensure managers are able to have honest conversations with their teams about the survey results, the activity becomes more of a ‘check the box’ than an opportunity for understanding and greater engagement. Be sure to take the time to prepare the entire organization for the process—in particular, the management team, who will need to facilitate the conversations with their teams.

Delayed communication. Survey results should be reviewed and an action plan should be developed as soon as possible. If there is substantial lag time between the survey and results, the engagement program becomes distant and possibly even forgotten.

Executive involvement. The most successful employee engagement programs are championed by senior leaders who promote accountability and follow-through. However, executives CANNOT decide that they will respond to the survey to fix everything, ultimately taking control from the employee population for improving the engagement.

In an engaged environment, employees are not only excited to come to work, but are committed to driving toward business goals. They take pride not only in being part of a great team, but in contributing to the success of the business. They are empowered to use their strengths to shine and are energized by doing so. It requires committed leadership and an openness and humility to evaluate yourself and your organization’s growth opportunities. Making employee engagement a priority provides amazing possibilities for improvements both for your employees and your organization as a whole.

References:

1 – https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236366/right-culture-not-employee-satisfaction.aspx 

2 – http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/163130/employee-engagement-drives-growth.aspx

3 – https://www.qualtrics.com/uk/experience-management/employee/engagement/pitfalls-to-avoid/

INTRODUCTION TO OUR NON-NEGOTIABLES

At The Gunter Group, the leadership traits and characteristics that define us are our Non-Negotiables: Collaborative, Integrity, Intellectual Curiosity, Thrives in Ambiguity, Emotional Intelligence, and Grounded Confidence. These traits and characteristics guide us every day in our interactions with clients, each other, and our community.

Our Non-Negotiables are the foundation upon which we built our business. They provide the framework for how we hold ourselves accountable in our work and relationships. These six Non-Negotiables represent the leadership traits and characteristics we seek out and expect from each member of our team.

At TGG, we believe in the value of diverse experiences and often hire consultants from non-traditional backgrounds. Despite our different experiences, we find commonality through our Non-Negotiables. Growing our firm with people who have the ability and commitment to being adaptable, constantly learning, and acting with a strong moral compass, is more valuable to us than hiring people based on their years of consulting experience. We surround ourselves with people who lead with intention, not only within our team, but with our clients.   

Our Non-Negotiables define how we show up with our clients. We build relationships by working together to understand and solve problems. By listening, asking questions and immersing ourselves in our surroundings, we can adjust our approach to fit our clients’ working environments. But our Non-Negotiables are always there to guide us. We are persistent and go above and beyond to understand our clients’ businesses to find the right solutions. We always act in the best interest of our clients and are unafraid to ask the tough questions.

Over the next few months, we are introducing a blog series where our consultants will be sharing their perspectives on each of our six Non-Negotiables; how these traits and characteristics are translated within our company and applied to client engagements. We look forward to sharing more about our firm culture with our clients and our community.