Sustainable organizational change and transformation happen one person at a time. This is a challenging concept for executives and managers - anything "one at a time" sounds inefficient at best, incompetent at worst.
No question; transformation or large-scale change is complex particularly in the context of major strategic shifts, reorganizations, mergers, or significant IT implementations.
Paradoxically, this complexity must be paired with a simple (not easy) fact which holds a key to successful change...change happens one person at a time.
What do we mean by this? For any change to take hold - whether it's changing something in your personal or professional life, or changing your company strategy, structure, or technology - the change eventually requires you to do things differently. In order to do things differently, a change in perception is generally necessary, and sometimes you need to learn new skills.
Regardless of what the change entails and what you must do differently to live and sustain it, the new change must appeal to your own motivations or it won't hold. Human beings simply don't do things differently unless personally motivated to do so. Mandated change just doesn't work.
Therefore, leaders of large-scale change or transformation need to:
- plan
- generate buy-in
- implement, and
- reinforce
the change in ways that satisfy peoples' existing motivation.
Since people are motivated by different things successful change requires a systematic way to ascertain individual motivations (yes, this can be done with thousands of employees) and design a change management strategy to play to them - thereby transforming your organization and its culture one person at a time.
2009 Copyright © Moore & Associates
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