All Posts Tagged With: "change management"
A Systematic Approach to Change
The decision to do a Baldrige assessment is a decision to change the organization. Questions will be asked that prompt leaders to reconsider the way they do things. Gaps in the day-to-day conduct of business will be exposed. Unacceptable results will shine light on ineffective processes. Cursed with new knowledge, senior leaders can either ignore it and accept that the current management system is unable to achieve the results they desire or embrace change.
The opportunities for improvement revealed by a Baldrige assessment contain the logic for acting upon them: Your results are flat or negative because this or that process is broken. Fix the process and improve your results. Measure your progress. Validate it with your customers. Repeat.
Unfortunately, the logic of the change is usually lost to everyone but the leaders who enact it, which can render it ineffective. In a recent article on Forbes, author Carol Kinsey Goman explains why human beings resist change. According to brain analysis technology, our work habits are controlled by a part of the brain called the basal ganglia. When we do things the way we’ve always done them, we feel good. Change stimulates the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to the amygdala, which controls…
16Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat People Need to Hear
Integrating the Baldrige model means altering your management system. It means doing things differently than you’ve done them in the past. In the best cases, it is a transformative process that delivers short-term success and longer-term sustainability.
To get to that point, leaders need to manage the change. They need to help managers, supervisors, and employees understand why the change is necessary, how it will benefit them as well as the organization, how it will change what they do, and what will be expected of them. It requires profound knowledge of what people need to embrace the change and education and communication to make that happen.
In “Why Call It ‘Lean Manufacturing’?,” consultant Rick Bohan addresses this issue as it relates to the implementation of lean. His insights are equally relevant to Baldrige. As Bohan notes, “culture change always meets resistance, even under the most ideal circumstances.” A good part of that resistance can be overcome by effective communication, and that means understanding what your people hear when you describe your change initiative. Bohan describes the impact of introducing lean to managers and operators:
3Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“When we speak of reduced costs, they hear, ‘Get rid of people.’ When we talk about increased efficiencies, they hear, ‘Work…
The Post-Industrial Marketplace
If your organization is interested in serving the post-industrial marketplace (if it’s not, you’re in trouble), Seth Godin is as good a guide as you’re going to find. Not only does he know what’s going on, he understands the impact of rapid technological change on business. As he writes, “the world is being remade again and again, and the agents of change are the winners.”
The quote comes from “A post-industrial A to Z digital battledore,” which lists his 26 favorite neologisms (even though most are not newly-invented words). Several thought-provoking definitions relate to meeting customer requirements including:
- C is for Choice: “Digital commerce enables niches” because “given the choice, people will take the choice.”
- F is for the Free Prize: “People often don’t buy the obvious or measured solution to their problem, they buy the extra, the bonus, the feeling and the story.”
- I is for Ideavirus: “Ideas that spread win, and you can architect and arrange and manipulate your ideas to make them more likely to spread.”
- K is for kindle: Not the ebook reader. “The internet responds better to bonfires that are kindled over time, to ideas that spread because the idea itself is the engine, not the hype or the promotion.”
- O is for…
Leadership Matters Most
The ease or difficulty in transforming a management system lies with the leaders of that system. I’ve worked with five Baldrige Award winners and in every case, their executives drove the renovation of their management systems. No company did it the same way: Some had it mastered in a few years while others took a decade or more. Not every senior leader felt strongly about the Baldrige model or the evaluation and improvement process it supports, but as long as the top executive did, it didn’t matter.
Executive attitudes toward creating a sound management system regularly surprise me. Those who recognize its value preach this systems perspective with the fervor of true believers. Those who don’t buy into it bide their time until the boss leaves and they can return to what they know is best. The trouble is, what they know is best is rarely as good as the systems approach they abandon.
Motorola, IBM, and AT&T dominated in the late 1980s and early 1990s when their leaders conducted regular, formal assessments of their management systems. As that process waned, so did their fortunes. AT&T formed its Universal Card Services division in 1990 with a management system based on the Baldrige…
21Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBe Prepared
I haven’t referred to a Rosabeth Moss Kanter blog for a couple of months so it’s time for a Kanter fix. She’s a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of several popular business books, which is an accomplishment in itself. This week she reflects on the volcano in Iceland in “Surprise! Four Strategies for Coping with Disruptions” (HBR, April 19, 2010).
Her four strategies are:
- Backup. Even in a recession, it’s a good idea to build some overlap and redundancy into your organization to make it easier to respond to disruptions. “Great companies stress efficiency but build in slack and cross-train their people,” she writes.
- Communication. If you’ve developed systems to spread information virally, such as through social networks, you can keep the communication lines open and fast when disruption occurs.
- Collaboration. “Human relationships, commitment, and resiliency help companies recover quickly,” writes Kanter. She points to the efforts of Continental Airlines employees during the power outage that closed airports in the Northeast in 2003 and the creative solutions they came up with to keep their planes flying while other airlines were grounded.
- Values and Principles. I’ve talked about this a lot on Baldrige.com because it’s a common characteristic of Baldrige organizations. Guided by a…
Shrink the Change
I’m guilty of being negative. When I evaluate a company’s Baldrige assessment, I dutifully note its strengths but I really zero in on its opportunities for improvement. And that’s a mistake.
In their thought-provoking book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Broadway Business, 2010), brothers Chip and Dan Heath explain why you need to learn how to recognize and understand your strengths, the best practices, the small victories—the bright spots:
“To pursue bright spots is to ask the question ‘What’s working, and how can we do more of it?’ Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused, ‘What’s broken, and how do we fix it?’”
I highly recommend Switch for its eclectic mix of research from a wide variety of fields that challenges the accepted wisdom about change. Change is hard? It doesn’t have to be that hard. We need a burning platform? Not really. Use SMART goals to change? Won’t work.
Instead, how about: Shrink the change. “Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory,” write the Heaths. Arrange for early successes and you build momentum for the bigger changes ahead.
Or:…
2Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Real Heroes
Toyota’s front-page fall-from-grace has rivaled that of Tiger Woods, a business world parallel to the sporting world’s latest scandal. No wonder. Our business publications, from BusinessWeek to Fortune to Fast Company to the Wall Street Journal, weave their stories around the companies and executives who have risen to the top today. It is a cult of personality, no different than the teams and stars in the athletic world or the TV shows and actors in the entertainment world. We read about a company’s breakthrough performance or an executive’s startling turnaround and we place them on a pedestal and feel betrayed when they fall off.
They always do, of course. No company or leader can sustain performance excellence indefinitely. There are Baldrige Award winners that have failed after they received the Award, but so what? The Baldrige Award doesn’t guarantee unending success. It simply recognizes that, in the year it was received, that organization was one of the best-run organizations in the country. Next year, who knows? It’s like winning the Super Bowl one year (not that I’d know what that’s like, living in Minnesota) and expecting to win it next year and the year after, ad infinitum.
We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Baldrige Award…
24Feb2010 | Steve George | 2 comments | Continued
