Leading Change – A Process Perspective

Regardless of the age, size, type, and industry of your business, it experiences change.  Its runs through all businesses, and in fact is the only thing constant.    Organizations must change quickly to adopt to the change. If not, it might not thrive but struggle to survive.   But how can businesses manage and turn out successful at change management?

The answer – it varies because it depends on certain factors, including who the people involved are and how well they understand it. Let’s talk more about it in the following as we discuss a process perspective of leading change.

Intentional Management of Change

Developed by Richard Boyatzis, the intentional change theory outlines five steps that a person should follow for a lasting change.   The steps are discovering ideal self, discovering real self, creating a learning agenda, experimenting with, and practicing new habits, and getting support. Here they are briefly.

• Discovering your ideal self, you should visualize what you would like to achieve.  Consider your aspirations and hopes, but make them clear.  Set short- and long-term goals. Finally, think about that person you want to become.
• Discovering your real self involves defining that person you are now.    Uncover yourself by creating a list and asking feedback from friends, colleagues, and family.
• Creating a learning agenda is another important step to align reality with your vision so that you can stay on track.
• Experimenting and practicing new habits involves applying the new formed habits. This step is realizing the changes into new habits. It can be changing belief or attitude that you must do something about every day to reinforce the changes.
• Getting support from your community and circles will help you through the challenging times. Tell trusted people about the changes you want and reasons behind them.

Lewin’s 3-Step Process

The Kurt Lewin’s Change Model process involves unfreezing, changing, and refreezing.  It is a practical change model that creates the perception that change is needed before transitioning towards the desired behaviour.   The final step in the process involves solidifying and strengthening the new behaviour as the norm.  Lewin’s 3-step change process is used as basis for other change models.

Unfreezing means creating an awareness on how the current acceptability isn’t helping the company to grow, at least in some way.    This step involves examining ways of thinking, people, and organizational structures, to name some.

Changing is the transitioning or moving with the change implementation.   Change becomes real at this step.    Here, people begin learning the new ways of thinking, processes, and behaviours.    In this step, people should become familiar with the change, so education, support, time, and communication are important.

Refreezing is the final stage of the change process. It symbolizes stabilizing and reinforcing the change.  It is critical because it ensures that the people do not go back to their old thinking and practices.  In this step, change managers should ensure that the change is not weakening.  The change must be cemented across the organization’s culture.

The Stages in The Process of Managing Change

There are four stages or phases involved, and they include –

Denial: It’s observed as soon as the change is implemented.  People deny the new way of thinking, or instance, even if they could read the signs of the change.   Change managers deal with it by giving employees the information to make them aware of the factors that change is important.

Resistance: While the people might have accepted the change, they’re now rejective it. It’s where a decline in the morale, competency and productivity of the employees are observed.  In this stage, employees are trying to go back to their old way of thinking, resulting to delays and losses.

Exploration: People start exploring the change for being unsuccessful in resisting it.  This exploration might lead to the loss of focus and indecisiveness of employees.  Some managers conduct a survey of the change, help stakeholders modify their ideas that will suit the change, an provide education, networking, and training opportunities so that employees can gain knowledge and competence.

Commitment/acceptance:  People commit to accept the change than resist or ignore it. Once they accept the change, it is integrated into the values, thinking and processes of the company.

Testing the Validity of the Change Method

These must be measured to check for the change method’s validity and effectiveness.

• Change management performance measures the success of the activities in managing change.
• Organisational performance measures the results the change an organization intends to achieve.
• Individual performance measures the progress that the employees make throughout the change process.

Do not take chances in the metrics by using a readymade list, but you must be able to measure the unique and specific change result based on your change initiative.

7 Key Steps in The Change Process

1. Recognize that change is needed.  What’s threatening your organisation?   What needs to be changed? What goals won’t it achieve if change won’t be implemented?
2. Get executive support.  All change initiatives will start at the top.   The CEO must be supportive of the executives. Get executives to support your change ideas.
3. Create a change management plan and make allies. Know what to complete and by when. What are important tasks? Use tools including change management guidelines, Gannt Charts, and task management tools.
4. Determine who in your organization can be the change leaders. Assign them tasks with deadlines.
5. Train and support employees.  As the change plan starts to affect the people involved, they will need training and education so that they can deal with the change. Identify skills gaps that your employees might be having. Make a system to ensure that your employees will be ready for the new responsibilities.
6. Communicate the status throughout the change with your change sponsors, change leaders and colleagues.
7. Check for and monitor progress.  Measure your success in the change and make sure to reward people for small successes.
8. Be flexible.  Unexpected events can still happen even if you have a great change management plan.  They will still affect your project or organization. That is why you should be adaptable to apply needed plan changes to accommodate any new need that will arise.

Every organization experience changes due to process updates, technology implementations, customer service improvements, compliance initiatives and more. Change is constant, so a consistent change management plan and process to help in minimizing its impact on your employees and organization.