The Change Leader's Roadmap: How to Navigate Your Organization's Transformation

INTRODUCTION

Imagine having mastered the leadership of change in your organization. Imagine . . . your mission-critical changes are being readily adopted by your organization and being used to deliver extraordinary results. You are getting the outcomes you need, and your business is reaping the rewards of them. Your change efforts are running smoothly without major disruptions. Your stakeholders and employees are engaged, committed, and pulling their weight. Change work is getting done on time, and your budgets are being met without costing your operations.

For many in organizations, their history with change makes this possibility hard to imagine. For us, it is the possibility that we commit to create in reality.

In this book, we introduce you to The Change Leader’s Roadmap (CLR), a change process methodology that will dramatically increase your ability to navigate your organization’s changes, and its transformation, successfully. The CLR has been developed through thirty years of application in large organizations across all types of for-profit industries, government, military, and global nonprofits. It will help you plan, design, and implement a comprehensive change strategy and process plan to deliver your results at optimal speed and cost. It will build your confidence in how best to attend to the most challenging aspects of transformation—the human dynamics—helping you design a change process that engenders commitment and engagement of stakeholders and devotes needed attention to mindset, behavior, and culture change. It will help you stay on track when new information or circumstances arise that would otherwise thwart your effort with conflict, chaos, and resistance.

The path of failed change is easy to find because research shows us that the large majority of change efforts fail to produce their needed ROI. Organizational change is pressured, constant, and competitive, and it has become much more complex and dynamic than in previous decades. It is tougher than ever to succeed at organizational change. In difficult economic times—and in our increasingly competitive world—leaders have little choice but to press for more with less, cut corners, try to attend to their highest priority changes while keeping customers satisfied, and get results as fast as possible.

Not only are leaders responsible for more complex changes, but the social, technological, economic, and political terrains they must navigate during change are shifting faster than they can keep up with. The name of today’s game is: Change as fast as you can to stay ahead of your competitors! With the marketplace operating at hyper-speed, leaders have their hands full, to say nothing of their heads, minds, and hearts. While they intend to do the best they can with what they have, they too often resort to old command-and-control practices that will not get them what they need, while dangerously taxing their workforce. Getting the chaos under control is an understandable instinct, but the current modes of managing change are not working.

Does the following sound familiar?

We see many leaders overloading the workloads of their employees with change on top of change on top of pressured operating requirements. They believe they have no extra resources, yet still need to get the change work done with what they have. We see an over-reliance on standard change practices applied to all projects, even if some changes are more complex and emotionally tumultuous than others. In such changes, traditional approaches such as project management and change management are not always sufficient. We see superficial attention to upfront change strategy, absentee sponsorship, and the drive for quick fixes. We see too much delegation without clear design requirements for what the outcome needs to achieve. We see leaders under-attending to the human dynamics inherent in change—with little patience for people’s needs and reactions, ignorance about the cultural implications of the changes they are making, and sidestepping the need to engage people in shaping their futures. An assumption on our part is that, under pressure, leaders believe that all this human stuff takes more time and resources, and they don’t have them. People will just have to deal with it.

The risk of this—especially in an economic downturn—is the tendency to increase control, speed, and mandate—in many ways doing more of what actually doesn’t work. However, there is a leadership opportunity here—to step back, pause, gain greater perspective, learn from the past’s unsuccessful patterns, and set up your organization to actually achieve the results it needs from change, still with the most expedient resources and pace. When things are most challenging, as they are right now in many markets, the time is right to give serious consideration to what you already have going for you in leading change and to learn specifically what you need to do differently to catapult your results. This assessment is the starting point for recreating your organization’s ability to succeed in change. The challenge to leaders is to understand what this renewal of change capability requires.

This book and its companion, Beyond Change Management (Anderson & Ackerman Anderson, 2010), provide that understanding. We have written these two books as a set to support the evolution of leaders and consultants to become successful change leaders—knowledgeable of what transformation requires and capable of providing it. These two books are designed to alter your paradigm about organization change, from burden to necessity, from distraction to focus, from checklist to strategic orchestration. They provide the pragmatic approaches to guide organizations realistically through the dynamic river of ever-changing economic, business, and social environments. First and foremost, the change game clearly needs new leadership thinking and approaches. Change is not the enemy; in fact, it is the only road to the future. Leading change successfully requires new perspectives, practices, and ways of treating people as they change. Beyond Change Management outlines much of this new thinking.

Without question, the nature and complexity of change has evolved over the past thirty-five years. We are not dealing with the more manageable, controllable types of change that dominated the 1970s and 1980s—developmental and transitional change. The most prevalent type of change in organizations today is transformation. Developmental and transitional change can be tightly managed. Transformation cannot. It requires a broader and deeper knowledge of the people and process dynamics of change, a knowledge that stretches beyond change management and project management. It demands a close and intelligent partnership between the tangible requirements of change—organizational and technical—and the intangible human and cultural dynamics of change. Leaders must create the capabilities, infrastructures, mindsets, and behaviors they require. Both leaders and consultants must learn how to masterfully guide transformational change—in style, skill, and strategy. Both leaders and consultants must evolve to become competent conscious change leaders—a new caliber of leader for a new type of change.

Transformation demands shifts in leadership and employee mindset, culture, ways of relating, and the ability to course-correct. These are not easy shifts to make. However, over our three decades of consulting, we clearly see that the level of awareness, perceptiveness, and openness of leaders and consultants has direct impact on whether change succeeds. Time and again, our clients’ results are directly proportional to the degree that they address their mindsets about people, organizations, and change; shift their leadership style and behavior to be more co-creative and engaging; and transform deep-seated cultural norms to unleash the human potential in their organizations. In the absence of conscious awareness, change processes and their outcomes are disappointing.

We offer these books to compel leaders and consultants to step into the role of consciously shaping the transformation of their organizations. We believe they are in need of a comprehensive approach for leading transformation with a greater focus on what it takes to succeed: (1) a meaningful context for transformational action; (2) guidelines for thinking strategically about how to plan the process of transformation so that results are realized in both the bottom line and the culture; (3) knowledge of how to ensure that the people who must make the change happen want to change and can succeed; (4) the infrastructure to support and expedite change; and (5) a methodology for doing so. The context and guidelines for thinking strategically about the people and process dynamics are featured in Beyond Change Management. This book provides the methodology—The Change Leader’s Roadmap—and the recommended infrastructure.

Beyond Change Management describes the conceptual underpinnings of transformation and what it takes to lead it to become more than a leader—to become a conscious change leader. This book describes the approach to put these concepts into practice. Beyond Change Management explores the theoretical foundations, and this book offers the pragmatics. We have written both books simultaneously to blend conceptual understanding with tangible steps and tools. Together, they provide an integrated and balanced approach to this essential evolution in the fields of organization development, project management, change management, and sound management in general.

Building your company’s change capability is like building proactive continuous improvement into the fabric of your organization. Being able to lead change better than your competitors is a key strategic advantage in the 21st century. The more organizational change capability you have, the more successful you will be. Having the change leadership skills, tools, mindsets, and methodology to lead change of any magnitude is an essential corporate competency. Take some time to step back and learn about the realities of transformation because, more than likely, your organization is in fact transforming at this very moment. Learn about the CLR’s evidence-based best practices of conscious change leadership. Set up the infrastructure, standards, and common change practices with strategic foresight—practices that allow you to hit the ground running with each major change effort your business strategy demands. The more strategic you can be in your change leadership and its supporting methodology and infrastructure, the more likely will be your success. Figure out how to establish in your organization the conditions that drive success—in the operation, the culture, and your leaders and workforce. We invite you to entertain establishing the cutting-edge strategic disciplines for change that we introduce in Beyond Change Management. They provide possibilities for enabling your organization to lead all of its changes with much greater intelligence, consistency, and skill. This book provides your toolkit.

In response to the need for conscious change leadership and greater results from change, there is also a new standard for change consultants. No matter what you currently call yourself, or how you perceive your work, we propose that you consider expanding into the new role of the Strategic Change Consultant. These consultants work at the large-scale or enterprise transformation level and are engaged from the beginning, as well as in setting up the change infrastructures their organizations need to succeed at change over the long term. We explore the role of the Strategic Change Consultant in Beyond Change Management, describing how it raises the possibility of having much greater impact at the system level from the onset of major change through to results. Beyond Change Management and The Change Leader’s Roadmap methodology pave the way for this new brand of conscious consulting, addressing the competencies required to master both the people and process dynamics of transformation.

Although The Change Leader’s Roadmap (CLR) is crafted for transformational change, it fits all types of change and all sizes. It includes the work relevant to engaging all levels of the organization from executive to the front-line workforce. It is your roadmap, and after you learn it, you will be able to tailor it for any type of change. We will overview the CLR methodology momentarily, and then explore it in depth in the remainder of this book. But first, we will provide an overview of the key points covered in Beyond Change Management. Review them as your foundation to understand what underlies the design and content of the CLR.

KEY POINTS FROM BEYOND CHANGE MANAGEMENT

1. Competent Change Leadership Can Deliver Extraordinary Breakthrough Results from Change.

Breakthrough results are outcomes that far exceed what would occur if your organization continued carrying out its changes in the same way it always has. Breakthrough results, by definition, are a level of achievement beyond what most people would even conceive as possible.

Research shows that the majority of change efforts fail to produce their intended outcomes. This is unacceptable! Change leaders can improve—not just a little, but a lot. We know how to lead transformation successfully, and leaders can learn what is required. Not only are intended outcomes achievable, but extraordinary outcomes are also within grasp if leaders develop their change leadership capability.

Leaders initiate change to improve things. Organizations all have a normal improvement line—the level of results they usually get from their change efforts. Few leaders are conscious of this line, but it can be plotted year by year to measure what level of improvement is acceptable in each organization’s culture. This line determines the organization’s current change capability. If you improve your organization’s change capability, the line will go up, and you will achieve greater results.

Few people pursue real breakthrough results; rather, they unconsciously accept the territory of the average, the middle of the bell curve. That does not interest us. We are after achieving the extraordinary, and this requires substantially increasing leaders’ understanding of transformation, building a new leadership mindset, and applying a new set of approaches and tools.

2. Creating Breakthrough Results from Change Requires Proficient Attention to Three Critical and Highly Interdependent Areas: Content, People, and Process.

Content refers to what must change in the formal organization—strategy, structure, business processes, management systems, technology, products, services, culture, and so on. People refers to the human dynamics that either influence the change or are triggered by it—dealing with people’s emotional reactions, turning resistance into commitment, motivation, engaging them in shaping the change, learning new behaviors or skills, changing mindset, dealing with politics and relationships, and addressing cultural implications of the change. Process refers to how the organization will transform, and the decisions and action steps it will take along the way. Process includes how you govern the effort; how you pace it; how you design the change solution; how you course correct implementation; and how you ensure the level of communication and engagement that will deliver the highest possible outcome.

Leaders focus much more on content than either people or process. This is one root cause of the high failure rate of change. If any one area is under-attended, results suffer.

The greatest possibilities for breakthrough results reside in how you lead the areas of people and process. Integrating organizational and personal change into one unified change process is key. It is your people who unleash the potential within your content solution. It is your people who can make extraordinary things happen, or keep them from occurring. When people understand and believe in the changes, accept their role in achieving successful outcomes, and commit to working together with everyone needed to produce those outcomes, the possibility of breakthrough increases significantly. As a change leader, you create this possibility by designing a change process that engages your stakeholders, frees up cultural limitations to change, and promotes conscious attention and support for people to move through their resistance to full commitment.

3. Understanding What Drives Change Is Essential to Building a Change Process That Delivers Breakthrough Results.

Organizational change is catalyzed by a number of forces that first trigger awareness and then action. Understanding what drives change is critical because the drivers establish the overall context within which any change is identified, scoped, and planned. The drivers of change establish a change effort’s relevance and meaning for both leaders and stakeholders. Without understanding them, a change effort can be disorganized, poorly planned, and resisted. Figure I.1 shows the Drivers of Change Model. Here is how it works.

Environmental forces (e.g., regulations, economics, politics, social trends, and international relations) drive changes in the marketplace’s requirements for success (e.g., customer demands, client/patient expectations). In response, you establish a business strategy—imperatives for change—to meet those new requirements. These new strategies require change in your organization (e.g., its structure, operations, technology, etc.) If those changes are significant, your culture will need to transform to achieve, sustain, and get real value from the organization’s changes. Culture change drives the need to shift leader and employee behavior, and to sustain these, especially if significant, you will need to alter people’s mindsets—their assumptions, perceptions, and beliefs about themselves, each other, and the organization.

Figure I.1. The Drivers of Change Model

While the model denotes a linear sequence, do not let this fool you. The drive for change follows this cause-effect path, but all seven areas must get your full attention, not necessarily in the model’s order, but as an integrated undertaking. Change leaders must assess the changes required in all seven drivers to accurately scope their organization’s transformation. If you leave a driver out, again, results will suffer.

Notice the direction of impact among the drivers. The larger, external forces (environment, marketplace requirements, business and organizational imperatives) drive the need to change in the more internal areas of people (culture, behavior, and mindset). Leaders are most accustomed to focusing on the external drivers, which generate the content of change. But to lead change competently, they must also attend to the internal drivers and human dynamics. Transformation requires conscious attention to both the external drivers and the internal drivers of change, to both content and people.

4. You Need to Know the Type of Change You Face to Build the Right Kind of Change Strategy.

Change has evolved over the past forty years. We now recognize three different types of change, each requiring different change leadership strategies and approaches. The three types of change are developmental change, transitional change, and transformational change. The most prevalent type of change occurring in today’s organizations is transformation. It is by far the most complex and requires more than traditional approaches such as change management and project management to ensure its success.

Developmental change is an improvement in an organization’s existing way of operating, such as improving skills, increasing communications, making a business process more efficient, or improving an existing sales process. Because developmental change does not ask people to radically alter their existing way of operating, it triggers fewer human dynamics than transformation and does not affect the organization’s culture significantly. People just have to get better at what they already do. Such changes can also be project managed fairly easily.

Transitional change, rather than simply developing the current state, occurs when a problem is recognized in the current reality that needs to be solved with a new way of operating. Transitional change involves replacing the old state with a clearly designed new state that is formulated to resolve the inadequacies of the old state. Because transitional change entails the implementation of something different from what currently exists, it requires leaders to dismantle the current way of operating and systematically put in place a newly designed desired state. The process of transitioning from the old to the new can be planned, paced, and managed . Reorganizations, the installation of new computer hardware, and the creation of new products or services are typical transitional changes. Project and change management are quite useful methods for supporting transitional changes.

Transformation occurs when the organization recognizes that its old way of operating, even if it were to be improved, cannot deliver the business strategies required to meet new marketplace requirements for success. This calls for content changes that are far more radical than in developmental or transitional changes, and require a fundamental shift from one state of being (the organization’s old state) to another (its transformed state). These changes are so significant that they require the organization, in addition to changing its operations significantly, to shift its culture and people’s behavior and mindsets to implement the transformation successfully and sustain it over time.

A key feature of transformation is that the specifics of the new state are unknown when the change process begins. They emerge as a product of the change effort itself. This makes a transformational change process very unpredictable, uncontrollable, and often messy. It must be crafted, shaped, and adapted as it unfolds. Leaders must be alert for the signals that indicate what the new state needs to be, as they engage the organization in moving away from its old way of operating and figuring out how the new reality needs to work. A direction may be set in motion, but the leaders need to actively course correct it every time new information emerges that calls for a shift of direction in either the content or the change process.

The second key feature of transformation is the significant factor of human dynamics and the essential role that mindset, behavior, and culture change play in its success. Because people are required to trust and step in to the unknown, transformation triggers fear and anxiety, which must be managed throughout the process to keep moving people’s natural resistance toward greater commitment. In most transformations, the organization’s culture must change to support the future state being created. Plus, most transformations require a shift of mindset, or worldview, for both leaders and employees to succeed. This means that transformation demands attention to deeper, internal human dynamics beyond simply changing their behavior or improving their skills. The nonlinear and emergent nature of the change process and the significant human and cultural dynamics make leading transformation very challenging.

The challenges require leaders to do three critical things to ensure success: (1) They must be willing to engage in their own personal change process to shift how they think, lead, and relate; (2) they must engage stakeholders earlier in the change process and to a greater extent; and (3) they must overtly set up the change process to welcome and respond to rapid course correction along the way. These actions are in addition to the guidance that traditional change and project management offer. These services can support transformation but are insufficient to deliver and sustain breakthrough results.

Some significant examples of transformation include old economy organizations moving into e-businesses, globalization, and major information technology implementations such as electronic health records in healthcare.

5. Achieving Successful Transformation That Delivers Breakthrough Results Requires a Conscious Change Leadership Approach.

Your state of awareness or level of consciousness is the greatest determinant of your success as a change leader. Your level of awareness impacts every aspect of your change leadership capability, experience, and outcome. Nothing is left untouched. Your level of awareness influences your change strategy, plans, decisions, leadership style, interpersonal and organizational communications, relationships, what you model, emotional reactions, willingness to change, and ultimately, your outcomes.

In the simplest of terms, leaders approach transformation with either expanded awareness or limited awareness. We call the expanded awareness mode the conscious approach and the limited awareness mode the autopilot (or unconscious) approach.

Expanded awareness is like getting the benefit of both a wide-angle lens and a high-powered microscope at the same time. Through the wider view, you can see the broader dynamics at play in transformation, such as cross-boundary impacts, regional vs. enterprise solutions, and how change in one area of the organization will impact operations in another. Through the microscope, you can see the deeper and subtler dynamics that would otherwise go unnoticed, such as how people’s emotions influence commitment or how culture stifles implementation. Expanded awareness provides both greater span and greater depth to your view of what needs your attention.

Taking a conscious approach is a requirement of leading transformation successfully. When leaders take a conscious approach, their greater awareness provides more perspective and insight about what transformation demands and better strategic options to address its unique people and process dynamics. They can see more accurately what is occurring and can therefore respond to it more effectively.

When leaders take an autopilot approach, they respond automatically and unconsciously to the dynamics of transformation based on their conditioned habits, existing knowledge, and dominant leadership style. Their lens is filtered by biases and assumptions from their default or historical mental conditioning, causing critical people and process dynamics to go unseen. They apply old management techniques because they do not know of or think about other possibilities. In all fairness, the autopilot approach has sufficed for leading organizations and developmental and transitional change for a long time; it just is not adequate for leading transformation in the dynamic marketplace we operate in today.

Breaking out of autopilot to become more conscious is the primary leverage point for greater change leadership success. Everything else pales in comparison. We cannot overemphasize this point. The success formula is simple: On average, your results from change will be in direct proportion to the level of conscious awareness you bring to the effort. Working with your level of awareness requires some foundational understandings:

• Leaders who take a conscious approach understand that they and all human beings possess a mindset: values, beliefs, and worldviews that are unique to themselves; mental models from which they operate, interpret the world around them, and produce results.

• They understand that mindset is causative: (1) that values, beliefs, and worldviews determine how people perceive and interpret facts; (2) that facts are different from a person’s perceptions and interpretations; (3) that how someone perceives a situation causes the person’s thoughts, feelings, and emotional reactions to that situation, which then determines the person’s decisions, behaviors, and actions and ends up determining the results the person creates. The initial catalyst or source of outcomes is in the person’s mindset.

• Conscious change leaders understand that mindset causes both their and others’ internal states (being excited or threatened, confident or doubtful), as well as their external results (success or failure). Of course, these leaders realize that environmental factors also influence outcomes, often placing limitations on what is possible. But this reality does not diminish for them the primary fact that mindset determines how a person responds inside those limitations.

• Conscious change leaders understand that their mindset is conditioned by their experience, and that past events and how they perceived, felt, and responded to those events set up habits for how they will respond to similar events in the future. These patterns of perceiving, thinking, and feeling are the basis of a person’s leadership style and approach to change. If your conditioned responses get you what you want and need, keep them. But if they do not, become conscious of them, and look for how to change them to generate different, and better, results.

A key differentiator between conscious and autopilot change leaders is that conscious leaders value and attend to both inner reality (internal human dynamics) and external reality (organizational factors) in their leadership. They take a whole systems approach. They actively engage with their and others’ mindsets, thoughts, feelings, values, and levels of commitment as a part of what is necessary for the change to succeed. They intentionally focus on evolving their organization’s culture and increasing employee engagement. These efforts are not nice-to-do’s for them; they are must-do’s.

Leaders operating on autopilot typically label attention to internal human dynamics as nonessential soft stuff. They might say that they understand that people’s reactions have an impact on performance or that culture should be attended to, but they ask someone else, such as the HR department, to handle it. What they do matters, not what they say, and autopilot leaders do not lead in ways that demonstrate a true understanding that mindset is causative and has a direct impact on human dynamics and results. They do not witness their mindset in action or how their conditioning influences how they behave, or how they impact others. They under-attend to culture and do not account for its pervasive force in their change strategies. Leaders on autopilot focus nearly exclusively on external dynamics. Their attention is primarily on content, the design solution, implementation plans, reporting mechanisms, and metrics.

6. Conscious Change Leaders Are Accountable for All of the Factors Impacting the Organization’s Ability to Transform