The amount of change has grown tremendously over the past two decades. The nature of the economies forces organizations to reduce costs, improve quality of products & services, locate new opportunities for growth, and increase productivity.
Change is the inevitable truth of our lives and whenever human communities are forced to adjust to shifting conditions, pain is ever present. However, most organizations struggle with this change and loose out If however, a careful change management plan is devised and executed successfully, a lot of pain and failures can be avoided.
Here are a few steps/guidelines to be established before you run a successful program within an organization:
1. Establishing a sense of urgency
- Examing the Market and competitive realities
- Identifying and discussing crises, potential crises or major opportunities
2. Creating a Change Team with Change Agents
- Putting together a group with enough power to lead change
- Getting the group to work together like a team
3. Developing a Vision & Strategy
- Creating a vision to help direct the change effort
- Developing strategies for achieving that vision
4. Communicating the Change Vision
- Using every vehicle possible to constantly communicate the new vision and strategies
- Having the Change team role model the behavior expected of employees
5. Empowering broad-based action
- Getting rid of obstacles
- Changing processes or structures that undermine the change vision
- Encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions
6. Generating short-term wins
- Planning for visible improvements in performance or "wins"
- Creating those wins
- Visibly recognizing and rewarding people who made the wins possible
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change
- Using increased credibility to change all systems, structures, and policies that don't fit together and don't fit the transformation vision
- Hiring, promoting & developing people who can implement the change vision
- Reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes and change agents
8. Rewarding, recognizing & championing the benefits to the organization from the change
- Creating better performance through customer and productivity oriented behavior, more and better leadership and more effective management
- Articulating the connections between new behaviors and organizational success
