Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Leading Organizational Change

Let's go over some of the failures that can occur when you are leading a change event. And you can see here that we have some examples, but these are examples of things that were not done during implementation. So these were mistakes made in change implementation, including not doing the following things: not creating a vision of the change.

That is a huge mistake that leads to failure. Not planning to implement the change, not having a plan for how you're going to do it, is another huge example of a mistake that leads to failures and not convincing the employees to support the change. Another example of a mistake that is made that leads to failure.

These things are critical and must occur. When they don't occur is when we see failures in making change actually occur. Other examples of things that do not communicate the change early and often will also lead to the change not being successful, such as not giving people a warning before the change occurs.

It's amazing how many times leaders know a change is coming, yet they don't integrate that warning into their planning, their thinking, or their communication. I may not have a lot of information about it right now, but it's going to happen. That warning can be very helpful for a segment of your employees who really are able to accept change better when they have a warning.

Another mistake is not involving employees in the change, not getting them involved, which is a great way to get their buy-in. It's a great way to reduce some of those barriers. And another big mistake that can lead to change failure is not preparing for the resistance to change.

Oftentimes, leaders will just assume everyone is going to love this idea. Everyone's going to love this change. They're all going to be excited.

We should always be prepared that resistance is likely to occur. So the next thing I want to talk about is some basic categories of change. The first one is adaptive changes.

And these are very small incremental changes that are made just to address needs for an organization that may evolve over time. So maybe just a small change, maybe we're just going to change this process, and then maybe we're going to change this process over here, and then maybe we're going to change the software, but they're very small incremental changes known as adaptive changes. The other category of change is transformational change.

Transformational changes involve major shifts in the mission of the organization, the strategy of the organization, the structure of the organization, the performance of the organization, and the processes of the organization. And it depends on the situation, which category of change is most appropriate to use, but even small incremental changes can cause resistance, can cause employees to feel very frustrated, or to fight back or be resistant to change. But certainly those transformational changes, which are major shifts, are definitely going to cause some reaction.

So let's talk next about some of the major sources of change and whether or not they are considered transformational changes or adaptive changes. So the first source of change here we have is demographic changes. And some of the example responses to a demographic change could be, maybe, some policies or a program being created due to demographic changes.

So maybe like an equal opportunity program. And that category of change would be transformational. Those tend to be sort of the bigger types of changes.

An example of an adaptive change would be that resources are cut. You lose money. So the source of change is that resources are cut.

And then an example of a response to that might be streamlining processes. So those processes are changing, but it's not a major change. It's more of an adaptive change.

But again, the source of the change is that there's some kind of money issue or resource cut, let's say. In this case, we're saying dollars. Another source of change is technological changes.

An example of a response could be an upgraded or a new system. And I'm sure all of you in your work have had a situation where a computer system has been upgraded, or you've had a whole new software come in that wasn't there before. Those would be considered in the category of adaptive changes.

And then another source of change is a changed strategy. And sometimes we see this when new leadership comes into an organization, right? So you can have a new leader come into an organization that decides to take the organization in a completely different strategic direction. And we know that to achieve any kind of strategy is going to cause change, right? That's how you're going to be able to achieve that strategy.

So, an example of a response to changing strategy could be restructuring an organization. And I'm guessing also many of you who have worked for a while have probably been through a reorg within your organization. And we would consider that type of change event to be in the category of a transformational change.

So what are some of the potential outcomes of change? Well, the first one is wonderful, right? It's a successfully implemented change. That means the change has occurred, it's been fully implemented, and it's been accepted by the employees. And the reason why the change was needed in the first place has been satisfied.

Unfortunately, studies show that most change events don't end up that way. They're not successfully implemented. A lot of our change events end up being either incomplete or completely failed.

And that means that the change is not, it just doesn't happen, or it only happens halfway, or some portion of the way. A lot of times this happens because the change is not planned properly, it's not managed properly, or something happens, like in a lot of cases, the employees do not accept the change. Sometimes something can be implemented as a change, and the employees don't use it.

So in that case, yes, was it maybe planned? Was it maybe implemented? But if people aren't actually using it, if they're not following the new way of doing work, it wouldn't be considered a successfully implemented change. Now, when you have a change event, and it is successful, there are some real positive outcomes that we can find. We can receive cost savings from that.

We can receive strengthened processes. So our organization ends up with really strong processes after a change event. We can have a stronger organizational structure and policies.

We can have more resilient employees because they've successfully gone through a change event. We can have strengthened leadership and management, and we can overall have less resistance to change because we've had a positive outcome to a change event. However, there are some potential negative outcomes, particularly when change events fail.

We can have wasted money. We can have really unhappy employees. We can have weakened processes.

We can also experience greater resistance to change and develop weaker leadership and management skills.