How to succeed with organizational change
Leading a change through your employees is often more effective than leading your employees through a change - and this is best done when you involve them in the implementation of the change through a high degree of autonomy. But change management is a minefield.
"I simply don't understand where we are going as an organization." This must be the thinking of many people in Danish workplaces. A survey from the Knowledge Center for Job Satisfaction shows that 66 percent don't really see the point of the changes in their workplace.
In fact, one of the three major pitfalls of good change management is that leaders fail to set a clear direction for the organization's change so that employees can see and feel the meaning.
We can say that organizational change has occurred when your organization has moved from a current state to a desired future state. A number of studies suggest that there are likely to be a number of pitfalls that you need to navigate around if you want to ensure that the organizational change you're leading is successful. We list them here.
Learn more about change management through our knowledge universe
In most organizations, creating change and development is an ongoing challenge. Whether it's time pressure, process fatigue or resistance to change that makes it difficult to reach the finish line.
On this page you can find some of our articles and videos on the topic. Read along and get input on how to succeed with change management.
Pitfall 1: You fail to make sense of the change
So what do you do when you as a leader want to set direction and create meaning around change in your organization? Research suggests that vision and strategic intent can contribute positively to both.
If it's a major change that will affect all aspects of your organization, you should formulate a vision. A vision expresses a picture of the desirable long-term future of your organization.
However, if you're the head of a department or institution within the larger organization, you might consider formulating a strategic intent instead. Strategic intentions reflect and support the organization's vision and should help concretize the direction at lower organizational levels.
Pitfall 2: You don't make it clear what the change means for employee performance
However, research suggests that simply articulating a vision or strategic intent is not enough to get your employees to change their behavior.
A study from the National Research Center for the Working Environment shows that 55 percent of public sector employees never, rarely or only sometimes experience that their immediate manager explains what the organization's goals mean for the employee's specific task performance.
This relates to the psychological bias of the curse of knowledge. This bias means that as a leader, you communicate the strategic intent in a way that doesn't take into account that your employees don't necessarily possess the same knowledge of how the strategic intent can be realized as you do. As a result, they won't pick up on your well-intentioned messages.
However, the solution is fairly straightforward. You need to "translate" the strategic intent by providing a number of examples of how the strategic intent can be put into practice. This way, you ensure that your employees understand what the strategic intent means for their work.
Pitfall 3: You forget to involve your employees in how to realize the change
Above, I've argued that you need to be able to provide examples of what behavior your employees need to demonstrate in order to contribute to the change. However, it's important to note that this doesn't mean you need to create detailed action plans or behavioral instructions - you just need to create a frame of reference.
This is in line with the results of an international study by McKinsey, which shows that when employees feel ownership of the purpose of a change and are involved in driving the change effort, 79 percent of changes achieve the desired results. Once again, we must look to the psychological bias literature.
For example, the IKEA effect tells us that people tend to value things more when they have helped create them themselves. Similarly, "not invented here" is a bias that describes people's reluctance to use solutions developed by others.
Bottom line: It will often be more effective to lead change through your employees than to lead your employees through change.
Overall, this article has a clear message: know the biggest pitfalls of change management and make sure you have a plan in place early on in the change process to avoid them.
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