Nothing endures but change.
Anonymous
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Changing is difficult, especially if you change people behavior.
But if change is well managed and sustained, it endures and becomes the new behavior.
So struggle to manage and drive change to craft the future of your organization.
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Dealing with an organization is a complex task, but not necessarily drives you mad on a day by day basis.
Instead, when it comes to designing and putting in place a new organization, things get really tricky, because cannot be left only to good sense and beautiful ideas.
In this series I’ll try to guide you through the perils and opportunities of organization redesign.
A definition
First of all we will set a common understanding of what we are dealing with.
Organization Design is the design and implementation in an effective way of a new organization structure that supports the goals decided at any level by management, achieving quality not only in work done, but also in collaboration and working environment.
The design includes many activities and among them, for sure also the precise definition of employee roles and responsibilities.
Organizational redesign, though is a “sensitive” one passes through the normal set of activities used in most of the projects:
Each of this areas include as said many activities and underlies many pitfalls we will discover later.
Planning phase: setting up the basis for success
Planning is by many sides one of the most complex parts of this project.
Is complex because failing to do it in a proper way and time, will for sure lead to failure.
The main question to ask you is “why you are redesigning and what are the objectives you should pursuit?”. Answering to this determines the pillars of your plan and start defining the scope of your work.
The second point is that doing a so complex task passes through the revision or at least the alignment of the core of your organization, which means evaluating changes or grant consistency with service management model if any, management of human resources, and deployment of personnel.
Having completed the above evaluations means having clear:
Team size you will need to have at hand is bigger then you think and changes proportionally to the organization dimensions. For sure needs to include:
Since each organization has different values and DNA, in planning take care of understanding and documenting previous change projects, to avoid repeating same errors and leverage good solutions that can help in accelerating acceptance and effectiveness.
Another key point is having the sponsorship and support from leadership because avoids misunderstandings on where empowerment comes from and helps in finding focused workarounds.
Once you have done this, you can start planning following the model you best like, but always keeping in mind the principles and objectives you’re aiming to.
Next time we will cover the design phase.
You can discuss also here
If you’ll excuse me a minute, I’m going to have a cup of coffee.
Broadcast from Apollo 11′s LEM, “Eagle”, to Johnson Space Center, Houston July 20, 1969, 7:27 P.M.
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Most of the people are too busy to take a moment to evaluate their time.
It is instead fundamental that within the complex things you are doing, you take your time to please yourself or, at least to rest for a moment.
You should not give alternatives to this: simply take a moment for you before taking an important moment, and let others wait: it will be the best 5 minutes you could gain.
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We talked often on change management, but after having started the change, which is the best way to assess the level of acceptance and internalization of the new “behavior” in the different target groups?
Defining acceptance level and its importance
First of all we need to focus on assuming a common definition for “acceptance level”: my proposal goes to interpret it as the attitude and the ability of professionals to adapt to new modes of operation. Simple and clean.
The importance of an accurate measurement of the degree of acceptance and internalization of the change is necessary in any change project, and becomes more important toward big changes.
And the acceptance becomes even more important if changes impact not only the organization, but also the behavior of the person: in this case the effort required for the employees in terms of adaptation to new conditions is therefore rather high than the normal and often justifies even more attention in change management.
As many times mentioned, change adoption follows a curve (representing the evolution of ”typical” individuals reactions toward a change event.) that starts from a situation of equilibrium, goes through enthusiasm, uncertainty, resistance, adaption and a new situation of “higher” equilibrium obtained through the understanding and “adoption” of change impacts.
The methodology
Assessing the level of acceptance passes through a more than normal approach:
To gather the data, the best way is to have a honest discussion within a meeting (e.g. training,…) because in this situations people tend to avoid becoming polemic (they are exposed in person) and the meeting itself can give a first hand impression of the group feeling.
Meetings should be organized for homogeneous groups of people and no more than 10-15 people per each one, to avoid a “mass effect” that avoids people sharing their opinions or reinforces the overall sentiment.
What you should focus to observe:
Once this “first hand” data is gathered, is also possible to assess in depth after some time with a questionnaire, the use of which cannot substitute the meeting. The reason for this is quite simple and deals, again, with the knowledge of change and of its impacts: the more people know about what is happening, the more they will feel to be involved and will to contribute; a questionnaire without “personal” interaction, make people feel the distance toward leadership and make them perceive a sense of abandonment.
After all data are gathered, they should be analyzed to understand:
and to determine specific actions to reinforce or correct the overall path.
David Witt at Blanchard leader chat posted an article about Jim Collins new book “from good to great”.
David suggests 3 ways to start building you leadership style. Following is my comment:
This post as a comment also here.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Anonymous
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Life passes, but this doesn’t bring maturity as a direct consequence.
There’s nothing to do, despite the fact that there’ a turning point you should intercept in others if you want them to change. This point is different from person to person and denotes the fact that the person is still able to understand that has some immaturity or brings himself to a self reinforcement of the immaturity.
When you identify this point, try to give rationals to the person of why is behaving immaturely and reinforce with examples.
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With a gentleman I try to be a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half.
Otto von Bismark
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In everyday management, try to give more than you take, in every direction it goes.
If you have to make something good, do this at your best; if you have to fight a battle, try to hit as hard as you can (of course proportionally to the value of the battle).
This will for sure cause you great lovers and great enemies, but again for sure will denote a precise position of you.
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Introduction
HR management is often seen as a fuzzy word with different things behind, especially if you are talking with people from other areas.
If we remain on the obvious level of defining HR Management as dealing with HR everything goes well, but what’s behind?
Defining the objectives
First of all we will try to define the main objectives of HR management.
The main goals of Human Resource Management are to:
All in all, seen like this, HR function is more a strategic partner then ever more then being an administrative counterpart. This because is a fundamental tool to enable:
Defining functions
So in order to achieve the objectives stated before, let’s try to analyze the specific functions performed by HR:
You never know who is right, but you always know who is in charge.
Whistler
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As we discuss business issues, too much time we loose in assigning tasks more than thinking of where the correct position stands.
When facing a problem or a decision, take your time to decide the path and fix who’s in charge of driving.
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As a first approach receiving a complaint by a customer or a colleague is a bad thing, because is the sign that something happened between what you provide/behave and what he expected.
But going a little bit in depth and trying to understand better, we can see the glass half-full by saying that a complaint is by some aspects a confirmation of the relationship between you and your customer or your colleague.
Let’s think on this for a moment: if you do not care of something you do not loose time giving bad feedback.
If this kind of feedback comes to you is one more chance to recover the relationship and try to revamp the perception of your service or behave.
So when happens, try to really understand the purpose of the complaint and don’t behave superficially or with angry: instead put yourself in the right mood for better understanding what went wrong and how you can revamp the relationship.
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