Change Management

By Author: Priyanka Sharma
Total Articles: 1
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Most chronic problems—from a corporation’s mediocre safety record or stalled product release to an individual’s inability to overcome a shopping addiction to a family’s history of verbal abuse—no matter how different they may appear at first glance, are actually the same problem. That’s right; most problems that resist our best attempts at solutions and then persist for years on end do so because we lack influence. More specifically, we lack the ability to get ourselves and others to change behaviour. In essence Change management is as difficult at personal level as it is at a team / organisational level.
As leaders when we often are in different stage of “leading change” or “managing change”. Fundamentally speaking any organisational change is a transformational process.

One can collapse the immense and slippery topic of influence into a single factor—human behaviour. Why? Because human behaviour affects most of what we really care about. Think about the profound and persistent problems you see in the world around you. Name a few of the chronic complaints you have in your organization. And, ...
... if you’re really bold, identify a couple of challenges you have in your own life.
Odds are, when you examine your list of concerns, you’ll discover the problems that plague you the most and persist for the longest do so because one or more human beings continue to behave in ways that perpetuate the problem. For example, people in the United States die younger than they should because they don’t eat healthy foods or exercise regularly. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide contract HIV/AIDS each year as a result of their actions. Professionally, people routinely hurt their reputations or perpetuate harassment complaints because of how they behave at work.
Leaders tend to look for silver bullets for impacting organisational change. What is important though is to apply a combination of strategies to increase the likelihood of success. For instance, a study conducted by VitalSmarts and The Concours Group of 900 executives involved in more than 300 change projects showed that the benefit of applying an effective influence strategy is not incremental, it’s exponential. Leaders and scholars are usually thrilled to learn that one approach or another improves the chance of success by 10, 20, or 30 percent. What we discovered is that those who use the full range of influence strategies we teach are ten times more likely to succeed.
With a clear theory of influence you can increase your chance for successful change management tenfold; it’s no surprise that the handful of world-class influencers is able to:
• Reduce the number of new AIDS infections in one country by 90 percent in less than two years.
• Help more than 14,000 hardened criminals and drug addicts change their lives forever—with more than a 90 percent success rate.
• Save tens of thousands of lives by reducing avoidable medical mistakes.
• Dramatically reduce violence against women nationwide.
• Eradicate a dreaded disease from 11 countries.

So what strategies the world class influencers apply?

1. Identify Clear and Measurable, Time-Bound Results That Reflect What You Really – the most important part here is the motivation for change.
2. Identify Vital Behaviours: Savvy influencers search for just a handful of high-leverage behaviours—usually only two or three. They realize it is impossible to change five or ten behaviours at the same time, and that if you choose wisely, there are usually just a couple of behaviours that Influence the change management process.

3. Diagnose the Six Sources of Influence behind Existing Behaviours Whenever people are acting in unhealthy ways, it’s because the world is perfectly organized to create those bad behaviours. More importantly, there is rarely one single source of influence behind chronic poor performance. Consequently, the reason leaders fail to create change is because they set out in search of the one source of influence that will work for them. They may try training, or offering rewards, or shuffling the org. chart. When their chosen solution doesn’t work, they give up. The same is true of parents who ground their kids and then can’t figure out why the problem persists. Any problem that is motivated and enabled by multiple sources won’t

4. Select and Implement Strategies Aimed at Each Source of Influence Change managers not only need to know six sources of influence that contribute to human behaviour, they also need to have a clear understanding of strategies that affect each of the six sources. With this approach leaders are in a position to create a combined influence strategy that will literally make change inevitable.