Ultimate Guide To Learning Change Management

While all changes are unique and all individuals are unique, decades of research shows there are actions we can take to influence people in their individual transitions. Change management provides a structured approach for supporting the individuals in your organization to move from their own current states to their own future states.

No single change management methodology fits every company, but there is a set of practices, tools, and techniques that can be adapted to a variety of situations. What follows is a “Top 10” list of guiding principles for change management. Using these as a systematic, comprehensive framework, executives can understand what to expect, how to manage their own personal change, and how to engage the entire organization in the process.

Change management, as a formal discipline, has been around since the 1990’s. However, references to change and change management can be found in the psychological literature more than 40 years earlier. Psychologists described “change” as the unfreezing, moving, and refreezing of thoughts or behaviors.

Being strategic means consistently focusing on those core directional choices that will best move you toward your hoped-for future. It implies that you know where you’re starting from, that you’re clear about where you want to go and that you will make core choices about how to get there, with a consistent, focused effort to travel down your clear path.

The value to you as a change management professional might be clear, but you will need to build support and buy-in to take on enterprise change management. You will need to be able to articulate the ECM value proposition. Here are 7 reasons for deploying change management in an organization.

While a river may change its course naturally over many years, altering its course in a specific direction within a particular timeframe requires significant planning, effort, collaboration, consideration, and tooling. If you build a crude dam with little thought to its impact downstream, the results can be devastating.

As Change Managers today, we have access to more information than ever before and the amount of available information is growing exponentially. As a profession, our collective competency is higher than ever. However, many organizations say that change is not done well and/or the leadership of change is lacking and/or that change isn’t happening fast enough. Why is this?

When introduced in the late 1970s, the 7-S framework was a watershed in thinking about organizational effectiveness. A previous focus of managers was on organization as structure—who does what, who reports to whom, and the like. As organizations grew in size and complexity, the more critical question became one of coordination. Some 30 years later, 7-S remains an important tool to understand the complexity of organizations.

One of the cornerstone models for understanding organizational change was developed by Kurt Lewin back in the 1940s, and still holds true today. His model is known as Unfreeze – Change – Refreeze, which refers to the three-stage process of change that he describes. Lewin, a physicist as well as a social scientist, explained organizational change using the analogy of changing the shape of a block of ice.

One of the biggest obstacles in getting folks to move with the change into the future state (where you want them to be) is that the present state is usually fairly comfortable. Unfortunately, getting them to move is not as simple as asking nicely. In order to get folks to move from the present state to the future state you need to understand the three stages I call the “Why, Where, and How” of change.

Time-honored principles and practices of so-called “change management” do exist. And they can mean the difference between a change effort that improves your business and fires people up and one that bogs you down, fails to achieve its objectives and damages your company’s morale to boot.

A good way to understand the difference between change and development is to consider how these words apply to an individual. If you decide to get up an hour earlier each morning to get a better start on the day, that’s a personal change. If you decide to pursue an MBA to further your career, that’s personal development. With organizations, of course, it’s a bit more complicated.

Managers without an understanding of the different ways in which their people respond to change encounter great difficulty in navigating through change successfully. When dealing with change, communication skills are paramount, as well as a solid understanding of the human issues involved. The success stories of winning companies are usually characterized by their ability to effectively exploit and manage change situations.

Organizational change initiatives often arise out of problems faced by a company. In some cases, however, companies change under the impetus of enlightened leaders who first recognize and then exploit new potentials dormant in the organization or its circumstances. Some observers, more soberly, label this a “performance gap” which able management is inspired to close.

Change is difficult, and many people not only resist it but seek to undermine it. Unsurprisingly, then, a McKinsey study found that merely 26% of transformation initiatives succeed. Most successful transformations have one thing in common: Change is driven through empowerment, not mandated from the top.

Most organizations today are in a constant state of flux as they respond to the fast-moving external business environment, local and global economies, and technological advancement. This means that workplace processes, systems, and strategies must continuously change and evolve for an organization to remain competitive.

The point here is that no matter what kind of innovation the company adopts, the prerequisite for change management is innovation and without innovation, a company cannot expect its internal and external environment to be to its advantage. For instance, if Apple comes out with its new iPhone and disrupts the way in which consumers perceive a phone, it is discontinuous innovation. If Apple modifies its iPhone in a dynamic manner according to the changing customer preferences, it is dynamically continuous innovation. If it releases its iPhone after minor tweaks, then it is continuous innovation.

You need to scale down ambitions, meaning you should stop implementing everything altogether, and start with small changes, and then slowly move to the large ones, thereby touching almost every changes in gradual order until the entire change plan is implemented.

The most effective change management strategies are those that focus on the human behavior element. Why? Because employees are often the ones most affected by an organizational change, and because their decision to become adopters, hold-outs, or disrupters of change can have a tremendous impact on the short- and long-term success of a business improvement project.

Managers will need to be aware that there will be always persons in their organizations that will resist the proposed changes. Because of that, the efficiency and effectiveness of the change process will be in direct relation with resistance to change and successful managing resistance to change.

I have conducted a literature review and practical research that enables me to discover 28 possible causes of resistance to change.

Here are 9 effective tactics and strategies from the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM); a structured, practical change management process for the human side of organizational change that Reinforcing Sponsors and Change Agents can use to manage resistance while it is occurring.

The responsibility of the success of a change initiative lies on the shoulders of the leaders.  The role of the leaders becomes important for several reasons. The level of commitment that they exhibit to any change decides the level of success to follow. A high level of commitment to the change process from the leadership ensures the success of the process.  Leaders do not have to just watch when the change process is on.

The distinction between the two is actually quite significant. Change management, which is the term most everyone uses, refers to a set of basic tools or structures intended to keep any change effort under control. The goal is often to minimize the distractions and impacts of the change. Change leadership, on the other hand, concerns the driving forces, visions and processes that fuel large-scale transformation.

The objective of the Risk, Issue and Change Management component is to give the PM the necessary knowledge and instruments to be able to face any events that might have an impact on the project’s products, resources, stages or objectives.

In this section both the Risk Management and the Issue and Change Management procedures will be defined as well as the categorizations that can be used to facilitate the identification, assessment and resolution of uncertain or un-forecasted events.

For over three decades, academics, managers, and consultants, realizing that transforming organizations is difficult, have dissected the subject. They’ve sung the praises of leaders who communicate vision and walk the talk in order to make change efforts succeed. They’ve sanctified the importance of changing organizational culture and employees’ attitudes. They’ve teased out the tensions between top-down transformation efforts and participatory approaches to change.

John Kotter introduced the “Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model” to improve an organization’s ability to change and to increase its chances of success. By following this step plan organizations can avoid failure and become adept at implementing change. As a result, organizations no longer need to adjust the changes and they will increase their chances of success.

Change is never easy. Especially in a context of business, as it affects a lot of aspects. In order to ensure a smooth transition from the current state to the desired state of business, you need the correct change management tools and resources at hand.

We’ve compiled a list of useful change management tools that you can use to adapt to new changes in your organization seamlessly.

When you manage change effectively, you can move your organization into the new “business as usual” state swiftly, and you’ll find that other people are quick to accept change. This means that your team and organization experiences minimum disruption, and projects succeed, rather than stall and fail.

This quiz helps you assess your change management skills.

How can you ensure your change management initiatives are successful? Here are five real-world case studies that should provide some insight into how strong companies pivot successfully.

Change management is crucial to the survival and development of organizations, the more effectively you deal with change, the more likely you are to thrive. However, there are a large number of failures of change management. Organizational change itself is a considerably complex activity; any tiny mistake in change management could lead to the failure of organizational change.

The value change management thinking and integration may be limited by insufficient attention to a single question: How successful can any change management approach be if the organization is not ready for the change?

Leading Change by John P. Kotter. Millions worldwide have read and embraced John Kotter’s ideas on change management and leadership. From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented M&A activity to scandal, greed, and ultimately, recession—we’ve learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. It’s the rule.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Change Management. If you read nothing else on change management, read these 10 articles (featuring “Leading Change,” by John P. Kotter). We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you spearhead change in your organization.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control.

The Science of Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture. Paul Gibbons takes us on a journey from change mythology, from New Age change ideas, from “reports in drawers”, and from pop psychology up to the present.In the first comprehensive treatment of behavioral science in business, you’ll learn which cognitive biases caused the 2008 Financial Crisis, Enron, and the Deepwater Horizon.

Leading transformations: Manage change. Via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessment) this course will teach you how to effectively influence change by developing a ‘change mindset’, creating a productive change cycle, and leading yourself and others on the change journey.

Managing and Leading Change: Real World Strategies & Tools. Throughout the course, you will have short exercises to do, that use the skills we’ll cover. They are based on a real organizational change project. Other students and your tutor will support you, endorse your successes, and help you with your questions.

Change Management For Organizations: Drive Strategic Results. If you are an individual contributor, a project manager, change manager, or an organizational leader, this unique course on managing change is for you! It will enable you to identify and manage the human aspects of implementing change. In addition, it will help you to transition people from the current to the future state to realize desired business objectives.

Managing Project Risks and Changes. This course will help you manage project risk effectively by identifying, analyzing, and communicating inevitable changes to project scope and objectives. You will be equipped with the tools to manage change in the least disruptive way possible for your team and other project stakeholders.