Change management behavior – trust is critical

Project management is rational…change management is emotional…

Though this is an overstatement it helps make a point about a key difference between the two practices. Project management designs a plan that scope, budget and timeline. Change management is about executing that plan and understanding the inevitable emotional and behavioral impacts.

Let’s look at one…trust. Leaders and team members need to feel comfortable that hand-offs will go smoothly and work will be completed at high level. There is second trust behavior which is just as important…perhaps even more than the first. Trust is also feeling comfortable with others and being able to admit mistakes and ask for help in a safe environment.

This type trust sounds obvious but it’s difficult to achieve…particularly today. In a completive work environment, it takes courage to ask for help or admit you’re wrong. This can be interpreted as showing weakness in front of peers. However it’s exactly the sort of behavior and courage that allows one to be successful in assessing and adjusting action. Change is fluid and frequently reactive. You need to trust in each other to allow for rapid course correction without the worry of perception and finger pointing.

True competitive differentiation

Do you really understand what is important to your customers and clients?  What is your point of competitive differentiation that separates you from the pack?  After your own assessment of the issue, if high levels of competence are on your list, you may be ignoring what is truly important and meaningful to your customers.  Customers are assuming competence and expertise in your business; that’s a given when they call or visit you.  Relying on competence alone, when seeking to separate from your competition is like a hotel seeking new customers by advertising they have clean sheets and towels.

You should be looking at areas of service and behavior that have seen historical failure in your industry, or common complaints that are specific about your local competitors.  A rich area to mine information is local forums and postings.  This is not to say that competency isn’t important, it’s the baseline structure that you build your business upon, it’s just not enough. Great examples are contractors and tradesman. These are frequently small or even one-person businesses. Communication and customer follow up are difficult due to lack of office or administrative staff. However, a company that follows up quickly on a customer request or better yet, answers the phone on the first call is frequently far ahead of their competitors.

Find a similar example for your business and simple actions can truly separate you.  

Change? It does a brain good!

With the start of a new year just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of change and how we respond to the prospect.  About 98% of the population does not like change.  In fact, research suggests that we are incapable of making major changes most of the time, even in matters of life and death.  I recently reread with interest a 2005 Fast Company, Inc. article on the subject that cited studies that showed 90% of heart attack victims when faced with the need to change could not do so. 

I am a process person.  I see life from a process perspective and, as a result, I see the beauty in change as a means to make life easier, more enjoyable and as a means to achieve desired outcomes.  Even as someone who enjoys change, however, as I look back over my life, it is clear that my attempts at making change far outweigh the number of times I have actually sustained changes and enjoyed the outcomes that were my target.  There are the multiple times that I have set out to improve my health by changing my eating habits.  Often, I have succeeded at one or more elements of change such as the content of my diet or the “what.”  Meanwhile, the “when,” “why” and “how much” elements of my diet have not changed through the years in spite of attempts to change most of these aspects.  The same can be said of my attempts to simplify life by exercising the use of the word “no” more often.

Neurologists suggest that making major changes are physiologically challenging for our brains.  Have you ever changed a piece of software on your network only to have three or four other systems start having problems?  Making a major life change may have an analogous impact on your brain as the change of software does to your computer network.  There are just so many connections and alterations that have to be readied for the change, that you are bound to suffer some speed bumps along the way.

There is a way to make change successfully and as painless as possible.  First, identify the psychological win for the people involved.  Dr. Dean Ornish has demonstrated the value of focusing on the joy that change can create in getting people to make dietary changes to impact their health.  Change is best when it has a logical benefit as opposed to change for the sake of change.  Once you have identified the rationale for the change, associate the logic to the emotional benefits.  If a needed change will make life easier on the people in the effort, then they will be happier and have more free time on their hands.  Make the emotional benefits real.  Paint the picture of the emotion that will persist if the change is not achieved.  Some people are motivated by movement toward pleasure; others are motivated by movement away from pain.  Lastly, slice changes into bite-size pieces.  Recognize progress, reward the wins and build momentum for continued change. The medical community suggests that learning new habits is one key to warding off brain malfunction.  So, if we give ourselves the opportunity to experience change we are fueling brain health along the way.     

PerSyst Welcomes Steve O'Neill

Ben and I are very pleased to announce that Steve O’Neill recently joined PerSyst Consulting. Steve has over 25 years of experience working with companies from start-ups to Fortune 500. His expertise is in maximizing company’s performance and profitability by identifying and improving customer-focused business processes, operations, and programs.

Steve had a 23 year theme park career with that started with Walt Disney World. He describes his time with Disney as “summer job that lasted 21 years”. Steve led operations staffs of over 500 employees, in some of the most challenging and high volume hospitality environments in the world. Steve will tell you, that his passion for world class customer experience was learned and perfected while at Disney. Steve had the privilege of working alongside some of the world’s best creative minds and storytellers in developing new theme parks while with Walt Disney Company and Universal Studios. Steve has significant expertise in the flow and management of people and activity through an environment and has helped to create desired experience for targeted participants.

Following Disney and Universal, Steve had a diverse career at Starbucks serving in multiple Director Positions. His experience ranged from building process and support teams critical to the scalable and highly profitable growth of Licensed Stores to the redevelopment of design criteria for all Starbucks stores resulting in many of the key features found in today’s retail stores.

Steve’s experience and breadth of functional knowledge position him to provide thought leadership and executive coaching to companies looking to close the gap between strategy and execution. His addition to the PerSyst team brings extensive depth of experience to our group as we continue to grow and deliver exceptional results to our clients.

Do You Know Where Your 'IT' Is?

How long has it been since you’ve had an IT audit of your organization?

Have you added new technology in your company in the last several years?  Are your systems documented with graphical depictions or illustrations that provide current information about your server environment, external security, internal security, and your back up system?  Do you know how your virus software is updated and company and client personal and confidential information is secured?   How up to date are your mission critical systems and what productivity gains are you missing as a result of older versions of software?  Does your business intelligence provide you the information that you need readily and in the most efficient and reliable manner?  Is your reporting capability timely and hassle-free?  What is your plan for a single point of failure contact for your IT system?  What plan is in place if that contact is not available?  Do you have a disaster recovery plan?  These are just a few of the questions that can plague an IT environment if these issues are not thought through, provisioned for and properly documented before an incident occurs.  An annual IT audit is a sound annual business practice.