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The negative side of change - how companies screw it up!
1. Regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it's new and because it's from below.
2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other levels of management to get their signatures.
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals. (That saves you the job of deciding; you just pick the survivor).
4. Express your criticisms freely, and withhold your praise. (That keeps people on their toes.) Let them know they can be fired at any time.
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area isn't working.
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret, and spring them on people unexpectedly. (That also keeps people on their toes!!).
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given out to managers freely. (You don't want data to fall into the wrong hands.)
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegate and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move people around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.
On a more serious note, the more fundamental reasons are tied in with the inability of the change leaders (or change champions or whatever phrase you like) to consider the needs, feelings and responses of people who they need to bring with them. If you are about to go through a change programme it may pay to raise the awareness and understanding of your leaders and managers of how people may react and why. They can then plan to handle this process positively.
We would be delighted to meet with you to explore how we can help you with identifying your culture or implementing a change programme. If you want to find out how we can do it, contact us.
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"Thornbury Associates were prepared to work with me to tailor the approach so that it exactly met my needs. Through a planned programme of training, assessment and process redesign, together we delivered a significant reduction of risk in the product development portfolio."
Estelle Clark, European VP, Alstom Power
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