Is change management about to change?
A few years ago I had a conversation about change with Mike Osterling. My lean manufacturing mentor and consultant. The topic revolved around change management and how it became easier as an organization embraced constant change as part of its culture. My theory was that at some point there would be no need for change management if change became part of the culture and the operating environment. Mike respectfully disagreed.
At that point our discussion was focused on organizations that struggled with change and struggled adapting to a changing environment. A place in time where leaders had to nudged the members of their organization to rethink the way things were being done. Leaders pushed to reinvent the business and innovate. This was the period in time that made reengineering popular. The challenge of leadership was to make sure the team kept up with a changing environment.
Times are changing. Leaders beware: your challenge when it comes to change management is about to shift.
The generation that entered the workforce with the mindset of building a life long career with a steady hand in a corporation is at retirement age. Leadership positions are now being filled by the generation that challenged the status quo. A generation of leaders that learned to manage change and developed executive skills to push the previous generation towards innovation is gradually facing the challenge of managing a generation that does not know status quo. The dream of a culture of change has been realized. These coming generations are built on a higher rate of change.
Consider that everything we do is based on intervals. Everything we do is a cycle. From communication to our strategic planning. Those intervals are getting shorter. Our main form of communication has gone from letters to emails to txt msgs. Our planning horizons are shorter. We are iterating faster. We correct faster. Which is good right? The next generation of executives is built on speed, multitasking and bursts. A generation that feels a phone call is restrictive because you can only carry one conversation at a time.
We are at the inflection where the challenge of change managment is going to shift from helping teams transition to keeping teams focused and helping them stay on track.
Am I getting old?
Jose Ruiz is Principal and Executive Search Consultant in Heidrick & Struggles. You can share your views of this article or aything related to the manufacturing, maquiladora operations or executive search at: jruiz@heidrick.com
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Jose
My “Google alert” pointed me to your blog post
Your post was worth reading twice (which I did), and I loved your closing line “We are at the inflection where the challenge of change management is going to shift from helping teams transition to keeping teams focused and helping them stay on track.” Indeed our attention spans are even shorter than they were in the past (and that has been one of the constant criticism of American management – our ability to focus and stay the course). With interest I have read the results of “multi-tasking” studies which demonstrate that multi-tasking is in fact a fallacy – it is the rare person who can truly do two “tasks” at once. In fact “interruption science” is showing that trying to multi-task hinders most people’s effectiveness and the time to recover from interruptions is significant.
Thanks for the stimulating post.
Regards,
Mike
Jose
I have been working in lean/kaizen/CI environments now for 19 years and the one area that I feel is missed or not understood fully is the area around senior managers (CEO, COO, MD’s, VP’s etc.) and middle managers and that is when we talk about ‘change’, I rarely see any real change in behaviours, there is still a need of managers to keep the status quo, I rarely if ever see behavioural change and I do not see managers being taught to implement lean on the “shop floor” getting their hands dirty, I am constantly amazed to see senior managers thinking they can implement lean from their offices..!
Alongside change I do not see real leadership, leadership with charisma, and an attitide of we can do this but we managers need to come down to your levels and work with you
Why do we still have offices seperate from the shop floor, workers expect to see small, simplistic, expectations of managers working with workers, we also do not seed managers realisation that operators can be trusted to control data, facts, and finance. The worker can do it at home with tghe house, finance, childrens safety, etc. but we do not give them that trust at work, not always
Hope this helps the debate
Kind Regards
Robbie Howarth