Our Perspective: Leadership at the Frontlines of Change
Research shows that ineffective change management is the leading cause of failures in business transformation. With up to 70% of transformations failing, it’s crucial for every leader to understand and implement effective change management to ensure their organization is among the successful 30%. No matter how sophisticated an industry or how advanced the technology, people are behind it all. Change management interventions focusing on critical people touch points make the difference between anticipated gains and overwhelming losses from transformation projects.
Appreciating the crucial role of effective change management in successful business transformations, many organizations invest 10%- 15% of project fees in change management, with some spending upwards of 30% of their project expenses on change management. Most of this budget goes to people resources, with investment in certifying in-house change practitioners at the very top. Despite the investment in change practitioners, organizations struggle to translate value into successful transformations.
There are two reasons for this:
1. The misunderstanding of the role of change practitioners in enabling change.
2. The ineffectiveness of change partners in overcoming resistance to change.
The misunderstanding of the role of the change practitioner:
The change practitioner’s role is to develop strategies and plans to facilitate the people side of a transformation project management. While they design the plans for the sponsor and line manager, they are not responsible for executing those plans. The communication, training, and coaching is the responsibility of management, and other supporting roles. Giving change practitioners employee-facing responsibilities removes them from their core and critical roles. It undermines the change management effort because they are often not the ones people want to hear from in times of upheaval.
The change practitioner’s role is to design and develop the strategies and systems that facilitate change. It is not to deploy people-facing communication, training, and coaching that enables successful change management.
The Executive Sponsor
Prosci reports that not having a credible and compelling executive sponsor is among the top three causes of people’s resistance to change. The executive sponsor provides the political authority and operational authorizations to keep the transformation on course. On the contrary, where the executive sponsor lacks the credibility and communication to influence buy-in, change practitioners struggle to overcome people’s resistance toward successful implementation. The absence of an effective executive sponsor is particularly dangerous to a specific category line managers.
Change practitioners must focus on winning line manager buy-in to enable successful transformation. They can do this by facilitating collaboration between the executive sponsor, line managers, and the project team to co-create adoption strategies and solutions and ensure skills transfer through training and coaching to maximize adoption and ensure the transformation’s success.
The Line Manager
The battle for transformation is won and lost along functional lines. With people organized in functional units, line managers have a greater influence on their behavior than other positions. During a transformation initiative, the line manager’s attitude and actions often decide how effectively, if at all, the initiative will be adopted. To this end, as far as employees are concerned, their line manager wields greater power to influence outcomes than the executive sponsor. As the gatekeepers of their domains, when line managers lose trust in the executive sponsor, change practitioner, or project team’s credibility, they can be the first to resist change – signaling to those under their charge to do the same.
“With people organized in functional units, line managers have a greater influence on their behavior than other positions.”