How does your organisation 'do' change? Two of the most common approaches are to:
1) Outsource it: We look around the consulting market and choose one of the 'big names' to send in an experienced team to lead our business change programme (this reduces our risk, right?).
2) Draw on our central change team pool: We fill our initiative management team with good experienced candidates located in our central pool of change management resources.
But the change doesn't quite work...
There are of course many reasons, such as forgetfulness that a consultancy partner has its own business case that does not always overlap our own. However, I have found that a common reason is the perception held by those on whom the change is being imposed. They look at the change professionals, and see their suits, their notebooks or clipboards. They hear them speaking a strange language full of change industry jargon. They hear them talk of unrealistic operational improvements that are not validated with those expected to realise them. They see them talk to the boss, but never the 'bossed'. They see them come from the ivory towers of headquarters, and scurry back to them immediately after, seemingly indifferent to the feelings of those left behind to sustain the newly-implemented operational behaviours. In fact, as far as they can tell, the change professionals seem to have landed from a completely different planet.
Increasingly organisations are spotting this problem and correctly seek to resolve it by appointing a local representative already working in the operation that will experience the change.
This appointment counters the aforementioned problems. The local representative already speaks in the local dialect and so can communicate the change agenda in the commonly-used tongue. They are in tune with the local fashion and dress sense. They are part of the leadership of the area undergoing transformation, and so already have local credibility, and will still be around after it has happened. And they are subject to the same emotions about the change as their colleagues.
Yet it still doesn't work...
Because they are asked to add the leading of their team through the change to the already huge pile of tasks sitting in their very full 'In' tray. Faced with a choice of either resolving a problem related to service delivery for a customer today, or planning the change that is to come, the decision is always easy - today's customer must get priority.
Furthermore, the local manager makes the decision about what is more important to the organisation instead of the strategic decision-makers. By failing to ensure that sufficient organisational resources exist to successfully deliver the transformation, executive management unwittingly hands over prioritisation decisions to their operational management colleagues: and operational priorities trump strategic priorities every time.
The only way that this can be resolved is to be brave enough to reduce the everyday business-as-usual workload of the local change manager. This presumably means paying someone else to do some of their work - providing adequate resources to complete all the business-as-usual and change management tasks. If organisations are unwilling to include these costs in the business case argument for the change, and persist in asking this to be done 'at no cost', they are not being honest about the true cost of change. They also lose the right to complain when the local manager deprioritises the change in favoor of more pressing customer-focused tasks, the change is unsuccessful and the organisation fails to realise the target return on its investment.