Like a good chess player, successful businesses are always thinking a few steps ahead of their current situation. Never content with the status quo, the firms that win more games than they lose are accustomed to embracing the notion of change, and incorporating it into the philosophy and ongoing operation of the organization.
Yet implementing the mechanisms that eventually foster a culture that welcomes change throughout the organization is no easy task. With countless departments often working in their own spheres and with their own approaches to change management, getting an organization of hundreds or thousands of individual employees on the same course is the monumental challenge that faces the modern enterprise. As University of Waterloo professor Teresa Rose simply puts it, “It’s just complex. Trying to manage organizations and lead organizations is hugely complex. So don’t try to come up with a single answer by jumping on a bandwagon and saying, ‘We’ll change it and we’ll win.’”
As a professor in the Master of Management Science Program in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ont., Rose researches change within organizations — how it’s carried out, what factors determine successful change, and what dangers exist for any company wishing to more fully embrace the concept.
Rose observes that a danger exists in adopting a method of change that might be popular at a certain time but which might not be an appropriate vehicle for a particular company. One current example of this is the rush to increase the amount of collaboration between groups and departments to more effectively bring about change. “I think we need to collaborate a lot, but I think there is a bandwagon effect (that says) ‘OK, we’ve got to get together’ rather than having some thought process about what we want to achieve, who needs to be there, what are the costs of collaboration, what are the costs of not collaborating, what is the time frame, etc.” If a firm attempts to institute more collaboration but does not give it the time or resources required to make it fly, the effort is destined to fail, Rose says.
“What I see a lot is the desire and the intent for collaboration, and it’s all good, but it’s being attempted without the supportive structure to make the outcome good.” One trend Rose sees happening is the idea that collaboration is becoming so prevalent that some workers are becoming “collaborationed out.”
She uses an example of a health care initiative that spans across multiple disciplines and hospitals, involving many different practitioners. Often, one or two such participants’ expertise will become so crucial to the project’s success that they are called upon to do more and more around it.
“What they see is that their expertise is valued and (the effort) will probably not work without it, but they begin to get pulled outside their role of medical technician, of serving the patient, and pulled into administrative issues,” Rose says. “They’re pulled away from what they want to do, which is maintaining their patient base. What you see is they say, ‘I can’t do this for very long.’”
Being prepared Rose says that effective change management comes about when those driving and directing the change have done their homework and decided that the methods to be used will indeed result in a more efficient organization. Often, this guidance originates at the executive level and spreads to other arms of the firm.
“It has to be something that the top is aware of and something that filters down, so that when departments throughout the organization set out to do a collaboration project, they set out with this awareness that, yes, collaboration is a good thing,” Rose says.
Involved parties, she adds, “need to be on board together at the start about the objective, about how it is going to take place, and to know what it means for me personally and for my organization.”
Rose asserts that the IT department’s role in the implementation of change management practices within a company can be a large one, and can occur in two different streams.
“IT has so many potential roles that they can play in the organization, whether it’s devising or supporting a communication strategy that‘s happening at the top to supporting it at a very technical level across every department,” she says.
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