Failing to assess the organisation’s readiness is one of the biggest errors leaders can make when embarking on a major change effort. As a result, they risk imposing change on an organisation that is unwilling or unable to adopt it. Executives are often so focused on what they have concluded is the right solution, that they often overlook the organisations’ capacity to make the change. This leads them to vastly underestimate the time, resources, and effort that will be required to be successful. Paradoxically, a large part of the success hinges on the leadership’s active role in supporting, equipping, and preparing people to make change. To do that, they need to first assess where they are and what gaps they need to fill. Show To visualise this, let’s use a popular metaphor for a difficult undertaking, climbing Mount Everest. If you were going to send someone to climb Mount Everest, would you send them without regard for their physical and mental capacity to manage the journey? Would you send them knowing that they have not yet acquired the skills to make the climb? Would you send them without first obtaining the proper oxygen, mountaineering equipment, a guide, or Sherpas to assist them? Similarly, not equipping your organisation for change puts employees, customers, the management team, and the shareholders at risk. Yet, leaders often expect their people to take on monumental change efforts without providing them with the training, tools, and equipment they need to reach their goal. As if things could not get any worse, some leaders even ask them to do it again and again and again allowing the pressures of the journey to overwhelm even the most committed employees, leaving them helpless, discouraged, sceptical, and disengaged. How to Assess if Organisation is Ready for Change?Smart change leaders first determine their organisation's fitness for making the change then build their plans to manage it forward thus mitigating the risk and raising the probability of success. A good readiness assessment should collect data on and evaluate at least these seven key elements:
Download: Building Enterprise Change Capability with Project ECM Of course, organisational readiness is not a black or white question. Readiness exists on a continuum and leaders will have to continuously probe, sense, and then decide whether they need to do more to drive readiness. Unfortunately, more often than not, the tendency is to not address these topics at all. The reasons for this are varied. In many cases, leaders have not been educated in the people side of change so they are not aware of the need. For some, they believe that if the change is the right one, employees will simply jump on board and enthusiastically adopt the change. For others, they may feel that raising these topics will create resistance or at the least raise challenging questions about the change. How to Succeed When Implementing Organisational Change?Yet, these circumstances are exactly why raising these questions are so important. Answering these critical questions allow insight into the organisation readiness enabling leaders to scan and reveal hidden challenges that would eventually jeopardise the success of a change. Successful organisations succeed not simply because of the presence of charismatic and visionary leaders that know it all. They succeed because these leaders understand the people that make up the organisation and their willingness and capability to drive and adopt change. The best leaders are the ones that prepare and equip their people and enable them the greatest opportunity for success. Want to Develop Your Change Management Capability?If you would like to learn about Prosci's change management methodology and become a successful change leader, find out more about our virtual instructor-led, three-day learning experience and gain a world leading certification. During the course, you will learn how to apply Prosci’s methodology to an existing project and network with other change leaders. Download our Change Management Practitioner Programme brochure to find out more about the course. The programme is also available on a private-basis for your organisation.You may also be interested in our upcoming Prosci Virtual Enterprise Change Management Bootcamp. The workshop is aimed at those charged with developing organisational change management capability. It takes delegates through the steps required to build a compelling case for Enterprise Change Management in their organisations, and shows them how to use Prosci’s Change Management Maturity Model™ to assess and improve organisational change management capability. |