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Change management has matured significantly over the last ten years, and we now have established structures, tools, and processes. But we can mature even more, and I believe that an evidence-based practice will take the discipline to the next level by targeting and improving our activities. When we choose which activities to do and how to design them, most often we are not using the best available knowledge, research, and information and that’s where evidence-based change management (EB-CM) will help. Specifically, EB-CM can add value by 1) Improving our understanding of the change we are facing, 2) improving the design of our activities and 3) effectively monitoring our progress. In some areas of change management, we have to stop guessing and start knowing. EVIDENCE MEETS CHANGE MANAGEMENT The fundamental idea of evidence-based practice is that good quality decisions around change management should be based on a combination ...

Change is hard, difficult and filled with a lot of human reactions, and we often fear how managers and employees will react. But fear not! If handled right, we can convert the negative energy into engagement and turn the strongest dissenter into a dedicated advocate. Change leadership is a part of your leadership role. When you sign the contract and accept the role as leader of a department or even as part of the C-suit, you automatically sign up for leading change. Still many of us struggle with leading change successfully. And by successfully, I mean changing the individual behaviour for all the managers and employees impacted by a change. When resistance to change is converted into engagement early in the process, we can use the energy to mobilize our organization. Whether it is rolling out the next business strategy, our new company IT solution or implementation or ...

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10, 000 ways that won’t work”, said Thomas Edison, who made one of our time’s greatest changes. There is so much truth in that quote. But seriously – who has the time and money for 10, 000 attempts? Nearly a decade ago, I courageously embarked on an adventure of managing the people side of an organisational turnaround. With little preliminary qualifications besides the eagerness that follows ignorance about the complexity of managing a change, I ventured into a journey that ended exactly where we did not want. Here are three take-aways from that educational experience.   Lesson #1 : You need top management involvement  Though the transition was demanded by top management, we struggled with lack of executive commitment from the get-go. With little direction about where they would like us to end up. With lack of resource allocation to manage ...

To succeed with changes, you must be ready to deal with issues such as loss and emotional grief. Complex, emotionally challenging changes have little chance of success, unless the severity of loss is acknowledged and grief is redeemed. As you probably have realised, it is inevitable that changes in your organisation will happen. And often there will be resistance to the changes. The default reaction is to blame employees for being resistant. While this might be the easiest thing to do, it does not deal with the root cause and the real issues. Instead, it is vital that you understand the human dynamics of changes to better support your employees through the process of grief. That is what some organisational changes are to employees: a grief process. Why organisational changes are a loss to employees Have you ever been surprised by employees’ reactions to even small organisational ...

Whether it is 70% or 90% of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) that fail is a much debated topic. It hardly matters though, as both numbers are unacceptably high. Failure is the unrealised potential of the benefits initially calculated. And it can be extremely expensive. But why are we failing? Research shows that current success has very little to do with previous success, as the success and failure rates are similar for both experienced and novice acquirers. In the due diligence phase of an M&A process, the focus is strictly on financial, strategic (products, customers) and legal considerations. A post-mortem analysis of merger failure and underperformance usually only examines the factors that initially determined the decision to engage. The argument here is, that the cause of death (figuratively speaking) is often found where nobody is looking – in the human factors. Here's why  Mergers are decided and designed ...

A Change Management Office (CMO) is a function with the purpose of providing the organisation with a structured approach and a set of tools to manage the people side of changes. Having a CMO can lead to stunning benefits for the organisation. These include that projects meet (and often exceed) their objectives, realising return on investments and maturing the discipline of Change Management in organisation. The benefits are the argument for establishing a CMO. Setting up a CMO is, however, not a straightforward matter. On the contrary there are a variety of approaches that can lead to success – or failure for that matter. So how do you know what elements you should take into account? While there are no one-size-fits-all templates or roadmaps for how to create a successful CMO there are seven questions you should always ask yourself when establishing a Change Management Office: 1. What are the ...

Achieving success with large-scale strategic projects requires more than an excellent strategy and well-prepared plans. You need to understand the people side too: what the company’s culture, people, and behaviours must look like to create the desired results. This is Change Management. And it works! You are six times more likely to succeed in your project implementation when you conduct excellent Change Management, as evidenced by Prosci’s best practice report demonstrated in the figure below Now we established that great Change Management significantly increase project success. But how do you ensure great Change Management is conducted and realize these benefits? That is where a Change Management Office (CMO) comes into the picture. A CMO is a function with the purpose of providing the organisation with a structured approach and a set of tools to manage the people side of the most critical changes. Studies conducted by Prosci show ...

People Analytics is maturing fast. 2017 in particular was a stellar year if the published cases, presentations at various people analytics conferences and interest from the wider HR community is suggesting anything. However, for this trend to take a more permanent grip, it must in my view be recognized as an area of importance across the wider organisation, something it is not currently. An answer to this is to look in another direction – a new avenue. A third avenue I see people analytics used in primarily two areas; 1) making better (evidence-based) HR decisions and 2) solving business issues. The first includes a wide array of things from improving on internal people reporting and scoreboards, engagement surveys to creating predictive models for turnover, talent performance, recruitment success or assessing leadership training and innovation processes. The second area uses people data to answer questions such as “How to ...

In a study by Prosci on practices in change management, 84% of respondents rated cultural awareness as being important or very important when managing change. However in the globalised business market, it can be argued that national cultures have decreased significance as a factor of importance. If a product or service equals a client’s needs, the interest of overseeing cultural and linguistic differences takes priority. Though that might be the case in some areas of business such as negotiation, it is not the case with change management. The main reason is that change management, is an exercise in appealing to individuals or groups of people. For this we need to consider human factors, such as cultural preferences. So, the question is, how do we address cultural diversity to successfully manage change? Mistake #1: Global English is not the cure for cultural deviance As internationalisation has become ...