Recently I’ve been talking with people about organizational changes and how the implementation of them is often done in one of two ways.
- Change done to you or,
- change that you are a part of implementing.
In life we all know that change occurs that, as individuals, we feel is being forced upon us; that feeling of something being done to us. This may be something such as a lover breaking the romance off or a boss giving you a pink slip. Needless to say, having change “done to you” doesn’t usually feel good.
Organizational Health
When we think about communities and organizations we generally think in terms of the organizational “health”. What does a healthy organization look like? Every organization will have their own checklist but a couple pretty standard ones that I can think of are that they:
- are producing enough output to maintain or expand the organization;
- are maintaining an environment that fosters good morale; and,
- are innovative and create a vibrancy.
The Death of Morale
One sure way to kill innovation, vibrancy and eventually production is to kill morale. When your organizations chooses to operate using a process of “doing to” instead of “doing with” you run a very high risk of killing morale. In the short-run you will realize the change you hoped to implement but consider the costs associated with killing morale.
- Employee turnover = organizational knowledge deficit.
- Employee silence = workers will no longer feel that their opinion matters and will stop providing innovative ideas; instead they’ll look for outside opportunities to share those ideas.
- Employee revolt = consider all of the opportunities employees now have to express their opinion about thier personal lives (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Can your organization overcome 10-100-1000 employees spreading the word-of-mouth opinion that your organization is broken? Imagine each one of those employees has an average of 150 friends that might not just read that message but re-link it?
Changing Together
So how do you avoid the “doing to” type of change? There’s no single answer but here’s the general idea.
- Include everyone in the path of the possible change an opportunity to share their knowledge with the work group that is ultimately tasked with making the decision.
- Use technology to provide those people with a chance to follow the decision process as closely as they choose.
- Clearly show how their concerns are being addressed (either with a bulletproof explanation about why something can’t be done or an acknowledgement that a change came about due to a specific person or groups suggestion).
- Never assume that a person within the organization knows about a change that is coming; be explicit with announcements and be overly inclusive in your change initiatives.
Remember, the change you do to someone else is an open invitation to changes your organization might not be able to afford.