Change Management, A Market-In Approach

Most organisations strive for improvement and want to challenge the status quo and introduce change-large or small. Often the motivation comes from peer group firms. Research suggests that only 20% of the change management projects succeed. The cause of failure of the change management projects differs from organisation to organization. But all follow some prescribed models. Several models do exist in literature as if there can not be a standard model.  At the same time most of the organizations, when trying to introduce a new product or try to enter a new market, follow the age-old process- 5 Ps of marketing. When an organization try to introduce a “Change” they are basically selling an idea to its internal stakeholders- employees of all categories. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when it comes to resistance, management talks about main resistance from Union as they are vocal but ignore soft chronic resistance from managerial staffs. In this conversation we will examine if we take change management is a process of selling an idea within the company how we should go about using the principles of marketing – the 5 Ps of marketing.

The 5 Ps include

Product: In the context of the change, it is the proposed change idea. The idea should be examined from all the stakeholders’ perspectives who will be affected by the change. First, one has to make it sure that what problem or business issues the proposed Change is supposed to solve. Is there any evidence that such a problem exists and it should also be examined that is there any evidence that the proposed change will solve the genuine problem? As a practitioner I have seen not enough thought is given in either of the issues, most often. Imaginary solutions for imaginary problem result frustration, I have experienced it.

Price: In the context of change management, what could be the price? It cannot be measured directly in monetary terms. It is the extra effort that the employees have to exert in order to implement the change and whether the change will help them. If we can not answer the question- what is there for me? Whatever benefit the proposed change brings to the organization, it hardly matters to the employees. Let us take an example of introducing ISO 9000 or TPM or Business Excellence model in an organization. The benefits of such a system in an organization are not beyond question. Enough literature support is there in the extant literature. But there is no doubt that such systems increase the non-value-added activities, mainly in the form of documentation, of the employees across the organization resulting frustration and change-fatigue.  Similar is the case of with implementing a Balance Scorecard, which should bring transparency in evaluation in the organisation and make evaluation objective. It is not that only the employees pay the price, organisations’ productivity do suffer as well.

Promotion: Once you are sure that the idea is saleable, it has its value to the organization and to the people working in the organization, management should think or pay attention to promote the idea among the employees. It has to be designed depending on the context of the organization. Just displaying slogans like,”Zero defect” while your input material is bad, processes are not stable, hardly works. Another common display is “I operate, I maintain” and assigning each machine to an employee or a group of employees including the chief executive, who visits the machine as a checkbox (there are some exceptions) result in nothing. One has to be practical. It is practically not possible for a chief executive to clean a machine on a regular basis. He need not do it; he has other important works to do- like providing resources so that others can actually follow “I operate, I maintain”.

I have an experience of conducting a series of maintenance management programme in a company, where Tribology was a topic, only to discover during the session that the company provides only one type of lubricating oil for all types of machines!

Such gimmick is a perfect recipe for failure of introducing change.

Place:  Within an organization how you will go with the deployment of the changing process- will it be in steps or across the organization. In other words-will, you go one function after another function or you will go with a big bang. One has to be very careful at this stage.   Failure at the beginning is not a good sign for the future. It depends on the size of the company. If you take only a tiny portion of an organization the effect of the change will not be visible at all. At the same time, if you take across the organization at the beginning, it may create chaos.

People: When it comes to people, management thinks of imparting training to the employees. While it is an important activity but before this, management should decide who are the people through whom the idea will be sold. First, identify this group of people, make sure they are convinced about the change process. It must come through a process of open dialogue and argument. It may take time but it is worth spending the time. These people should be trained as sales representatives. They should be able to answer the uncomfortable questions that may be raised during promoting the idea. Often such communications will give important feedback, which should be considered before going for imparting training regarding the changed system. Therefore, a select group of people must be trained to sell the idea and at the same time those are affected should be made capable of implementing the changed process through training.

In the end I do not think this is an entirely new approach but it definitely gives a different perspective on the change management process.