Three constants in life. Death, taxes and change. The pace of change is increasing. It comes in many forms. It’s not going away.
In my experience most organisational change fails, for a whole lot of reasons, but mostly – lack of planning, lack of involvement of those who will be most affected by it and sadly, arrogance.
If you want to achieve effective organisational change, and let’s face it, that’s what leaders do, you have to get a couple of things right, in a particular order. My colleague, Ian Berry, has a great approach to change.
First, we need to commit to changing personally. Then we need to, collectively, commit to changing our relationships, and then, and only then, can we achieve organisational change.
Don’t make the mistake of ramming change down people’s throats as they’ll only resist. If you open yourself to changing personally and you get your guys to agree to improving relationships, you’ll have set up for successful organisational wide change.