Ready for Change
A company where frequent staff cuts were mandated from on high found it had to let a store supervisor go. Here was a guy who had lost his left hand in an accident when he was in his 20s, but was now in his 40s. Everyone agonised for him, but within three weeks he had another job, with a 50 per cent higher salary and greater responsibilities.
“He would never have looked for the job if he hadn’t been forced to do so,” says International Business Improvements proprietor John Cunningham.
There is a popular misconception that people automatically resist change, and tend to be poor adaptors when changes occur, Cunningham says. “Wrong, wrong and wrong again. In fact we are natural adaptors, and therefore constantly ready for and in many ways happy to embrace change,” he says.
“Consider the major changes that we bring upon ourselves: we leave home (where we’ve been nurtured and protected for a couple of decades); we enter into long-term commitments (marriage, business relationships, and families); we change jobs (much more often these days). These all have major impacts on us, yet we seem to be able to move through them with some degree of aplomb,” Cunningham says.
“So what is the problem with change? The problem is we don’t like being forced to change when we don’t understand the reasons for, and the value of, the change itself. Importantly, if we trust the harbinger of change, we much more readily accept it. So here are two key factors in change management, participation and trust, both of which are boosted by communication — very open communication.”
Change is here to stay, and we had better get used to it, Cunningham says. The trap for CIOs and other executives lies in the “insidious lag” between technological change and the outcomes of that change — the way we exploit technology and provide solutions to business — which happens much more slowly.
Getting Personal
Executives often fail to notice things aren’t working quite as well as they used to until a fairly major piece of organisational resuscitation is required — a BIG change, perhaps a transformation.
When that time comes no-one finds leading change easy, but as a senior leader in the organisation everyone turns to the CIO for support, guidance and direction, notes Adrian Cropley, owner of Melbourne-based Change Management Consultancy Cropley Communications.
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