At the same time, as the cause of the change, particularly if it is a difficult change that impacts on people’s jobs or ways of working, you can expect to see a wave of emotion directed at you.
“The challenge here is to be able to understand what your people need of you throughout the change and be able to support their needs,” Cropley says. “This takes time and just when the workload heats up for you during change, so does the need to spend more time with your people. The trap I often see senior leaders falling into is throwing a few additional resources in to help manage the change without fully realising how much they are actually required to be active in managing the change.”
Cropley says that when it comes to developing the skills to manage change, a good place to start is to firstly observe your own reactions during a major change. How did you feel at the time? What need did you have from your leader? Research peers and find out how they have handled change before. Also ensure you get in a good change communications practitioner to help you manage the change.
Cropley says the senior leader’s role includes firstly setting context for change: Why this change? Why now? “Ensure there is a clear line of sight for your staff between the change and direction of the business,” he says.
But it also involves understanding the emotions people go through during change. “Equip yourself with the knowledge around the emotional journey people travel during change and be active throughout the change process responding with the right strategy at the right time,” Cropley says.
“This includes things like just being able to listen early in the change when staff are going through shock. Giving clear direction and being able to respond to questions staff have, and encouraging and rewarding as people start making progress towards the new.”
Is There a Technology-Free Solution?
Sometimes technology doesn’t enable change, it just gets in the way
Another question CIOs in particular sometimes forget to ponder is whether the desired transformation could be better achieved without applying technology. Red Cross Australia CIO Warren Don says such a situation arose when he was working in the pharmaceuticals business in the United States.
“We had 4500 field reps whose job was to visit doctors and present the information about the new drugs. We decided that we would implement a CRM system where we would segment and target the markets, and we would only send the sales force into those doctors whose prescribing habits changed after a visit by one of our reps. We spent $188 million on a project to deliver CRM to the sales force, but the sales force was located in many non-city areas where we couldn’t get even the best US broadband out to them, and we found that the amount of data that we tried to ship didn’t happen. We could have done it much more easily simply by printing reports or we could have done it by delivering CDs with the data on it, but we tried to use online-to-handheld computers and in the end we wrote off $188 million because it didn’t work.”
“There are a lot of people who think that simply because the technology exists, it works, and that by applying the technology all their problems are going to be solved,” Don says. “But it really gets down to investigating the strategy of the organisation. What is this strategy and how is this going to deliver the means of achieving this strategy? And in the case of the pharmaceutical company, really our strategy was we only wanted to visit doctors whose prescribing habits could change. Why did we have to spend all this money on the technology? We already have the data, all we had to do was find a way of getting it to the field staff. And so we put in a massive technical solution, and it was tenuous at best that it was ever going to work.”
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