This blog is a short summary of our April’s The ITP Digital Leaders Lab breakfast, a monthly leadership conversation about delivering value from your technology investments. The format of the discussion is a short presentation by a guest speaker followed by a lean coffee style discussion where we learn from each other and gives you plenty of opportunity to raise and engage in the questions you are seeking answers to.
“Change is inevitable in any organisation and today more often than not, that change is caused by advances in technology. As technology continues to cause or foreshadow change and disruption one of the greatest corporate challenges is managing change and overcoming employee resistance to change. Also, much of today’s change is driven by technology, IT leaders and their teams are often in the middle of the change challenge and to be successful today’s IT leaders need to be as change and culturally competent as they are technically competent. But what does this mean and how can IT leaders acquire and grow these cultural and change management skills?”
Our guest this month was David Graham, Principal Consultant and Practice Manager, ITNewCom. David has over 20 years of experience as an executive leader specialising in business development,using Technology as an enabler for business with international experience in leading complex transitions and large programme experience across many and varied sectors. He has a strong governance, commercial and negotiation leadership skills. David’s slides can be found here and a quick summary of the subsequent conversation follows:
You need to sell the change. When we talk about sell the change what we are really saying is that you need to get buy-in to the change. People buy or buy-in when they need something, when they see there is a benefit for them. It is actually quite hard to “sell ice to Eskimo’s”
We need to put the customer at the centre of the change. In this sense the customer means the person or people impacted, who need to change rather than the more classical “who pays” definition.
There was also a view that perhaps we are looking at this from the wrong perspective. John Kotter (perhaps the world’s leading expert on change) talks about communicating change not selling.
Focus on gaining small wins. Getting small wins shows that the new ways can work and it demonstrates progress. This helps to build momentum and momentum is important to overcoming resistance. From an organisational perspective small early wins provide early value and this in turn makes it more likely that the executive will persist with the investment and complete the work required.
Several high profile IT project failures were discussed and it was noted that there were no small gains, but were classic large and complex projects. It was agreed that we need to move to many small and simple changes (because we are good at delivering these) and less large and complex project delivery.
Focus on progress not change. Progress implies that we are getting better and progressing towards an agreed goal, it has direction and purpose. Change is just change, it’s directionless. Leaders should focus more on creating progress (through ongoing small wins) than managing change.
We don’t tend to do this, however, we tend to emphasise change. As an example, it was mentioned that every job description we have talked about change and perhaps it should be about progress.
Manage change or simply recruit new team. Most established businesses struggle to change, particularly if that change is of the nature of new businesses, new products and new markets unrelated to existing businesses. In these cases it is often better to recruit new talent rather than try and develop your existing talent in the new market space. Another option is to buy businesses who are doing this and bring them into your broader offering. If you are interested in this conversation you may find this blog useful.
Where does the resistance come from – top or bottom or both. In reality resistance can come from anywhere – from shareholders, the Board, the Executive team, middle management or the team. The key is to identify it and then work to resolve it. I put the case that often leaders create the resistance by the way they announce, manage and justify the change. The underlying conversation is negative. Where we are today is wrong. What we have done to get us here is wrong. We have decided that this is unacceptable and you must change. Yes, leaders are more subtle than this, but it is the underlying message and it invalidates the team. The problem is that there is a social equivalent to Newton’s third law that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” in this case a reaction against the leaders characterisation that it is the teams fault.
And that was our discussion. Thank you to those who were there and contributed to the conversation. What was your major take away from the day?
For those who weren’t there, what would you add to our conversation?