When Stephen Elop took the helm at Nokia in 2010, the company was falling fast. Apple, Android and Chinese manufacturers were grabbing business on all price-fronts; brand loyalty was dropping; product innovation was stalled. “Nokia, our platform is burning”, Elop wrote to analysts. If his firm didn’t make a fast leap of faith, they would be consumed by “multiple points of scorching heat …fuelling a blazing fire around them.
”Few businesses have to compete with the likes of Apple, but the fear caused by impending change is something most business owners will know and understand. For organisations who’ve started working with one of our part-time marketing directors, the prospect of change is a necessary cost, however. They’ve engaged us to help them grow, and that growth will come from, or result in, changes to their organisation.
Change management stops this resistance being a burden on business. It’s the trapeze swinging away from the burning platform to a new, more profitable normal, says Sue Firth of Firth Consulting. So what does an effective change management strategy look like?
The Ripple Effect
In a business, no change can happen in isolation. Investing in a part-time marketing director will boost leads, which will affect sales, which will affect delivery and production teams.
Ally Maughan of People Puzzles understands this ripple effect well. When Ally engaged us to help build her business, People Puzzles was a typical HR consultancy serving clients on an ad-hoc basis. Working with The Marketing Centre helped Ally to pivot her business to provide part-time HR directors to SMEs. This shift generated ten-fold growth and necessitated change in every part of the organisation, including its sales, marketing and IT systems. “You change one little thing, and ten people have to behave differently, and then thirty other people have to behave differently as well”, says Ally. “Before you know it, everybody’s had to go through a change process.”
Changes like these can be both deep and far-reaching. When Ally decided to shift her business model, even the language her staff used had to shift: “If our team walked around and said ‘we’re consultants, shall we help you with a project?’, we wouldn’t have become an embedded, part-time service that operates within businesses, because we’d still be thinking about ourselves as consulting advisors.”
Understanding the nature and scale of the change sought – and whether a business can cope with the shift – is therefore an essential first step in planning for that change.
All Aboard
Business owners and managers are not alone on their burning platform. Every employee needs to understand that the platform they are on today is disappearing, and tomorrow, by necessity, must be different.
Ally explains that – too often – staff will assume that “change” means “redundancy”. Those who don’t fear for their job will resist change through habit, self-motivation or lack of understanding. At best, these staff will be left unable to function in an improved business. At worst, they will bring new operations to a halt. For this reason, an effective change strategy will prepare for resistance by staff; it will plan for training to communicate why and how the business is going to change; and it will make provision for when staff refuse or are unable to get on board with the new normal – either by finding new staff or transitioning existing ones into altered roles.
Because the knock-on effects of any change spread so quickly and widely, it’s essential that change be communicated across all levels of the business. Executive teams become frustrated when their proposed changes are not actioned by staff; teams often resist developments they cannot understand. Planning for communication is therefore key to planning for change.
Today, tomorrow, the day after
Teams not prepared to jump onto the trapeze will stay stuck on the burning platform; those left swinging for too long will drop into the net below. Incidents like these can upset a business and derail development. For that reason, change should be planned for and managed from the offset, and continue throughout, and after, the change process. This can mean building a strategy that stretches for weeks, months and even years. Strategies will evolve over time. But most crucial is that they are followed through to their logical end, with no half-measures.
“Change is not change unless people do something differently tomorrow than they were doing yesterday”, says Ally.
Business owners, be brave. Make the jump.
Seeking to change or grow your business? Take our Marketing 360 Healthcheck to kickstart the process.
