Change Management – Another Instance of Management 101 Getting it Wrong

Change Management is a idiom often heard these days where I work. I’m sure you know what it refers to – the process of implementing change in an organization and converting employee’s initial reactions of fear/anger/doubt to ones of discovery/understanding and ownership. The management steps used in this process involve opening up the avenues of communication to explain why the change is being made, providing training as needed, dealing with resistance, aligning employee and company needs, obtaining buy-in, implementing, and repeating – or some variations thereof.

I never bought into this approach and have recently figured out why. First off, it starts the communication and gathering of input process too late – only after the decision has been made. In reality, employees should be part of the problem formulation and solution formation from the start and not only after the powers above have declared some particular change is needed. My second objection is more fundamental in that this approach espouses certain kinds of activities and communication approaches only during major change, when in reality the proper change management approach is simply a good every day management approach. Since the default is to do today whatever you did yesterday, nearly every decision made represents some kind of change. Why do we worry about communicating with employees, aligning needs and strategies, and getting buy-in only when we see some decision as part of a change management process and not otherwise? It just doesn’t make sense. Good communication and employee involvement make good management sense always – whether or not the company is going through a major change.

It is not so much that the basic change management approach gets it wrong (and I’m sure some change management proponents adopt more sophisticated approaches which solve my implementation objections), it is more that it implies you need to worry about good management practices only during a big change and not otherwise. It is this implicit tolerance of bad management practices being the norm that I find the most troublesome and fundamentally bad for the organization. Good change management is simply good management. It doesn’t need to be separated into its own discipline.

By all means, communicate with employees, get their opinions, align their needs with those of the company, and monitor the implementation of new projects, but do this early and do it al the time! Manage this way and you’ll never have to talk about the change cycle or change management again.