What do employers want from their employees: knowledge or competence? I visited a client recently who told me they were re-orienting their training because they needed people who can do things, they distinguished between “know how and know what”. Know how is knowledge, often raw and not contexualised, classically this knowledge is gained in a …
Tag archives: line management
Change Saturation
Too Much Change Many people in organisations are reporting that they are doing “too much change”. Which usually means they feel they are not able to cope with the changes they are being asked to carry out. To understand what this means we need to look at three forces going on in an organisation: The …
Middle managers to drive change
What does it take to succeed in change? Middle managers in most organisations have a huge influence over the success of organisational change. Most middle managers are passive about change; a few step up to delivering change; all of them need to be behind the change. Some recent blogs point to how to get middle …
Change Advocates — a good idea?
The idea of advocating change Change advocates both promote change in a business and help protect staff from poor change implementation. They do this by advocating the change on behalf of the business and being a channel between affected staff and senior managers. The role demands trust and respect from both staff and managers; here …
Making change personal
Using change to grow yourself In the April 2014 Harvard Business Review I found a paper about creating a very open culture to encourage personal learning by Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller called “Making Business Personal“. The starting premise of the paper is that ’employees do a second job that no …
It's still the Senior Manager wot did it
Contributors to Change Success A recent email from Prosci about their 2013 survey (results published this year) lists the top seven contributors to change success. This is probably the most important result from the survey and the most widely reported. Top of the list, again, and by a large margin is ‘active and visible executive …
Mid-Level Managers: the new superhero
Mid Level Managers as Superhero In a recent blog post on the Harvard Business Review web site Behnam Tabrizi reported on some research he had undertaken on why change and innovation (a pre-curser to change) didn’t work. The article is focused on Leadership but I found some powerful snippets about doing change.
Change saturation – change centres on stakeholders
Its the stakeholders that decide if a change is a success or failure. No matter how hard the change team plan a change, nor how creatively the team designs a change; if the stakeholders don’t buy in the change will not happen. Prosci are collecting data for their next research survey of organisations. To promote …
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Do you need a Change Manager?
A couple of recent experiences, training and consulting, have tested my assumption that a change manager (or change team) is needed to deliver a successful change.