How CEOs should choose change plans for positive impact on firms

Jepkemoi sat back in her chair and peered out the window of her executive office. As Friday afternoon neared its end, she prepared to leave the office.

As the CEO of a Kenyan cement company, Jepkemoi engaged three different consulting firms to assess how to make changes and improve her company.
Each consultancy spent three weeks at the firm and gave presentations to the management team on problem diagnosis and change intervention recommendations.

Jepkemoi decided to fly down to Zanzibar for the weekend to review the three different change proposals from three different consulting companies. She endeavoured to choose the change interventions that would yield the most positive change for the company.

How should Jepkemoi choose her firm’s change initiatives?

First, she should judge the organisation’s characteristics against those of the change intervention. The change initiative should not disrupt the managerial philosophy, strategy, structure, or environment unless those were specific change targets. If Jepkemoi chooses a change initiative in congruence with her firm, the more likely that the likely change initiative would get institutionalised.

Further, the degree to which an organisation’s environment and technology change frequently may affect the success of implementing a change initiative.

In a hyper-change environment from external forces, executives must buffer any change scheme from other changes taking place. Also, if a firm is unionised or if it operates in a heavily regulated industry, then diffusions of change interventions becomes more difficult.

Second, Jepkemoi must assess the intervention’s characteristics. How specific are the goals of the intervention? Specificity of goals helps direct socialising activities to particular behaviours required to implement the intervention, including training and orienting new members.

It also helps operationalise new behaviours so that rewards can be linked clearly to them. An intervention aimed only at increasing product quality is likely to be more focused and readily put into operation than a change for employees.

Also, the intervention’s programmability whereby its degree to which the changes can be programmed or the extent to which the different intervention characteristics can be specified clearly in advance to enable socialisation, commitment, and reward allocation. The change programme can be planned and designed to promote specific features.

Additionally, the level of the change target also proves important. If you intend to change an individual versus a group or a department the whole organisation will impact the success. If you intend to change an area of the firm less than the whole organisation, then the diffusion of that group into the general institution may prove difficult.

If the group change does not match the trends in the firm at large, then the likelihood of the change sticking in the group becomes less likely.

Why? Because other forces within the firm not experiencing the change may push back substantially. Others may not appreciate a subculture or may feel jealous or disdain as a specific group’s initiative “may not have been invented by them”.

Further, internal support entails the degree to which there is a system within to guide the change process. Internal support can gain commitment for the changes and help organisation members implement them.

Jepkemoi must decide whether her internal support system might any of the three consultant proposals. An internal support system may be supported by consultants, but really needs internal sponsorship.

Sponsorship involves the presence of a powerful supporter who can initiate, allocate, and legitimise resources for the intervention. Sponsors really need to come from all levels within the organisation and must hold enough visibility and power to nurture the change intervention and see that it remains visible.

Thankfully, with Jepkemoi, she herself as the CEO supports the possible initiatives.

Third, Jepkemoi must consider the institutionalisation process for the change intervention. Socialisation is the transmission of information about beliefs, preferences, norms, and values with respect to the intervention. Because implementation of organisation development interventions generally involves considerable learning and experimentation, a continual process of socialisation is necessary to promote persistence of the change programme.

Since Kenyan firms generally value team building, then every team building activity must reinforce the socialisation goals of the change initiative. Games, humour, and working together can strengthen the ideals in employees’ minds with regards to timeliness, performance, efficiency, togetherness, or whatever underpinning emotion is needed to facilitate the specific change process.

The socialisation should lead to commitment that binds employees to behaviours associated with the intervention. It includes initial commitment to the change programme as well as reinforcement over time.

Opportunities for commitment should allow people to select the necessary behaviours freely, explicitly, and publicly. These conditions favour high commitment and can promote stability of the new behaviours.

Then, Jepkemoi would allocate rewards linking them with the new behaviours required by the intervention. Next, an executive should be aware of the likelihood of diffusion, which entails transferring interventions from one system to another.

Many interventions fail to hold because they run counter to the values and norms of the organisation. Rather than support the interventions, the larger organisation rejects the changes and often puts pressure on the change target to revert to old behaviours. Diffusion reduces this counter-implementation force. It tends to lock in behaviours by providing normative consensus from others.

Finally, Jepkemoi must sense and calibrate directing deviations from desired intervention behaviours and take corrective action when outcomes do not match intended results.

Institutionalised behaviours invariably encounter destabilising forces, such as changes in the environment, new technologies, and pressures from other departments to nullify changes.

Ever have to decide between two or more change initiatives? Possess any advice to share with other Business Daily readers? Share your experiences at #KenyaEconomics on Twitter.

Prof Scott serves as the director of the New Economy Venture Accelerator at USIU’s Chandaria School of Business and Colorado State University, www.ScottProfessor.com, and may be reached on: [email protected] or follow on Twitter: @ScottProfessor.