Transcription
In order to define a change strategy that is tailored for your organization and fits your organization, it's important to start with an organizational assessment. What exactly is this? That's what I want to talk about here today.
My name is Eric Kimberling, and I'm the CEO of Third Stage Consulting. We're an independent consulting firm that helps clients throughout the world reach the third stage of digital transformation success. We assist clients through change management initiatives and their overall digital transformations.
One of the questions that comes up is: How do we address change management? What are the things we need to do to ensure that we're successful in our change efforts? A lot of times, organizations don't know where to start. They don't want to take a one-size-fits-all approach; they don't want to just try a bunch of different things or throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. They want to have a very tailored change strategy that fits their needs, culture, and future goals and objectives.
So, what I want to do today is talk about what an organizational change assessment is, why it's so important, and how you can incorporate this into your overall change strategy.
Now, if you'd like to learn more about change management and best practices related to it, I encourage you to download our guide to organizational change management for free on our website. You can find that by scanning the QR code right here or by going to the links below.
Let's start off by talking about why organizational assessments are so important. As I mentioned at the start of the video, it's really important that you define a change strategy that's tailored for you as an organization. We don't want to just take a one-size-fits-all strategy and try every single change management tool or framework that's out there. We want to tailor it and target the things that are most important to our organization.
Part of the reason why change readiness assessments are so critical is that they allow us to proactively identify where the risks and change management issues are likely to lie. A lot of times, organizations go into these exercises thinking that change management is not going to be that difficult. They believe change resistance won't be an issue because people are excited about the new vision and the opportunity to have new tools and better processes. While that may be true, inevitably, as you get further into the transformation, you find that people will resist change.
The key isn't to identify or answer the question of whether or not people resist change; it's about how much they will resist change, who exactly will resist it, and what the root causes of that resistance are. During an organizational assessment, you often find issues that are part of the culture of the organization.
For example, there could be a perception of a lack of communication between different silos or departments within the organization. That may just be the way things are for your organization, but as you deploy an enterprise-wide technology, that could create resistance to change. People are used to operating in silos, and now, with an enterprise technology, they will likely have to think more about the upstream and downstream impacts of what they do in their individual jobs. This all leads to resistance.
So, we need to identify traits and characteristics within your organization—your culture, your organizational design, the politics, and the organizational dynamics. All those things may have strengths, but there are also weaknesses that can cause resistance to change.
That's why organizational assessments are so important for those two reasons: because you can create a very tailored and more prescriptive approach to change management, and because you can proactively identify what the sources of resistance are likely to be. This allows you to get ahead of those issues and create a change strategy and plan that addresses those needs.
In the next sections, I will talk about how to conduct an organizational assessment and what some of the inputs we use along the way are.
Let's talk a little bit about what exactly an organizational assessment is. The way we execute this at Third Stage Consulting involves two main tracks that we pursue in parallel. One is a quantitative, anonymous survey-based approach, where we submit anonymous surveys to employees to gather information about the culture of the organization, the leadership style, the communication style, the level of collaboration, past change initiatives, and other factors likely to influence how this change initiative goes.
The reason we conduct this anonymous survey is that it allows us to quantify some aspects of organizational readiness and assessments. It also provides an unfiltered view from employees who are completely anonymous, making them more likely to share candid feedback on the organization through these online tools. Additionally, it helps us understand the demographic makeup of the organization and the motives and drivers of different people throughout it.
This quantitative information serves as a good starting point to benchmark how an organization compares to others and to track internal trends over time. We can conduct these assessments multiple times throughout a transformation to monitor progress.
The second dimension of an organizational assessment is more qualitative and involves focus group-based activities. We meet with small subsets of different departments or locations, depending on the size and complexity of the organization. We aim to understand more qualitatively about the culture, the dynamics, the political landscape, the leadership style, and the level of collaboration and innovation—all of which feed into what our change strategy needs to be.
We take the quantitative and qualitative information from the focus groups, assess it, and analyze what it tells us. Having done this for many different clients, we can usually identify where the pockets of resistance are likely to reside. We start to dig into and understand the root causes of that potential resistance.
Now, we can apply different change tools, strategies, and tactics in a very tailored and surgical way that targets the issues identified in the organizational assessment.
Once we've conducted an organizational assessment, gathered quantitative information through anonymous surveys, and completed focus groups with employees for qualitative insights, we analyze that information. Some examples of what we look for during these assessments include identifying which departments are more or less resistant than others.
As we examine the quantitative and qualitative information, we prioritize which areas or parts of the business are likely to have more trouble with change—not because the people are resistant, but because there are organizational, political, or communication factors driving that part of the organization to potentially resist change.
For example, we might work with clients who have different departments that feel more overworked than others. They may feel they lack the tools, support, leadership, or clarity of communication. This tells us that this department is likely to struggle with change more than other parts of the business, making it a high priority for us to target.
Another example is when we find a perception of insufficient clarity of communication from leadership within the organization. This might lead us to recommend creating more deliberate and frequent communications related to the changes coming from leadership to address that concern.
These are just two micro-examples of many results we often find during these assessments, but hopefully, they give you a flavor of the types of things to look for.
Again, organizational assessments and the analysis behind them aren't simply about asking people if they are ready for change or if they support it. On the surface, most people are supportive. The real issue is digging below the surface to understand the organizational dynamics that are more likely to cause resistance in some cases, and in other cases, lead to support for the changes more so than in other parts of the organization.
Once we've analyzed the organizational results and developed a set of recommendations and findings, we can create a more descriptive change strategy tailored to the organization. For example, if it's an organization that's very risk-averse, we may need a different change strategy than one that's more tolerant of risk and has had more successful change initiatives in the past.
If we know that certain parts of the organization will be more resistant than others, we can tailor our change efforts for those areas. Understanding the politics, organizational dynamics, and culture allows us to create a change strategy and plan that fits those specific needs and situations.
We also have to look at where the organization is headed. This involves not just the information gathered in the organizational assessment, but also understanding the overall digital transformation strategy. Once we know what the organization and leadership team want to accomplish as a result of this transformation, we can identify the gaps between the current state and the desired future state.
Once we understand that gap, we can create a change strategy that's very tailored to where that journey will take them.
This is just a couple of examples of how the results from the organizational assessment can and should lead to a tailored change strategy and plan that fits the specifics of your organization.
Once we've defined the change strategy, the change plan, and the change tactics and tools we will use, we need to factor this all into the overall program plan. It may be that our software technology provider has created a technology implementation roadmap. Now, we need to integrate this change management strategy and plan into the overall roadmap.
As a word of warning, there will often be some kind of reconciliation needed between the two. Frequently, the software vendor can and wants to move much faster than the organization can. This often means that the change strategy requires a longer duration or more resources dedicated to change management—things that may not be in the wheelhouse of the technology provider.
The key here is that we must incorporate the change strategy and plan into the overall transformation program. This ensures that we address organizational issues and give them the proper prioritization and investment of resources they deserve.
These are just a few things to keep in mind as you think about organizational assessments. If there's one activity I suggest every organization do from a change perspective, it is to conduct an organizational assessment. By doing so, you can create a change strategy and plan that fits your needs, rather than just trying a bunch of change tactics that may not be effective.
Instead, we can focus in a more prescriptive, surgical way on who we are, who we're trying to become, and base that on the organizational assessment. We can also use these assessments to track trends and movement over time, allowing us to see how we're doing and make necessary adjustments along the way.
If you'd like to learn more about change management tactics and strategies, I encourage you to read our guide to organizational change management. You can download it for free at our website by scanning the QR code right here or by going to the links below.
I hope you found this information useful, and I wish you a great day!