Establishing the proper governance for lean change

What I want to talk about today is establishing and infrastructure for improvement. Most organizations fail to establish a governance process for their change and this can cause some damage to the improvement process.

In his book titled "Leading Change", leadership and change management guru, John Kotter summarizes the key reasons why some transformational changes succeed and other's fail. Mr. Kotter cites the 8 step change process in his best seller. These steps include the following:

1)Create Urgency
2)Form a Powerful Coalition
3)Create a Vision for change
4)Communicate the Vision
5)Remove Obstacles
6)Create Short Term Wins
7)Build on the Change
8)Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

What I want to focus in on today is point #2, forming a powerful coalition. The first hurdle to overcome is convincing people that change is necessary. This takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization. Managing change isn't enough - you have to lead it. Easy to say, but difficult to do since likely we are not totally clear on where we are going and perhaps no one has gone here before.

Every organization has effective change leaders. But to get to the "real" leaders you need to recognize that they don't necessarily follow the traditional company hierarchy. To lead change, you need to bring together team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources. These sources may include position title, status, expertise, and political importance. These leaders can be formal or informal. Once formed, your guiding coalition needs to work as a team, continuing to build urgency and momentum around the need for change.

Over time, the responsibilities of this team should become more formal. I teach that the guiding coalition or steering committee has six main responsibilities:

1) Make sure you are working in the right areas - Are we climbing the right wall and do the improvements link to the strategy of your organization?
2) Make sure the changes are being sustained - You can only go forward if you hold the gains.
3) Monitor the pace of change to maintain momentum - If we go too fast and sustaining results will suffer; if we go too slow, you will never get momentum
4) Develop people - Where are the change champions? Are they being properly developed?
5) Capture the results - What are we measuring? Are the results relevant and current? Are we capturing the hard measures like productivity, and cost?
6) Remove organizational barriers - Align policies and procedures to facilitate change. Deal with the "antibodies" in the change process.

Without the powerful coalition to steer the change process, the current culture of your organization will likely overtake the few change champions and derail your change efforts.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com