Organisational Change Management Should Be People-Focused
Organisational Change Management (OCM) is too often considered a process that revolves around profit and productivity rather than integrity and people. Adopting more forward-thinking and emotionally-mature principles might seem counterintuitive to the traditional X-Theory organisation, and yet moving in that direction can increase results and profit naturally, all while simultaneously motivating your workforce and underlining their importance within your company.
Facilitate Learning
Some organisations train their staff, while others facilitate learning. It might sound like splitting hairs to differentiate between such terms, but the fact is that they work on very different levels and produce very different outcomes.
- Training: Gives skills to people.
- Facilitating Learning: Develops people from within.
Nurturing emotional maturity, compassion, and integrity is ultimately more important the memorising certain processes. Just look at the foundation of your organisation’s successes and failures – you’ll rarely find them based around processes and skills.
With that in mind, make sure you encourage the development of each team member. Giving people choices and letting them learn and grow in their own way ensures relative strengths and weaknesses are acknowledged. Adopt a Multiple Intelligence theory to focus on natural ability and individual potential rather than dictating exactly what must be learnt and which skills should be developed.
You’ll also want to balance constructive criticism with positive feedback. If negativity is all a person hears, it’s tempting for them to opt-out and hard for them to really commit to change.
Motivate the Right Way
Motivational efforts often fall flat. It’s because most employers retain the idea that the people they manage should simply be told what to do without any real direction or responsibility.
People understand that OCM may be necessary to remain competitive, increase sales, gain a market share, and so on. What you need to do to motivate them is:
- Use Strong Aims: The aims and beliefs of your organization should be aligned with those of your team. This will make it hard for them not to be interested in developing themselves and helping with any changes.
- Consult Rather than Dictate: Encourage dialogue by consulting with people to see things from their point of view. This reinforces their value to the company while also throwing up good ideas for moving forward that you might never have considered yourself.
- Don’t Blame the Situation: Is your organisation changing under extreme pressure? Is there some kind of crisis? Easy excuses for supposedly not having time to consult with people properly. A crisis should be a wake-up call – the people are still good, and now is the best time to re-align your aims around theirs.
However you want to look at OCM, remember that coming up with a plan in isolation and then simply telling people to implement it is far from the most effective method. Want to manage change for the most rewarding results? Consult with your team.
