From Goals to Meaningful Change

Posted by Jim Connolly on 16 June, 2010  Email This Post -  Print This Post

In spite of best thinking on change management, most efforts to improve organizational results still fail to achieve the desired results.  What is the missing link between setting the goal and seeing meaningful results?

Long before I learned about change management, I studied the psychology of human behavior.  In my opinion, the missing link in our contemporary change models is failing to understand how patterns of predictable human behavior can either support or derail our efforts to improve organizational results.

Building effective change efforts does require a commitment from the top of the organization, a clear goal, excellent project leadership, etc.  However, three human behavior components are critical to achieving meaningful change.  We call it IAC. 

• I - Individual Performance Rules: Understand that individual performance determines organizational results. No amount of yelling or hours and hours of meetings will change organizational results. An organization’s results are an outcome of the collection of every individual’s performance. So, our goals have to be focused on improving each employee’s performance.

• A - Acknowledge Human Behavior: When employees are presented with a new goal, human behavior can be predicted. Stages will include: 
  • “What happened?
  • “Why?”
  • “What about me?”
  • “Who else should be involved?”
  • What about…..?”

Meaningful change only occurs when an employee comes into your office and says “What about adding Y to your X plan?  By doing so, I think we can improve upon the original idea.” At that point, they have fully embraced the change, they own it and they are productively supporting it.

The goal is to understand this human behavior process and get more of our employees to that point.  So, resist the temptation to yell “Shut up and go back to work” or “Just do it the way I said,” and help move them toward the “What about?” stage.  If you do so, their increased commitment, productivity and support for your goal will quickly result in meaningful change.

• C - Cement New Habits: So many of our well meaning efforts to drive meaningful change fail because they are not well implemented. New habits are not cemented into the fabric of the organization and the old habits choke off the new habits.

Part of the supporting the goal has to be a commitment to investing the resources necessary so that there is a return on investment.  If the new behaviors, skills and practices that will achieve results are not developed to the point that they become habit, we’ll end up with just one more flavor of the month program.

The process of managing change is simple and straightforward.  Implementing desired change successfully is the hard part.  Apply the IAC model and your success rate will improve.