Rethinking Change – Series

The Role of Role in Effective Organisational Change

By Peta Bayman Director Facilitating Results Pty Ltd

 

The world context has changed and so our organisations’ response needs to change.

  • The current world context is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA). Even limited success with change can be threatened by the next crisis, or innovation whether it’s a local or global
  • Organisations have become increasingly impatient with the lengthy timeframes and variable results typically associated with change
  • Shifting employee expectations, particularly generational, have led to a cohort far less willing to bear the significant personal cost required for success at work.

In organisational life, change is a constant. What if there was a resource, that already exists which has possibly been overlooked until now, one that could really help navigate change, faster and more successfully than currently experienced?

While there are many approaches organisations take to planned change, traditionally there are two key levers they utilise, i) technical change, and ii) people change, or a combination of the two. The results of these change programs are often disappointing.  A much-used statistic is that 70% of change programs fail to meet their stated objectives (1).

Individual Change

People change often means behavioural change, organisations want certain behaviours to start, others to stop and others to continue or even increase.  The collective terms used to describe these activities are performance improvement, growth, development or leadership development. To begin this process, an organisation has a range of tools on offer to help ‘measure’ where they are in relation to a Goldilocks zone of attributes and performance. These tools then highlight what gaps or opportunities exist, and from this a plan can be designed to address them. Anyone who has tried, knows behaviour change can be hard. 

People Development at Scale is Inexact

We also know from experience, changing and developing people at scale is also quite hit and miss. There are many theories and practices and at best there is not one unifying strategy which is a repeatable methodology that gets reliable and consistent results.  An approach to performance improvement or development at an organisation level can take many forms. There are some organisations that focus on forced ranking, for example, GE, habitually fired their bottom 10% (2). Other organisations recruit in their likeness, building “Ghettos of Excellence” (3). Achieving peak ‘excellence’ often has unintended negative consequences, consider Google’s experience as a case in point  (4). Other approaches focus on measures of strengths and weaknesses in their people, (psychological approach) to get the balance right. The premise that underpins these approaches is that there is an ideal, obtainable cohort of workers who have the requisite values, mindsets, and behaviours which is obtainable through a variety of ‘known’ interventions. Operating as though the previous statement is true, organisations embark on a journey that never seems to satisfactorily reach its destination.

Considering these challenges, it would be fair to say a new perspective on our approach to change could be helpful. (5) 

It Helps if We Reframe the Problem We Are Trying to Solve

If we reframe the problem we are trying to solve, away from seeking an elusive Goldilocks zone of attributes and performance, we will start the conversation in a different place. This inevitably leads to a different set of questions and a fundamental shift in our approach to make the progress we so desire.

 

A Different Approach

Most of us are familiar with adjusting our behaviour based on the requirements of different roles in our lives, such as being a parent, partner, sibling, friend, worker, boss, or community volunteer. A resource immediately available from our lived experience is that when we move from one role to another, we naturally change our behaviour to meet the new role, for example, from the role of boss at work to the role of partner at home.

Role as a Catalyst for Behaviour Change

While our behaviour changes to align with the role, who we are as individuals remains unchanged. These changes in behaviour can be instant and impactful. By recognising the role as a catalyst and vehicle for behaviour change, organisations can leverage this inherent capability to facilitate change. In the workplace context, thinking about roles in this way goes beyond position descriptions and encompasses all that an individual brings to a role like decision making, prioritising and delegating, (6).   By shifting the focus from the personal to the role as a guiding factor for behaviour, individuals can reframe their approach and make different and more deliberate choices about how they take up their roles.

The Challenge of a Relationship Led Approach

When dealing with perceived people challenges, much emphasis is put on the skill and practice of building good relationships. This process of relationship building can take many forms and can include a focus on getting to know each other, being vulnerable, building trust and rapport. The goal is to enable more effective collaboration, feedback, decision making, shared ownership and accountability. A key desire is for people to be enabled to hold challenging conversations well. The fear (one driver of avoidance) often expressed when contemplating these conversations is around the risk of damaging the relationship if the conversation goes badly. In addition, what happens when we just don’t like the people we are working with or, perhaps surprisingly, they don’t like us?

Moving Past the Personal

When we work in a ‘role-relating’ way, we bypass the need to make the conversation personal. Through ‘working in role’ the relationships that are built result naturally, rather than being engineered. Relationships are a result of the work rather than the cause. This can be observed on many occasions when we get thrown into situations and we mix with people we would not necessarily have ‘chosen’ or are working in extreme or emergency situations where we don’t have long time periods to ‘build’ trust. This approach should not be mistaken for negating relationships or pleasantness in the workplace, the exact opposite is true. In this context, relationships are an output of working in role, not an input.

A System That Changes Itself

By helping individuals see themselves fully in their roles and encouraging them to share their perspectives on the organisation, from role, a more conscious and collective picture of the whole system, including the influence of the system on roles, can emerge. This shared understanding can enable negotiations across role boundaries to reshape the organisation, leading to re-contracting around unspoken assumptions and defunct rules. The resulting organisation fluidly becomes more dynamic and adaptive, capable of changing and re-patterning itself (7) and is way more responsive to a VUCA context.

Conclusion:

Rethinking change by leveraging roles as a resource for behaviour change can offer a simpler and faster approach to organisational transformation. By recognising the inherent capacity of individuals to adjust their behaviour in different roles and creating a shared understanding of the organisation’s map, organisations can facilitate effective change efforts.

References

  1. McKinsey & Company. Changing Change Management. [Online] July 2015. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/changing-change-management.
  2. Bates, Steve. SHRM. Forced Ranking. [Online] June 1, 2003. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/forced-ranking.
  3. Bayman, Peta. Leadership . s.l. : CCE, 2010-2023. “Ghettos of Excellence”. .
  4. Bulgarella, Caterina. From Exceptionalism To Unrest: Why Google’s Culture Is Changing. Forbes.com. [Online] February 19, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/caterinabulgarella/2020/02/19/from-exceptionalism-to-unrest-why-googles-culture-is-changing/?sh=2b5329013560.
  5. A Concept of Organizational Ecology. Trist, E. s.l. : Australian Journal of Management, 1977, Vols. 2(2), 161-175. https://doi.org/10.1177/031289627700200205.
  6. Reed, Bruce. An Exploration of Role by Bruce Reed. [On line] Cloudesley Street, London, N1 0HU : The Grubb Institute, 2001.
  7. Gorman, Brian. Organization Ecology with Joan Lurie. s.l. : Change Managemnt Review – Actionable Insights for Change.

With acknowledgement to the work of Bruce Reed, The Grub Institute, Irving Borwick and Joan Lurie

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