Managing change: NMC staff learns how

It didn’t matter that we didn’t know how to change organizations. We were all professionals who didn’t hope to achieve what we were selling or suggesting to clients. Then I got into a deeper state of realizing that none of us knew how organizations change. This field was really moribund. We just didn’t know.

—Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

Employees of the Northern Marianas College will undergo a seminar that will teach them how to handle management changes and empower them so that they will know how to go about implementing the changes.

This professional development learning opportunity for NMC employees will be facilitated by Dr. Tusi Avegalio, executive director of the Pacific Business Center and the Minority Business Development Center, College of Business Administration at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

A survey of 3,300 senior managers and human resource professionals reported by Rob Lebow in his Washington CEO magazine article “Making Heroes of Workers,” concluded that, of the nearly $48 billion spent on training and change programs that year, only 12 percent to 15 percent was considered money well spent. This suggests that as much as $40 billion was wasted on training and change programs that year. This also underscores the fact that 75 percent of all organizational change programs fail.

Change Management

Most organizations say their most important assets are their people, but few behave as if this were true. Change projects typically devote the lion’s share of budgets to structural issues such as technology and processes, not staff issues. There is still a whole notion of focusing on tangible assets and their impact on the bottom line, rather than the intangible assets, which are people. Organizations don’t adapt to change; their people do.

The implication of the “Change is the only constant” mantra is that the most successful organizations, in the long run, are those that learn to continuously adapt to change. Says Richard Foster, author of Creative Destruction: “We [found] that new companies coming into existing industries…could outperform their industries. But it never lasts. If you’re trying to copy a company, don’t. By the time you get there to copy it, you may be copying what accounts for its demise rather than its success”.

Constant upheavals in the organizational environment mean that leaders must not only learn about change and its impact on people and systems, leaders must be able to master the process of implementing change, just as their employees must learn to accommodate change.

Transition Management

As with a transplanted flower, it initially wilts after the transfer. However, in time with proper care, it stands upright again. With continued good care, it blossoms. The same holds true with then introduction (transplant or transfer) of a new system (new idea, methods, practices, etc.; under a new leader, teacher, parent, etc..), the productive curve drops (wilts) and given proper support and care, the productivity curve loops upward on a continuous positive trend. Transition trauma is little understood by bureaucrats, but is a fact of systems and organizational life. Inexperience tends to misread the downward curve (wilt) as failure, often triggering inappropriate actions; rather then understanding it as transition trauma that is a readjustment and adaptive phase of change that requires trust, patience and support.

Seminar Objectives:

1. Clarify why traditional efforts at change don’t work.

2. Understand that organizational environments are more unpredictable then ever before and increasingly so.

3. The leader’s challenge is to renew continuously, to anticipate change with the ability to be flexible, highly adaptive, and anticipatory requiring a mindset and attitude of openness and opportunity.

4. Understanding the over-powering power of vision, mission and core values when organizational members are aligned (buy in) to it. (PR)