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Terms of Engagement: Changing the Way We Change Organizations: Changing the Way We Change Our Organizations - Hardcover

Axelrod, Richard H.

 
9781576750841: Terms of Engagement: Changing the Way We Change Organizations: Changing the Way We Change Our Organizations
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576750841 ISBN 13: 9781576750841
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Building engagement is crucial for every organization. But the traditional top-down coercive change management paradigm—in which leaders “light a fire” under employees—actually discourages engagement.

Richard Axelrod offers a better way. After debunking six common change management myths, he offers a proven, practical strategy for getting everyone—not just select committees or working groups—enthusiastically committed to organizational transformation. This revised edition features new interviews—everyone from the vice president of global citizenship at Cirque du Soleil to a Best Buy clerk—and new neuroscience findings that support Axelrod’s model. It also shows how you can foster engagement through everyday conversations, staff meetings, and work design.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Axelrod is a founder of and principal in the Axelrod Group, Inc. His clients include Boeing, Coca-Cola, Corning, Ford, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, and Kaiser Permanente. He is the coauthor of You Don’t Have to Do It Alone.

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Engagement Makes a Difference

We’re about to start a change process, and I think we’re going about it the wrong way.” Hank Queen, soon to become vice president of engineering and product integrity for Boeing Commercial Engineering, and Charlie Bofferding, president of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, were present for a talk I was giving about the four engagement principles that are core to Terms of Engagement. Boeing was just coming off of the largest white-collar strike in U.S. history, where more than fourteen thousand employees walked off the job, and Charlie had suggested that Hank come and hear what I had to say.

At the break, Hank pulled me aside, and with those words, “We’re about to start a change process, and I think we’re going about it the wrong way,” launched a change process that ultimately affected the entire engineering organization. This process, based on the four principles that make up the new change management, resulted in a 40 percent improvement in employee satisfaction, along with many productivity improvements.

Three years later, the same employees who went on strike voted by a margin of more than 80 percent to renew their contract. Today, new programs, such as the 787 Dreamliner and Multi-Mission Maritime Aircraft, have added six thousand new jobs in Washington state. Production rates for commercial airplanes are increasing, and orders are up.

Every leader faces the eternal question, How do I engage people in the purpose of the enterprise? You might be like Hank, trying to rebuild a culture; or Carol Gray, trying to improve access to health care in Calgary, Alberta; or Jan Mears, trying to implement a global SAP process at Kraft Foods, Inc. Terms of Engagement provides the answer.

In my work with leaders in organizations large and small, I find them grappling with a turbulent environment where rapidly changing technology makes yesterday’s innovative ideas obsolete. Reorganizations happen so fast, it is almost impossible to keep track of the entities’ names. The job you had yesterday is not the job you have today, and it is not the job you will have tomorrow, if you have a job at all. Organizations find themselves existing simultaneously as competitors and partners. Leading in this world requires all of the physical and emotional resources leaders can muster.

Globalization requires organizations to find ways of working that span culture, time, and distance. All of this is taking place in a world where people have more access to information today than in the entire history of civilization, yet they are increasingly lonely, isolated, and disconnected. Extreme wealth and poverty live side by side, while the gap between them increases exponentially. Authoritarianism and violence are rising in a world where people say they want peace.

The changes are so profound and occurring so rapidly that drinking from a fire hose feels like a leisurely cup of tea. Yet this is our reality, and in this world, success belongs to organizations and leaders who respond effectively to this complex, chaotic environment.

HOW BIG A DIFFERENCE DOES ENGAGEMENT MAKE?

In the first edition, I responded to those who said the cost of engagement is too high by asking, “What is the cost of disengagement?” Now we know.

• Disengaged workers cost the economy more than $300 billion a year (Gallup 2010).

• McKinsey & Company, in a global study of successful organizational transformations, identified cocreation, collaboration, and employee engagement as key success indicators (McKinsey & Company 2010).

• Northwestern University found that organizations with engaged employees have customers who use their products more, and increased customer usage leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction (Cozzani and Oakley n.d.).

• ISR, a Chicago-based consulting firm that has one of the largest databases on employee engagement, discovered that engaged organizations are 52 percent more profitable than their disengaged counterparts (MacLeod and Clarke 2009).

• Hewitt Associates has an Employee Engagement and Best Employer Database of fifteen hundred companies. In companies with 60 to 70 percent engaged employees, average total shareholder’s return (TSR) stood at 24.2 percent. In companies with only 49 to 60 percent engaged employees, TSR fell to 9.1 percent. Companies with engagement below 25 percent suffered negative TSR (Wellins, Bernthal, and Phelps 2005).

• A recent poll by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., found employee engagement to be a top priority for Chicago-based senior HR leaders (Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 2010).

THE OLD CHANGE MANAGEMENT

If you look at any major corporation or government entity worldwide, this is what you will see: leaders with an army of consultants creating new organizational directions—the few deciding for the many. Often, leaders and consultants try to soften the blow by creating steering teams and project teams. But most people end up feeling that their voices don’t count. They are left on the outside, wondering what is going to happen. This approach to organizational change is so pervasive that few question it. It’s just what you do.

Four beliefs are the hallmarks of the old change management: the few decide for the many; solutions first, people second; fear builds urgency; and inequality is the norm and life isn’t fair. These beliefs are so ingrained that leaders and consultants do not consider their approach to change as “the old change management.”

WHY DO CHANGE MANAGEMENT INITIATIVES FAIL?

Most change management initiatives, while professing the importance of people, forget real human beings are involved. When change management processes identify people as “change targets,” they deny their humanness. Peter Koestenbaum, noted author and philosopher, says, “The essence of being human is the freedom to make choices; there is no escape” (P. Koestenbaum, pers. comm., October 27, 2009). Whether you are trying to create an engaged organization or engage people in the latest business imperative, leaders and those who work with them make choices.

Leaders make choices daily about the principles they follow, the methods they use to bring about change, and the ways they interact with others. Organizational members make choices about whether they will sit on their hands or engage with the organization’s goals. These choices have consequences. Ultimately, they determine whether change will meet with footdragging resistance or wholehearted energy.

IS YOUR PLATFORM REALLY BURNING?

Popular theorists like Daryl Conner and John Kotter reinforce the notion of plug and play, order, and predictability. They aren’t the only ones, just well-known theorists who reinforce the old change management.

Conner (1992) popularized the notion of burning platforms as a key ingredient for change: the way to get people to change is to light a fire under them. We’ll see later how neuroscience research is showing how lighting fires may shut people down rather than start them up.

While not advocating burning platforms, Harvard professor John Kotter (1996) wants leaders to create guiding coalitions populated by senior management, which in turn produce strong visions for the organization to follow. These ideas represent the old change management—a series of leader-directed moves where the few decide for the many. In the old change management, leaders seek to create “buy-in” to a predetermined solution. Buy-in turns leaders into salespeople and employees into consumers, thereby creating engagement gaps that increase resistance instead...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576750841
ISBN 13 
9781576750841
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
222
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Verantwortliche Person
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