Important Change Management Basics Managers Often Miss

With the ever-evolving economic climate, change management basics have become a crucial part of businesses and organizations making constant efforts to reduce operational costs, increase resource capacity and opportunities to boost the overall revenue of the business. Change management not just focuses on company’s profits, but also ensure better business-customer interactions through various means. Effective change projects can help organizations make necessary changes in the existing operations to survive the economic downturn. But what are the essential things that managers often miss in order to implement a successful change project? Let’s take a look at 5 important change management basics that managers should consider while designing the change programmes.

Clear Targets: A lot of managers often feel perplexed during the change process due to lack of clear targets. Change targets should be clear, easy to understand, reachable and measurable. It is advised to design them on the change management of KISS (Keep It Simple and Small). Clearly understandable targets signify one single definition for each target. These can include: costs per unit sold and cash-flow per unit sold.

Communication: A consistent, open and reliable communication is important. Every relevant information should be clearly communicated in the real time in an authentic and consistent manner. The communication process should be formulated on the basis of nature of target audience. External and internal communication, both play a very important role in change management process. Successful external communication has a positive impact in shaping employee’s attitude towards change.

Commitment: What managers don’t realize is that they need to be committed to the changes and help other employees feel the same too. The change manager should have the leadership qualities to create willingness for change within the organization. Commitment should be based on trust and belief. If employees will be persuaded that the change will be advantageous for them too, they will contribute willingly.

Cultural Fit: It is very important to keep internal key people involved in the change project as a general rule of change management basics. Strong change programs, especially the ones that target cost-reduction may seem a challenge to fit to the company’s strong, authenticable and leadership culture. Creating a mix of objectivity, flexibility and emotions is an important part of the change-program. Managers should prefer local implementation of change as and when possible. The project team should be formed with members having know-how of the team-members and professional experience.

Monitoring: Monitoring and follow up is as important as implementing the change in an organization. It is important to monitor by measuring the results. Ongoing controlling, transparent and reporting processes helps keep make the changes friendly. Monitoring must include a strict budget-control, and should be linked directly with the corresponding budget. Monitoring the changes enable the status-control at any point of time and reporting must be done regularly to the top managers to keep constant pressure on the program. However, one should keep in mind that over-administration can negatively impact the change project and slow down the progress.

The proper understanding of the existing culture and structure of the organization, as well as strategic orientation enables the change manager to determine the social and cultural implications of a change initiative. Based on this understanding, the manger should be capable of designing a change plan together with responsible stakeholders, and decide on a suitable communication style for better implementation of change management basics.

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Uncategorized March 9, 2014

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