At this moment, reduce the process of change to a minimum negative impact and shorten the period will maintain your organization vitality and rebuild your competitive advantages quickly and effectively.

Let us explore the eight common elements of rapid development changes and understand further the related change circumstances, characteristic and challenges.

 

Change Elements

 

There are eight common change circumstances, characteristic and challenges

 

(1) Restructuring

 

Organizational structure or position adjustment (it could be multi levels of structures)

  • urgent need to improve productivity
  • shrinkage of manpower, one person is require to play multiple roles and take up multi responsibilities
  • directly or indirectly impact the employee’s remunerations, position and power

 

(2) Acquisition

 

Common strategy in the 21^st century to enable accelerated growth

  • employee being familiar and accept the new management styles and corporate culture
  • differences among initial operating model, pace, management philosophy and values
  • power, reporting, compliance

 

(3) Merging or joint venture

 

Integration of the two organizations with different competitive advantages, different market segments, or industrial upstream and downstream chain for better growth synergies (ie. Manufacture and logistic company buying each other shares) 

  • compliment to each other’s weakness, finding common ground and improve competitive advantages

  • increase company’s scale and market shares 
  • the integration of two companies with different corporate culture is just like mixing the oil and water

 

(4) Transfer of target market

 

Change of increase target customer groups (ie. From fortune 500 MNC to SME)

  • marketing expenses reduction or transform
  • initial strategy and method may not work for new customers
  • impact employee short term remuneration

 

(5) Migration

 

Passive migration or transfer operation from one place to another (ie. from first tier city to second or third tier city)

  • reduce operating and labor cost and expenses
  • migrating following the key customer’s move 
  • domestic government new policy privilege 

 

(6) Increase of target/quota

 

The need to rapid multiply of business (ie. new strategy from corporate head quarter)

  • despite current good performance, business growth saturated or stagnant for years

  • short of human resources, not easy to recruit the right candidates from market
  • employee is require to adapt to the new policy and strategy quickly 

 

(7) Change of strategy

 

Proactive changing of the business and management guideline according to market competition (ie. from product selling to solutions provider)

  • new manner, new performance evaluation indicators
  • aside complete work mission, require to learn quickly during off time
  • new manners may not be able to achieve results as quickly as it was

 

(8) Impact from external factors

 

Change of target customers’ expectations and values (ie. from quality to brand) 

  • new innovated products replace the existing industry (ie. cell phone replace pager)

  • existing competitive advantages desalt
  • don’t know where to start facing the decline in profits

 

What kind of accelerate development or upcoming change that you are currently facing? 

 

 

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Top 10 Challenges

In one of the survey with 150 middle and high management leaders, we found that managers generally face the following problems during implementation of change process,

1.  Staff feel is the victim and resistance to change

2.  Team to the front frustrated, uncertain

3.  Managers lack of support and action

4.  Convincing win a peer cooperate effectively

5.  The composition of the innovation to develop a series of feasibility

6.  Keep the morale of the team should have and centripetal force

7.  The brain drain and human resource cost of ascension

8.  Instant access to the upper support and resources

9.  New skills shortages affect the execution team

10.  Effectively handle change during the process of problem

What kind of accelerate development or upcoming change that you are currently facing? Within these top ten challenges, which are the top three that you find thorny? If the issues that are bordering you have exceeded these ten challenges, welcome to email us at info@ict.edu.sg and share more with us. You will also help us to expand our research and development for the change area to help more people.

Critical Change Challenges 

General setback during change process includes,

No Clue - Innovative thinking not only used to develop new products, it could be well apply on management, service concept, business models and other sustainable development area. If organization faces issues in these areas, recommend management could learn and apply innovation techniques through different channels such as books, taking reference from other people’s practices (even other industry), through observation of other field, or bring in training. For reference purpose, in our two days training workshop, we teaches participants to understand the different types of thinking methods, and utilize both left and right brain to develop thoughts for series of innovation techniques, this inclusive individual innovative thoughts expansion tree, the subconscious thinking method that inventor Mr. Edison used, gaining resolution through dreams that the Singer sewing machine inventor used, mastermind innovation mechanism etc. 

Employee Resist New Plan – Although most organization recognize the benefits of the change process, however, most employee can’t escape from being under the shade of negative and victims throughout. When organization encounter these problems, management is recommended to conduct more coaching and harmonize communication, leading the thoughts of the team to a higher level of consideration, seeing things with bigger views, leading staffs to a big picture thinking with proactive action against change. Management team to continuously respond to different staffs’ reactions to change with different kinds of communication methods, to help staffs to adapt, adjust, tune in and accept the changes is the critical key to success in change management.  

Team Morale Drop Significantly - During change, we would find a common scenario whereby the staffs were worried about the uncertainties ahead. Due to the change in initial goals and sustenance, staffs easily lost and lose their morale. Recommend that the management team to continue establish common shared vision with staffs through effective communications and coaching. During the process of change management, management team is required to conduct close follow up on staffs progress, coach and help staffs or team to accomplish each stages success is the best motivations of all. 

Talent Attrition– While morale and work competency unable to cope with the new environmental change, staffs will encounter tremendous pressure and lead to high turnover of talents. Two psychologist, Mr. M.Csikszentmihalyi and Mr. Csikszentmihalyi (University of Cambridge England 1988 Articles) found out that during the situations whereby organization encounters rapid changes, if staffs are yet to acquire the necessary new skills shall face tremendous pressure and hence impact the staffs’ efficiency (See figure 1 below with the grey area on the left top corner).  

If organization facing these two scenarios, suggest that organization to take considerations from two aspect for improvement:

(1) Eliminates the fears of change through training and coaching management team and staffs how to adapt to change. Normally, we putting them into a 2 days training workshop, through participating in interactive activities, leading management team and staffs to learn and acquire the 3 stages of change (a) Understand Change; (b) Change Awareness; (c) Acquire Change Intelligence (CQ) and all necessary skills to quickly adjust one mindsets and adapt to the change.

(2) Outsource training to training and consulting company or through internal management team, training staffs in execution of new plan’s skills and techniques. For work related skills, normally direct training by superior is the best alternatives. It’s not only improve the team execution competency, it will help to establish trust and cohesion efforts among leaders, managers and team in the tough situations.