Making Change Happen Through People
Author: Eric Thompson
Eric Thompson considers the role of the high performance team in delivering sustained benefit in organisational efficiency.
When change is required in an organisation, it has to embrace every aspect of the way in which the organisation works if it is to be sustained.
A half hearted attempt will nearly always result in a return through time to the ways of work that you started from, with a consequent erosion of any benefits that have been achieved. To avoid this, not only must the processes through which the various tasks that the organisation wants to execute be changed, along with the physical systems through which those tasks are executed, but the people involved need to believe in the change, they need to be retrained to cope with the new ways of working and just as importantly developed in a way that creates its own self-sustaining high performance culture.
When you are dealing with long term projects to improve organisational efficiency, you don’t always get what you expect in the way of sustained benefits. As Keith Harris of the National Audit Office put it in his presentation to the “Lean Government” conference in September 2009; “The expected benefits are not always realised. Senior management commitment may tail off. Staff may become disillusioned. To overcome that what is required is a culture of continuous improvement and staff engagement.”
Harris believes that the process and system improvements are necessary. They lead to benefit opportunities. However unless the people involved believe in the change, are trained to manage the change, and seek themselves to continuously improve the environment that they are in, any benefit will rapidly dissipate.
In the context then of making government more effective and making the efficiency savings that are required to balance the national budgets, the lean approach is an essential tool. ”Lean” helps to get the organisational side of things right, what to do and when and how to do it. However, it is not enough on its own to deliver sustained benefit. To do that you need to work with the people to build that “culture of continuous improvement and staff engagement”.
"The not very subliminal message is that people matter."
At the same “Lean Government” conference Jeremy Groombridge from the Department of Work and Pensions in presenting an insight into that department’s lean journey cited the work being done in their Jobcentre Plus operation. Local teams who have realised that they are empowered to make changes have delivered significant benefits, not only in operational savings for their lords and masters, but for the clients that they support on a day to day basis by making their service more accessible, simpler to use and more effective, and also for themselves by making their life easier and from the satisfaction of knowing that they are making things better. The not very subliminal message is that people matter. If you can harness the power of the local people, sustainable improvement can be achieved. Nor does the process end. If the people involved really believe, they will go on making changes and delivering further improvement in response to the changes in the environment around them.
The challenge then for any manager leading change, with a view to delivering significant improvement in organisational efficiency, is to develop that culture where the people are fully engaged and seek themselves to drive continuous improvement. In other words, they have to turn their team into a high performance team.
The diagram below helps to demonstrate the contribution that the high performance team can make. The lean approach will get the organisation moving forward and even create continuous improvement. It may deliver as much as eighty percent of the available benefit initially. To complete the delivery of the benefit and sustain the improvement and to make sure that future change is embraced in a routine way, it is necessary to develop that high performance team.
Here the focus is on the people in the organisation, not just equipping them with the individual skills to perform their own role, but equipping them as a team to work together to identify and solve the problems that impact the service that they deliver and to embrace and develop that high performance culture. Harris stresses the need, for example, for people to be empowered to implement their own ideas, and that it is staff not management that need to own the ideas and what happens to them. Where this environment can be created, not only is change and its associated benefit delivered, but it is sustained and new opportunities are embraced and absorbed, clocking up further benefits.
"...do you have an alternative but to engage with your team?..."
So how does a manager set about creating a high performance team? Well it is not an overnight conversion. In itself it is an ongoing process of continuous improvement, which if ignored will lead fairly quickly to a loss in performance. The manager needs to be in it for the long term, the manager needs to display the sort of skills and behaviours that are expected in others, but the manager can’t do it alone. Use of facilitators, external to the team, can help to develop the structure and knowledge of the appropriate tools plus vision of what is possible, but equipping members of the team itself is the key issue. Individuals have to be able to take leadership in the key situations that they are involved in, they have to be able to coach their colleagues to use the new ideas and skills and above all they have to believe that they can make a difference.
So how will you make a start? Start by telling your staff about the journey that you need to take together, and why that is necessary. They won’t need to hear that once, they will need to hear it many times, and not just from you, before they start to understand and believe. Talk to them about what other teams have achieved by taking this approach. Remember, you are the manager; you need to lead, but involve others who can help. There is plenty of expertise that will help you to identify what additional skills your team will need, how to coach the team to use their new skills, how to get the team working better together, how to benchmark performance against good practice elsewhere, how to develop their own competitive edge. The list goes on. There is much to be done.
For you as the manager the journey must start now. As Harris said, “It’s now about radical transformational changes.” If there is no alternative to sustained long term improvement to make your organisational efficiency then do you have an alternative but to begin to engage with your team now and begin to develop a high performance team?