@powertochange:

Successful Change = People + Process

From Leonard Buhler

March 1, 2012

Change is never easy. What I’ve found is that to successfully guide change within your organization, you have to maintain a balance between people and process.

Let’s say your organization has big goals. And to reach those goals, you’re going to need introduce some significant changes. Maybe you’ll need to move key personnel around, or adopt a new attitude, or restructure, or incorporate new technology. Perhaps you’ll need all of the above.

To make progress, you’ll need people. More specifically, you’ll need healthy relationships with your team. You’ll need colleagues who are willing to go out on a limb for you. Without that support, you’ll find yourself trying to drive change all alone, which is never a good idea.

You’ll also need process. By process, I mean a deliberate, disciplined approach to your work as an organization. Process includes things like a clear vision and set of goals, well-defined roles, a consistent system for evaluating team and individual performance.

It’s when you balance both people and process well that change moves forward in healthy, productive ways. Process without relationships makes for a disengaged, hostile team. Imagine a board of directors with a sophisticated bureaucracy, but who have very little use for each other. Their meetings are disciplined, but dry – no one bothers to bring their best ideas because they just want to get through the agenda.

Now imagine the reverse: a board that has the ‘people’ side of the equation nailed down. If you put your ear to the door during one of their meetings, you hear laughter. These board members like each other and trust each other. But they don’t have any sort of process. They do lots of talking, but none of it is very productive, because they have no clear guide for making decisions that will move the organization forward.

Think about your organization and how you work towards change. Are people and process well-balanced? Do you need to make some adjustments as you move forward?