CM: It appears as though change has consistently played a role in your own life …
Duck: It's not as if I've gotten bored with my life and decided to turn it upside down. I've had so much change that I think I just sort of had to figure it out because it kept happening. Being divorced with a one-year-old, not having a job, moving across country and uprooting myself and starting a new career, those kinds of things are pretty big. I just had to figure out how to deal with it.
The thing that was fascinating to me was realizing that people who are undergoing very different changes sound very similar. That was the real surprise, and it got me wondering, Is there a real pattern here? I was able to relate my own experiences to what I saw. There is that period during preparation where you are dreaming of the possibilities and sometimes the fears. That's why I called the book The Change Monster. I think that period of trying to get dreams and energy all gathered and working is really important, because the carrying out part is going to be hard. And, if you don't have the strength of dreams to sustain you, it makes it very hard to stick with it.
CM: What types of consulting work involve change?
Duck: My question would be, "What consulting case is not a change case?" Because if you have new strategy, you've got to change the way people think. You have to change what they do or how they conceive of the business or how they individually add value. There are a lot of strategies that can only be effective if people change their behavior, so I'm still engaged in that same thing. If you think about it, managing change is always an issue.
CM: Companies have been confronted by people issues for years. Why is the "soft stuff" often overlooked?
Duck: If you think about people who are now in executive positions, they are not going to be newly minted. The dot-coms notwithstanding, most executives are in their forties and fifties. When you think about when they were in school, which was 20 years ago or more, we didn't talk about emotions. In fact, at that point what we said was: "Leave your emotions at home. There is no place for emotions at work." Most (future) leaders were probably in class studying finance or engineering, not concepts like "the value of symbolism for a leader." Emotions weren't a part of the teaching.
My husband is a lawyer, and I remember asking him, "Did you have courses on questioning?" He said, "We had courses on cross-examination." And I said, "No, I mean how do you question a client so that you really put them at ease and you establish trust and you get them to tell you the real deal?" No, they didn't have a course like that. "Did you have courses on listening?" No. "Did you have courses on relating skills?" No.
A lot of what it takes to be an effective leader is not what many executives were explicitly taught. They may have received coaching over the years or may have had courses within the company, but it wasn't standard coursework when they came through school. It is certainly possible even today to get an advanced degree without taking any courses of that type.
The idea of emotions or dealing with people is still seen as "soft," which many interpret as meaning optional. I would say it's exactly the opposite. The people issues, the so-called "soft stuff," is the hard stuff. And it's really a lot harder. I was talking to a gentleman recently whose new strategy requires an entire sales force to change not just what they sell but how they see themselves. The more you need people to change their own self-perception and identity, the harder it's going to be to get a change enacted.
CM: You often state that there are several stages that a company goes through in making change happen. Is it possible for a company to exact change without going through each stage?
Duck: They wish they could. One of the things that is very common is that once leaders — the middle managers or the executive team — make a decision that they want to change something, the immediate desire is to jump into action. I call them the Nike leaders, because they think that deciding to "Just do it" is all they need. Leaders like this are usually action-oriented to begin with, and they are firm believers that actions speak louder than words.
They also believe that action demonstrates commitment. The problem is that if you haven't done the other tasks of preparation — which are, first of all, making sure all the leaders are united; second, that the organization understands the need for change and what you are trying to accomplish; and, third, that the plan is robust enough for people to figure out what they're supposed to do — then your early actions are likely to fail. Therefore, jumping into action too soon can have the opposite effect of the one desired.
Basically, employees are very comfortable doing what they're doing today, and you're springing a whole new set of changes on them that they don't have the first idea about. So of course their reaction is, "What is he talking about? Why should I change? Why should I bother?" Employee resistance skyrockets. Jumping into action without adequate preparation is a big mistake.
Another classic mistake is that once implementation has started and the assignments have been made, to think that the leadership challenge is over and, therefore, to withdraw executive oversight. Soon the Determination phase will rear its ugly head, and there'll be a crisis — because there always is — and the leaders are caught flat-footed, out of touch with the organization, not understanding how they got into this mess.
CM: You have done change management work around the world. Have you noticed whether some cultures are better in dealing with the process of change?
Duck: I think that why we see a lot of the Asian cultures doing better is that they spend a lot of time in Preparation. What they're doing is getting everybody aligned and ready. Everybody understands what they're trying to do, the goals have been socialized, so to speak, and the teams are ready to act, so implementation is easier. In the West and a number of European countries, the desire to act or jump over Preparation, or to think it's a minor effort, is more typical.
CM: Preparation is the biggest stumbling block for most companies?
Duck: There are two. People don't recognize that Preparation is actually a critically important stage that needs to be completed. The tasks are real and they matter. The other major stumbling block is the need for the leadership to stay engaged after implementation has started. It is very typical, for example, to have a highly talented task force working on a particular issue. They've got the ear of the leaders and some sort of steering committee. While they are doing the analysis and designing their recommendations, everybody is fully engaged, stays current on what is being learned, and participates in the decisions. As soon as the plan is agreed to and the assignments are made, everybody from the task force is dismissed and the steering committee is disbanded. Then they are surprised when the change doesn't actually occur and the expected results don't materialize. That happens constantly.
What's needed is to keep some of the key people from the task force engaged so that what they envisioned and what they meant by the plan are understood. It's also critical to keep the executives engaged in some form of oversight and follow-up. Not everyone will understand what's required or do a stellar job. The monitoring needs to be robust enough to signal where corrective action is needed. People run into problems that no one anticipated — who is going to help them out? Who makes decisions about business trade-offs? What happens when more resources are needed? All of those things — and many, many more — will happen, so a mechanism for monitoring, resolving problems, providing executive oversight needs to be in place and active. Often it's not.
CM: Is there a formula that even executives of successful companies should follow, that they should have change every X number of years?
Duck: No. I don't believe in change for change's sake. It's much more that you need to be rigorously analyzing your business, your customers, and your competitors, including new types of competitors, so that you are not left scrambling to keep up. You don't want to be taken by surprise because you didn't see a customer need or somebody came out with a new technology or somebody solved a chronic problem in a radically new and different way. Staying on the leading edge in any sector will keep change happening.
CM: Is completing a merger or acquisition a good way of bringing about change?
Duck: There have been any number of studies which show that mergers more often destroy shareholder value than create it. Of course, there are different types of mergers and acquisitions. The companies you hear about being very successful in acquisitions, like Cisco and GE, do what I call tuck-in mergers. A small company is acquired and assimilated quickly. The mother ship doesn't really change; it just keeps on going. Those tend to be pretty successful.
But those mergers are a very different animal from when two very big companies come together with the hopes of creating strategic synergies, not just cost savings. Strategic synergies are the ones that are very hard to realize. Trying to figure out how to work together in new, productive ways when the various players come from different corporate cultures, have different philosophies of the business, have different expectations and experiences, and may have been fierce competitors historically, is very hard indeed. Most mergers fail to capture the synergies they anticipated.
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