Change is the norm, not the exception, in the world of business today.
To an unprepared organization, disruptive change can be paralyzing and cause long-term damage.
Therefore, it’s critical to develop and strengthen your Capacity for Change.
Change comes in many shapes and sizes.
Some changes are so minor that they slip by us unnoticed, others are large enough to overwhelm the best of us. Sometimes we know that a change is coming, and we can plan for it. Other times, an unexpected event or condition may catch us by surprise.
Whether the change is small or large, planned or unexpected, it’s critical that your organization successfully meets the challenge.
We Help You Build Your Organization’s Capacity for Change
We can assist you when you need help with any kind of change that you face – small or large, planned or unexpected. And while we help you with your specific change challenges, we also help you, both personally and as an organization, develop the change capabilities (strengthen your change muscle) to increase your agility and resilience. That way you’ll be better equipped to meet the next change circumstance with confidence.
Our 5-Step Process for Helping Strengthen Your Change Muscle
Miller Consultants has developed a 5-step process to help you strengthen your Capacity for Change:
- Getting to Know You
- Assess the Type of Change
- Determine the Type of Assistance You Will Need
- Design the Plan
- Support Implementation
1. Getting to Know You
We start by getting to know you, your company and what you are trying to achieve. Whether you are a senior leader over the entire company, over a part of the company or the leader of a team, we want to know what matters to you and to understand the nature of the change you are about to undertake. We will want to know the background that led up to the change, what you expect will be different if the change succeeds, who is likely to be affected by the change and how.
2. Assess the Type of Change
Once we understand more about you, your organization and the part of it you oversee as well as the high-level change picture, we will dig into the specifics of the change facing you. We will work with you to assess whether the change is:
- Developmental, improving on what is already in place
- Transitional, moving from what exists to something different yet clearly understood
- Transformational or truly radical, the kind of change that is the toughest nut to crack. However, under the right circumstances, transformational change can make the greatest difference in the organization’s long-term success.
3. Determine the Type of Assistance You Will Need
Once we understand the type of change you are facing, we can offer options for how we might assist you.
If you are improving what is already in place (Developmental), we can help you put a process improvement in place or organize a kaizen event.
If you are moving from what exists to something different but clearly understood (Transitional), we will help you with the management of the change. Our tools and techniques will help you plan the project, including who will need to do what and in what timeframe. And we can help you identify who will be affected by the change and how each affected group is likely to respond to it.
If the change is Transformational in nature, we will coach the leaders directing it on how to create an inspiring vision. We will help leaders develop a strategy for engaging people throughout the organization, and sometimes even stakeholders outside of the company, in sharing the vision. We will assist with the messaging and aid in assembling the infrastructure to support the transformation. This could include assigning and educating sponsors of the changes and chartering the working groups to oversee the various parts of the change process.
Transformational Change is the most complex type of change. We match our services to the exact circumstances and context of the transformation.
4. Design the Plan
Once you have determined the type of assistance you will need from us, we work with you to put together a plan, complete with roles and responsibilities, timelines and metrics. We will choose the tools and processes that we will use to assist you with the change you are facing as well as to build your change capabilities in general so that you will emerge with a stronger change muscle than when we began.
5. Support Implementation
Once the plan is in place, we will provide support for the implementation. The processes and practices that we design for implementation are concrete and easy to grasp. In fact, we like to say that we minimize the stress of organizational change.
Strengthening the Change Muscles: Real-World Examples
We have many examples of change services that we have provided to clients.
Example: Create a Workplace Environment to Support Company Purpose
When a company defines a clear social or environmental impact purpose that reaches beyond merely making a profit, they have taken the first step in a longer journey. Once defined, the purpose must be embedded in the company culture to have the impact the company desires. Miller Consultants helped a large company develop and implement a transformational change strategy for creating a workplace environment where their purpose was firmly embedded and guided their decisions, operations, and choices. Our assistance involved:
- Working to understand the exact nature of their business, their purpose, and the change that they desired. We quickly surmised that they were getting ready to undertake a transformational change.
- Coaching their leaders in crafting an inspiring vision and planning and facilitating a process for aligning their various stakeholder groups around the vision.
- Helping them develop a 3–5 year transformational change strategy for the organization.
- Assisting them in reviewing their decision-making and people-related systems to pinpoint what would need to be eliminated, redesigned or strengthened to support their newly minted identity.
- Designing a communication strategy customized to various stakeholder groups.
- Developing an education and training curriculum tailored to various stakeholder groups to address their specific needs for understanding and new skills related to the changes.
- Coaching the senior leadership team throughout the first year of implementation focusing on leading change and staying aligned as a team.
The Result
As a result of our collaboration with the organization, their leadership team reported greater cohesion and more efficient and effective functioning as they led the organization from a place of purpose and values.
Example: Develop A Change Roadmap for A New Commitment to Environmental Sustainability
Often companies conduct their corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate citizenship activities in one part of an organization and their environmental sustainability work in another. One of our clients engaged us to help them bring the two groups together to set new, more aggressive environmental sustainability goals. And, at the same time, they wanted to shore up their organizational culture to support their goals. We determined that this change was transitional. They wanted us to help them create a roadmap to take them from what existed to where they wanted to be in 10 years. Our assistance included:
- Assessing the current culture as it pertained to supporting more aggressive environmental sustainability goals.
- Working with our technical partner, Schneider Electric, we facilitated a cross-functional team to design a roadmap for the transitional change. The roadmap included new goals for environmental sustainability and strategies for achieving them including ways to make the culture more supportive.
The Result
Several people who participated in the process from our client organization noted the potency of assembling so many players from different yet interdependent parts of the organization. They heralded the value of hearing points of views from functions outside of their own. One person remarked that he had worked for the company for 25 years, and yet this meeting was the first time that he had met some of the people in the room and heard the perspectives of other functions.
After three years of implementation, the roadmap we helped them develop to support their ten-year goals resulted in 30% reduction in energy, wastewater and carbon emissions, and an 85% reduction in waste to landfill.
Example: Improve Talent Retention by Upgrading Individual Development for Meaningful Work
Most companies have some type of individual development process available to their employees. However, this client, a medium-sized technology company, became concerned that their system wasn’t working as it should when they found that they were losing too many talented employees. Through some preliminary research, they found that many of their employees disliked their jobs, and/or believed that their managers weren’t helping them grow. The company asked Miller Consultants to assist them in improving their individual development system. Thus this project involved developmental change. We assisted this company by:
- Designing and developing a system to teach managers skills for carrying out individual development planning with their employees.
- Coaching managers on how to tie employees’ work to company purpose, ensure that employees were able to use their strengths in their jobs, and support their career development continuously.
- Providing ongoing support to managers as they worked to improve their individual development process activities with their employees.
The Result
Employees noticed the change. They began to express their appreciation to their managers for their increased interest and attention to employees’ growth needs. Turnover dropped as managers became adept at carrying out the improved engagement and development system.
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