Top 6 Ways to Create Change in an Organization

People are naturally resistant to new things, and successful, long-term change won’t come easily. The bigger and older the organization, the more entrenched people get. Even people who would seemingly benefit from the change can be surprisingly unwilling to do things differently.

Still, change can originate from any level of an organization. In fact, in order to be most successful, every level of an organization must take part in defining what changes are needed and how they will be achieved. This article hopes to help you affect change, whether you are the CEO of your company or working in the stockroom.

1. Make allies
Gett the ear of people who are sympathetic to your concerns. Remember to speak to individuals about your concerns in ways that will resonate with them. For example, a boss may not be interested in hearing about how hard a particular problem makes your workday, but might be interested in hearing how that problem is costing the company money. If you are going to get people to care about the issue you are concerned about, you are going to have to interest them on their terms.

2. Seek Insider Input
Ask a variety of people for their input on how the problem could be resolved. Remember, affecting change requires compromise. You can’t hold onto the idea as your own if you want the organization to change – it needs to be a group effort. Try to include members of every group that will be affected –from management to employees to community activists. Bring in nay-sayers, too. Knowing what the objections to your idea are from the beginning will help you both counter them and create a viable compromise. Work to reach a plan of action that encompasses everyone’s insights.

3. Seek Outsider Input
Chances are, someone somewhere has already faced the challenges your organization is up against. It can be instructive to find out what people in other companies have done to try to remedy this problem – what worked, what didn’t, and why. Also, an outsider (such as a consultant) can look at the problem from a different perspective – outside the fishbowl, so to speak. They may be able to pinpoint snags in your thinking or simple solutions that might not be obvious to you.

4. Foster buy-in
Once you know what should happen, encourage people to buy-in to the plan of action. One good way to get other people to buy-in to the plan of action is to educate them. When people understand why a plan exists and how it is supposed to work, they feel much more inclined to support it. And if you did a good job of including nay-sayers in the planning process, you will already have answers to most of the objections people might raise.

5. Be vigilant
Anyone who’s been on a diet knows that it’s easy to stay on track at first, when you are feeling gung-ho about things. But after a while, success can turn you lazy or failure can discourage further efforts. The same is true with organizational changes. Build in checks into your action plan, so you can make sure that progress continues months and years down the line. When you reach barriers, just re-group, reexamine the goals of the action plan, and work as a team to find a way to achieve those goals. If a barrier makes a particular goal absolutely unattainable, try to figure out a second-best goal to achieve.

6. Acknowledge success
As you begin putting your plan into action, set goals for your organization. Then celebrate each achievement. The celebration doesn’t need to be an expensive party – just do something to acknowledge progress. Try a note in the company newsletter or a notice on the bulletin board. Of course, when you reach major accomplishments, you may want to do something bigger, after all. And don’t forget to publically acknowledge the actions of anyone who goes above and beyond to help make the change a reality.

http://labor.about.com/od/laboractivism/tp/leadingchange.htm