What is Organizational Change Management? | Introduction to Change Management

what is organizational change management I've been a change management consultant my entire career and sometimes I take for granted that some people may not understand what the word means some people may have never heard of the word and those that have may not understand what it takes to manage change or why it's so important and I want to talk today about what is organizational change management what does it mean to you my name is Eric Kimberling and the CEO of third stage consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients through their transformation journeys and

like I mentioned at the top of the video have been a change management consultant for 22 years my entire career so it's something that I know very well and thought it'd be an important time to take a step back and just talk about the real fundamental basics of change management and in my philosophy of change management [Music] now the thing that change management is that there's no one definition there's no one standard way the change management is defined and so I like to keep it really simple and define it on the surface as anything that

is required to change people and to change your organization to change your culture anything to do with the people and human side of your business anything to change that is what organizational change management is so I'll talk in a few minutes in this video about what some of those tools and mechanisms are to change people but the other part of change management is how to keep those people aligned how do we keep our organization aligned and not just understanding what the change is but being aligned on what the change is and why it's happening and

what it means to all of us so in a nutshell if I were to summarize a starting point of what change management is its anything to do with changing people getting them aligned in ensuring that the organizational human aspect of your transformation is being addressed now in addition to making sure that your people your employees your overall organization is aligned and actually as a prerequisite to that you want to make sure that your executives are aligned a lot of times companies move forward the changes or transformations of some sort without having clear executive alignment and

definition of what this change means to the organization why we're doing it what some of the key decisions are behind it so our executives and also the key stakeholders within the organization need to be aligned on what this change is and how it's going to affect our overall organization as an example a lot of times we'll be hired by clients that will say we want to standardize our business processes across the entire world or a global company we want standard processes we want everyone act like one company but what they don't realize is what the

detailed decisions are behind that what are the decisions that need to be made on what that exactly means to act like one company are there any exceptions to that is it a all-or-nothing type proposition or are we somewhere on a spectrum those are the types of things that a lot of times executives and stakeholders aren't aligned on and when they start the transformation and then hand it off or expect the rest of the organization to follow there's a lack of clarity there's confusion around what that really means so it's really important to define a framework

and sort of a skeleton of what the change is make sure that the executives and stakeholders are aligned on that skeleton so that we can continue to flush out the details with the rest of the organization going forward now typically prior to change affecting employees there is an identified change to business processes or a set of business processes so one of the first things we need to do in order to be effective at change management is to define what our changes to business processes are and a lot of change management practitioners think that business process

stuff is outside the realm of change management they think that it's all about just dealing with the human side of things but we also have to deal with the operational side of things because the human and operational side comes together along with technology to enable changes and we have to understand what the changes to business processes are we have to define that in detail we have to define how technology is going to fit in how roles and responsibilities are gonna change all that stuff that comes later we can't do any of that until we've defined

how processes are going to look going forward so part of change management is by necessity defining what those features state business processes are so once we've defined what the business process changes are we inevitably lead to the conversation of how are people's jobs changing if I typically had a responsibility for a certain amount of work and you're gonna take some of that work away or you're going to add to my workload or you're gonna give me a new technology to do my job or you're gonna take away a spreadsheet that I've always used and obsessed

over for 20 years my job is changing and I need to understand what those changes are and we as a change management team need to understand what those changes are so that we can communicate to people and help them transition through that change now the thing about designing roles and responsibilities is that different people are affected and impacted differently we work our way down from company-wide changes down to business units or locations down to departments down to individual work groups and ultimately individuals and we define what the changes the roles and responsibilities are for all

of those different people and a lot of times people think of change management is more of a shotgun approach where we just take a high-level view of what the changes are we send out some emails we tell the management team and we call it good but we have to get down to the real micro level of understanding how one individual person in each individual person's job may be changing so that whole definition of roles and responsibilities is a critical component of change management [Music] now an often-overlooked and hard to understand aspect of change management is

culture what kind of culture is it that you're trying to achieve with your organization are you trying to change your culture are you trying to become more of a flexible organization are you trying to become more of a customer centric organization a more efficient organization whatever the general type of change your going through is going to have an impact or should have an impact on your culture in an order for us to change the culture we have to change the people and in order to change the people we have to change the culture so it's

sort of a closed-loop cycle and so change management has to take culture into account and we have to figure out what are the things we can do to start to bend the culture and start to influence the culture recognizing that it's not going to happen overnight and if we're trying to achieve a certain future state it's going to take years or maybe even longer to get there but we can start influencing that culture and directing people in that direction now now the younger of a company you are the easier cultural change typically is if you're

a more established organization with highly tenured employees it's going to be a bit harder to change that culture but regardless you still want to define what that culture is and cultural change is a core component of change management so when it comes to execution the next component of change management is helping employees through the journey helping them through the transition helping them understand that this is our future state over here here's where we are today and how are we gonna help them migrate from point A to point B and so it's really that execution part

of defining how is it we're gonna help each individual person in each individual work group transition through the change throughout the organization and again this is going to be something that's tailored to you every change management plan and strategy and approach should be tailored for your organization and watch out for cookie cutter approaches because cookie-cut cookie-cutter methodologies and tool sets typically don't work because they're cookie cutter and they aren't unique to who you are and who you're trying to become so defining what that transition plan is and what the overall change transition plan is going

to be is a very core and important part of what organizational change management is [Music] and now the final major component of organizational change management that a lot of change if not most change practitioners fail to recognize is benefits realization how do we measure the results how do we identify how our efforts should and will impact our actual company-wide performance so if we're trying to become a more customer driven a customer centric organization for example how is it that we're gonna measure and hold individuals accountable and how can we actually measure the results after the

fact to see how successful we were in our change efforts so that we can modify and tip it and reinforce where it needed so benefits realization and then more pragmatic and tangible and quantitative side of change is extremely important and it's a bit different than the soft touchy-feely side of change management it's very hands-on at tactical but it's very important and something that oftentimes gets overlooked but benefits realization is the final major component of what organizational change management is or should be so I hope this provides a basic introductory level understanding of what change management

is why it's important what the major components of change management are now if you're looking for more detail on how to actually execute some of these things I've talked about today I've included a number of resources in the links below I've published a lot of papers there's a guide to organizational change management I've included a link to below I've put a number of videos on my youtube channel about change management a lot of different articles and blogs we have written on our website so I've included just a few of those links below to help get

you started so I hope you found this information useful and I'd love to hear your feedback any change efforts a year going through any feedback on how you would define change I encourage you to provide comments in the fields below please like this channel and please feel free to reach out to me if you like to brainstorm ideas on how to manage change within your organization I've included my contact information below to reach me to set up a time to talk so I hope you're having a great day I hope you found this helpful and

we'll chat with you soon [Music]