Since most people are not involved in too many change initiatives during their lifetime they retire having never succeeded in aligning the workforce’s actions with their strategies, but are quite comfortable with their failure because it simply means that they never found the right implementation tool.
When we seek to change the way that an organisation works it has been argued that 95% of these efforts fail. This normally leads to the question, what can we do that will align our workforces actions to our strategies? This question is asked after every failure of change and due to the large number of failures, this question has been asked quite a few times.
Every time the question is asked, if we hear an answer that we have never heard before we assume that this must be what we have been doing wrong. We go off happily with our new strategy in the sure belief that this time it will work, this time we have found the answer, little realising that the odds are still 19:1, stacked against our success.
Since most people are not involved in too many change initiatives during their lifetime they retire having never succeeded in aligning the workforce’s actions with their strategies, but are quite comfortable with their failure because it simply means that they never found the right implementation tool.
An inexperienced mechanic who is told that one of the tools in his box will do the job will try every one before he either gives up or realises that the tool he needs is not in the box. Most people never live long enough to gain enough experience with change management to realise that, as a result of almost constant failure, there is no “right” tool to implement change.
If we did live long enough then eventually we might realise that this magic tool to implement change does not exist. Assuming that we do come to this conclusion, that banging our head against the wall is not achieving our aim, then we have to start looking for another strategy.
In the case of seeking alignment we have to conclude that aligning our workforce’s actions to our strategies is not working and look again at how to achieve our goal. This is difficult if we continue to believe that our goal is to “Align The Workforces Action With Our Strategies,” but is less difficult if we believe that our goal is simply to “Seek Alignment”.
In the first instance we are continually trying to force our workforce to change their actions to suit our management strategies. This driving behaviour creates a resistance in the workforce that is the reaction of any human being when told what to do by another. Every time we try to bend other human to our will we will experience this same reaction. This is why trying to force change to align actions with strategies is almost always doomed to failure.
If however we see simply “Alignment” as the goal then that allows a second strategy. That of creating a strategy to support the actions of the workforce. If instead of trying to force the workforce to change to match managements strategy we change our strategy to match the workforces actions we achieve alignment without creating any resistance at all.The major cause of failure is removed at a stroke. The argument against this volte face is that by this strategy we are taking the ability to create strategy away from the managers and giving it to the workforce. What a terrible thing to do.
Perhaps it was a terrible thing to do in the early part of last century when the manager was the only person with the overview of the market and the workers had a poor education and low expectations. Today the average worker can expect to have been to college or university, will own a car and possibly a house, will make independent investment decisions and can be expected as a result of the information revolution to have a valid and cogent opinion on anything from the morality of the Chinese occupation of Tibet to the next president of the USA.
Today’s workforce is educated, imaginative, intelligent. It is very difficult to generalise about the difference between today’s workforce and their managers, except that since they don’t work there, their managers have no idea about what is happening on the shop floor and are therefore the least able to understand what changes are required. The workforce on the other hand know exactly what is required but are prevented from making the required changes by managements insistence that they implement managements changes.
Management base their insistence on the belief that their workforce has no value unless they do what management wants. This attitude makes the workforce feel unvalued and therefore increases their resistance to implement any changes required by management. If however we prevent management from making the workforce feel this way we discover that the workforce have as much interest in the success of the enterprise as management and they have many more practical ideas about how to make it work.
So by allowing the workforce to become involved in creating strategy we discover that far from being destructive they have exactly the same goals as management but, with a greater collective experience and intelligence. they stand a much better chance of succeeding. Managers who resist involving their workforces in the creation of strategy by insisting that the workforce defer to their judgement are betting their careers against a collective expertise and intelligence that they cannot hope to match.
