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In a previous life I walking into my new boss's office for my induction talk - it was my first day of my first people management job and I was full of excitement and anticipation. Then he sat me down and said: "Your job is to get the unwilling to do the impossible for the ungrateful."
I nearly turned around and walked back out the door! If we put our hands on our hearts how many of us would admit that change management sometimes feels like this? A recent change management study by Towers Watson surveyed over 600 organisations that have recently gone through significant change and unearthed the practices that are at the heart of effective change management. They simple truths and can make the difference between and failure in many cases, but evidence suggests that they are often forgotten when in the midst of a challenging change project.
It is a fact that change is a constant reality for any organisation looking to survive and thrive in these turbulent and uncertain times. When you boil it up, change is about doing things differently or doing different things. Whether you have to change, help others change or define what the change is, we all have a vested interest in getting it right. Our recently published research shines a light on what those organisations that are effective at change management have in common when it comes to managing change. So bearing this in mind, the first issue to put to bed is what do we mean here when we say 'effective change management'? In a nutshell, if change programmes achieve their stated goals on time and within budget and deliver sustainable benefit then that would fit most people's definition. We used this definition to classify organisations that are really good at change management and then looked at what they did well in comparison with their peers.
Significantly and perhaps not surprisingly, we also found that those businesses that plan and execute change well are also the ones that are outperforming their peers when it comes to bottom line performance. Companies highly effective at both communication and other change management activities are 2.5 times as likely to outperform their peers that are not highly effective in...