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Small and large businesses have been searching for decades for the holy grail of organisational change: the perfect way to motivate employees to change their old ways for what management (or consultants!) deem to be better, new ones.
The prevailing wind of change is a "top down" change of an organisation's structure or reward system. Some experts espouse putting a "champion" in the executive suite to drive and implement change down to the lowest rung of the corporate ladder. The notion - get a big gun upstairs to push change to the organisational depths.
INSEAD professors Stewart Black and Hal Gregersen take a fresh approach in their
book 'It Starts With One', believing that an organisation changes only as fast and as far as the front-line individuals implementing that change. Therefore, they need to be considered first, in the change paradigm.
"When we work with managers, here's the default mindset: when they think about change it's easy for them to focus on all the things that are not personal?systems, context, or structure," Hal Gregersen said in an interview with INSEAD Knowledge. "But when you push managers to think about individual people who need to change, it becomes a very different conversation ... less of an intellectual exercise about systems and structure, and more of an individual exercise about real people making real change," Gregersen says.
Black agrees that the change must come from considering individuals first. He notes that only about 30 per cent of organisational change initiatives succeed. The 70 per cent failure rate, he says, is not because managers are dumb, but because there must be a systemic reason that their focus on changing organisational structure is not working. "Change really starts with focusing on the individuals you're trying to change, why you're going to change them, how you're going to change them, and how they...