Opportunity for Change?

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I have found in my travels there are two types of change – forced and voluntary.

Change in any form is often painful, sometimes shocking but always a transition.  It is the reason for the change and how you manage it that makes it more effective and/or efficient.

An example of forced change could be, your freight bill has crept up and has now become prohibitive.  There are a number of steps you can take to correct the situation – review costs with suppliers, find new suppliers, change the profile of your shipments, etc.  But now action is required urgently, placing pressure on staff and possibly service providers – errors are inherent in rushed or urgent projects.

But what if you put into place a process of continual review of all your transport providers?  – to monitor performance, costs and mutual gains.  This is a change but it is controlled and under your terms, it is smoother, with minimal urgency with smaller increments as to identify costs.  This has the side-effect of generating mutual cooperation and team building across companies ie sort the problems out early and together.

What happens when someone leaves your organisation – for whatever reason?  Do you analyse their role, the impact of their role on others or the impact of their role on the organisation.  There is a chance nothing changes and you just hire a replacement, but this is a fantastic opportunity to see where that role fits in with the whole – this is your chance to make improvements, more efficiency and/or effectiveness.  But this is a voluntary change and may mitigate forced changes down the track, eg redundancy.

So the old adage “if it works, leave it alone” does not work. That is like saying “Although there are small leaks in the dam it still works, so don’t mess with it”   I don’t know about you but if I owned the dam, I would not wait for it to fail!

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12 thoughts on “Opportunity for Change?”

  1. Adding to my previous – This is if you do not have a culture of change already in place – Once you are working on change, then you can work on the voluntary changes. If you have the resources or staff that are willing to take up the cause then they can do voluntary changes whilst also manging forced change. This is ultimately the prefered option: working on issues before they are issues.

    Cheers
    Mark

  2. Hello Bernard

    Change is a big subject and I would need to now if there is anything specific you want to change, it could be a process, a product or company culture, customer attitude, etc. They are addressed in a similar way but the management of each is different.

    Change is primarily a mindset, it is about having standards and the will to actually do something immediately as issues are found. Procrastination kills change and progress. So the very first thing to do is set the standards eg in my Customer Service article I suggest drafting yourself a Customer Service Charter – this is your standard to Customers. I have found the most efficient way of conducting regular change is to set the standard then as each issue comes up do a full review a that time (it is a bit more time friendly and issue focused). When you do not have any issuse being worked on review your KPIs, they are a passive form of issue yet still need the same attention.

    Oh, and you need to generate the right culture and trust with your staff – In general, staff AND managers are fearful of change!

    I would be glad to answer any specific question you may have.

    Cheers
    Mark

  4. Hi,
    I have an RSS link on the tabs on my site. I know you can subscribe to my site by clicking through this, now I am guessing there is a widget on your site that takes RSS feeds. Thus comleting the loop.

  5. Thanks for the compliment Antonia, much appriciated.
    (Sorry for delay Blog admin auto sent comment to Spam folder)

  6. Very good question – I’ve never done this but we see what I can find.
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  7. You can, but please credit back to my blog – thanks.
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