How often have we seen management initiate change with great enthusiasm and expectation and then passively manage the process to a failed outcome? A leader’s capability to manage change is often the determining factor behind a successful process implementation. Without good change management, our business improvement initiatives are doomed to fail. This issue often reminds me of a book that I read to my children when they were young – Bear and Bunny Grow Tomatoes by Bruce Koscielniak.
In the story, Bear and Bunny decide to each grow a garden of tomatoes. Bunny takes the path of least effort. He scatters some seeds on the ground and then takes off to relax and have fun, fully expecting a wonderful garden to grow. Bear, on the other hand, carefully prepares the soil, plants the seeds, waters and weeds, he stands over his effort with great vigilance. Needless to say, Bear reaps a healthy harvest of tomatoes and Bunny stands in a forest of weeds wondering what happened.
Like Bunny, business leaders scatter the seeds of change on an organizational garden and expect the results to magically appear. They wonder why the change did not yield the expected result, why their employees are not enthusiastic, and why their budgets have been overshot. The answer, as was so simply illustrated in the Bear and Bunny book, is that it takes planning and constant effort throughout the initiative's lifecycle to achieve the identified change. For any change initiative to succeed, a leader must visualize and communicate the desired outcome, identify the steps necessary to yield results, make the right resources and tools available, ensure that the initiative is progressing, and reinforce the desired behaviors.
This was recently reinforced in a recent lead time reduction project we helped implement. In the past, this very successful company had tried to implement lean production with moderate success. They understood the benefits of lean manufacturing and they invested in training their employees. They changed production layouts from traditional production lines to cells and instituted Kanbans to manage and drive down their inventory. Despite their efforts, there was not the desired improvement in throughput and service levels continued to lag. Like Bunny, management planted the seeds necessary to get a result but did not experience the fruits of their labor.
When we dug into their current process, we learned that the fundamental manner in which work was done had not changed. Their employees were still batch processing and not operating in a single piece flow that a lean system requires. Why? It was easier for their employees to work in batches as they always did. For them, working as a team and relying on one another to keep work flowing was not comfortable. Since no one challenged their behavior, despite a change in landscape, their work methods never changed and the accompanying results were never realized.
Many successful companies like our client suffer the same fate when implementing new initiatives. They often underestimate the people side of implementation, assuming the new process will manage itself. Change management addresses the most basic aspect of change: the people doing the work. It manages their natural discomfort to change to put into practice the new processes necessary to achieve a desired outcome.
At our client, we worked with an employee team to re-engineer their layout to reinforce single piece processing. Our methodology focused on designing the new processes by the employees doing the work. This increased buy-in and drove process ownership. In the end we were not only able to implement the required work methods and behaviors but more importantly provided management with the basis for oversight and hands on reinforcement.
As in gardening, where most of the time is spent planting, watering, weeding, and watching over each stage of the garden’s life cycle, leadership must communicate, measure, evaluate, and direct every stage of the change process. Leadership must have hands on involvement to directly address resistance and continually reinforce the required behaviors. Once there is measurable evidence that the new processes are taking root, they can start to step back their efforts and allow the progress to take off on its own. Without that effort, your change initiative will look like Bunny's garden.
