V EDYCJA FORUMZARZĄDZANIA KOMPETENCJAMI PRACOWNIKÓW WPRAKTYCE

Managing Personal and Staff Effectiveness during OrganizationalChange

A lecture by John GaynardSenior Partner Syre Consulting (Systèmes et Ressources sarl)ParisWarsaw September 2005At a conference organised by the Profirma Consulting CompanyJohn Gaynard works for his own consulting company:Syre Consulting (Systèmes et resources sarl)14, avenue de l’Opéra75001 Paris,FranceTéléphone: +33 1 30 61 46 17 or +33 1 47 58 67 08Website:http://www.syre.comBlog :http://johngaynardcreativity.blogspot.comTwitter account:http://twitter.com/jfitzgaynardJohn Gaynard, Senior Partner, Syre Consulting,http://www.syre.com Page 1

How I got into Change and Transition Management

I will begin with a piece of personal history. I used to work at the WorldBank, in the European Office Headquarters in Paris. In 1988 I had been at the Bank for four years and I worked in the recruitment department. A new President wasappointed. He was a former U.S. Congressman and his job was to make the Bank more effective and more efficient. After his nomination, he immediately startedtalking about the major change effort he would launch to make the Bank moreresponsive to its clients. My manager at that time was a person who was nearingretirement. He was one of the best managers I ever had. One morning he came to meand he said, “John, recruitment has been frozen. With all this talk of change, therewill be absolutely nothing to do for the next 10 to 12 months, so decide which of your skills you want to upgrade. Then every morning, come into the office and work onthat skill. In every other department, work will also come to a standstill. People will be worried; they will be talking in the corridors all day long. Hard information will be impossible to come by, so rumours will occupy the minds of most people. If youdon’t want to be caught up in the stress and if you don’t want to waste the next year of your life, fix yourself a personal objective and work on it.”At first, I didn’t believe him. How could the whole World Bank, with morethan 10.000 staff members, come to a halt? But, he was right. With regard toorganizational effectiveness or respecting its mandate in the developing world it didcome to a halt. None of the economists that year travelled to evaluate new loan projects in the developing world. They stayed in Washington or Europe because theywere frightened that if they left the office even for one day they would lose their job.That is when I first learned that during major changes, if the change is notcommunicated effectively from a human point of view performance levels can drop toonly 15% of organizational potential. The World Bank is in the Public Sector. It prides itself on being more effective than other United Nations Organizations. TheUnited Nations Organizations are continually implementing change initiatives whichnever seem to succeed. These organisations can survive because, ultimately, they arefinanced by their member countries who keep them alive for political reasons. Butcompanies in the private sector who manage change as badly as internationalorganizations usually go bankrupt very quickly.That manager put me on the path that eventually lead me to do an MBA, inwhich I began to become very interested in Strategic Human Resource Managementand Change Management. I have since worked on change programmes with manyinternational companies in France, Belgium, Holland and the United Kingdom.

Survivor Guilt

I was promoted during that 1988 change and that promotion taught me about

survivor guilt

. A promotion did not give me as much pleasure as I had expected. Infact it pained me because at the same time some of my best colleagues had lost their jobs in very emotional circumstances. Survivor guilt also reduces personal andorganizational effectiveness, but it is rarely taken into account in change programmes.John Gaynard, Senior Partner, Syre Consulting,http://www.syre.com Page 2

At that time, for personal reasons, I could not leave the World Bank. But Irealised much later that the 1988 change was the event that triggered my decision notto stay with the organization for the rest of my career. When I finally did leave, 10years later, after another two badly-managed changes and another two promotionswhich came at very high human cost, I said to myself that there must be some better way to manage change. I set out to find it and that is how I came across the work of William Bridges.One of my first activities after leaving the World Bank was go to Canada andstudy the work of William Bridges with an associate of his, Chris Edgelow. I hadcome across Bridges’ name in a Fortune Magazine article about best changemanagement consultants in the United States. In a few minutes, I will be going intomore detail about the methods developed by Bridges after he himself had gonethrough a difficult change. His ideas initially came from reading the French 19

century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. Van Gennep had found that in traditionalsocieties, every time there was an important change the person involved in the changehad to go through a rite of passage. This rite of passage was nearly always made upof three stages:1. Separation from the previous status.2. An in-between time before the assumption of the new status.3. Reincorporation of those passing into a new status.

What I have learned About Communicating Change

The first major assignment I did in France was with an American computer company where communication had totally broken down between the majority of thestaff, the unions and the Human Resources department. In fact, because of the levelof stress most of the Human Resource professionals were on sick leave for a large partof the time I worked with the company. The change had begun badly, and then gotworse, because of bad communication. I would like to share with you the principles Ihave learned about communicating change, both from my professional experience andfrom working with Bill Bridges and Chris Edgelow (a Canadian consultant).1.The change should never be communicated unless it has been well thought out.The strategic analysis must have been done and the strategic choice must have been made. The date for the change to begin must be fixed in advance and mustnever be delayed. It is usually on the day the change is announced that staff recognise the implications for themselves and their own transitions.2.So that staff can recognise the implications for themselves the change should becommunicated only when the Four P’s are in place. The Four P’s are : Purpose,Picture, Path and Part.2.1.

The Purpose

should describe why this change is the right one. WHY doesthe company need to change? Why does it need to change now? What wouldhappen to the company if this change were not undertaken? The mistake thatis often made during times of change is to focus on the solutions (this is whatis going to happen), but before staff accept what is going to happen they needto agree with the WHY of the change.John Gaynard, Senior Partner, Syre Consulting,http://www.syre.com Page 3