The CEO of a £10m utility firm was left exasperated after achieving a major reduction in operating costs. “So much has gone so well, but the fundamental way in which the business works, operates and behaves has not changed. What do I have to do to change the behaviour of my executives, my management
and the way in which we respond to our growing competitive pressures?” he laments.

This scenario is a common one. The question ‘how do we change behaviour?’ floats like a balloon. Tied to the string are the questions: ‘What behaviours are we looking for? What is the context? Can we even target behaviour, or are we missing the point?’

What is required is a cocktail of ideas, steps and efforts that will shift individual actions by changing their focus, realigning the organisation and harnessing their individual energy. In order to arrive at some answers, let’s look at some of the common dilemmas illustrated in the following scenarios:

Common dilemmas

A: “Clearly changing the physical and knowledge assets of our organisation is important to achieve change. Having done all of that, we are still not sufficiently competitive. We are still not delivering our promise. We’ve made expensive structural changes, yet unsure if we can make it work. Big tangible decisions are overshadowing the reality of needing to change individuals and teams.”

B: “We took on board some proven management advice from consultants. It is clear that our competitors have done X, so we must do X. We thought through the cultural fit, the differential side of our brand, our history and markets. We even learned from their mistakes and listened to their advice. Inevitably, we have to learn from our own mistakes and experiences. Yet we continue to set the required competencies, do’s and don'ts of behaviour, and hope that people will use these systematically.”

C: “The feedback from customers and stakeholders tells us that we fall short. Hard bottom-line measures – when available – rarely give us the full picture. It may obscure the promising roots that we are growing from, so we will stick to the strategy and renew the messages of change. Or maybe the feedback is at odds with our performance measures. Perhaps we are getting it wrong. Let us rethink, rewrite and recascade our message. The vision is fairly all-purpose, we’ll leave that alone. If we globalise we are on a roller-coaster out there, so we may take a much stronger top down approach; but if we remain a local provider in a monopoly or uncompetitive sector we will struggle with reinvention and manage down those expectations internally and externally.”

ER Consultants’ clients – global players, unique public agencies, innovative new businesses and major institutions – may well refute some of the above scenarios as simplistic logic, but will certainly be able to relate to some of the sub-text!

Changing individual, team and organisational behaviour to achieve such desired goals is a dilemma facing many a chief executive. Change management needs to integrate the hard physical changes with the changes in focus and behaviour of each and every individual impacted by that change. Too often we make the assumption that as long as we specify the required changes in sufficient detail, then change itself will happen. But in reality, there is very little evidence to demonstrate that specification alone leads to change.

When ER Consultants begins a dialogue with each client, be it for the first time or in a new phase of their journey, we will be responding to that call for a fix. That may mean offering strategic consultation, changing the structure, building resilience for change, designing and implementing a new performance or project management culture, realigning core businesses to deliver new strategy or to ensure a sustainable reward system to attract and retain scarce skills. Whatever
the scenario, we work to integrate meta, macro
and micro change levers in order to change
organisation performance.

1. The individual level (motivation, capability and job/process design)
There have been interesting contrasts in business approach that clearly impact on the psychological contract and degrees of integration between employee and employer – one of these is the drive to ‘diversify’. When used at a business level this means ensuring a more flexible and resilient response to changing markets. For individuals the term ‘diversity’ sits 90% within a legislative/social view of the world. What if we reversed this thinking? A resilient workforce achieves the breakthroughs for the business; the organisation espouses the value of diverse corporate behaviour.

Consider these differing models: the Japanese ‘corporate family’, militaristic organisations, the short-term or fixed-contract employees, the portfolio careerists, the professionally dispassionate public servant (bureaucrat), or the dedicated public servant. Every individual brings into the culture a potential to change it. If you are the hard-won black recruit to the Police Service, the expectations are ridiculous. However, if you are seen as ‘one of us’ from the word go, then the culture may smooth out any of the differences and innovative ideas a new person may bring, defeating the whole purpose of diversity.

2. The social or team level (motivation, capability and job/process)
This level of change is where new communities of practice (operational or executive work, service delivery, product development, thought work) are formed and grown. The systematic, perhaps over-engineered, approaches to managing people and work processes often give us the clue to how behavioural change has typically been approached. The more ‘illogical/uncontrollable’ the behaviour seems, the tighter the control mechanisms can become. It’s not our bid to promote ‘self-managed’ teams – all groups and networks have shifting levels of tolerance for imposed or required controls. A better appreciation of what is compatible will help to unpick the language and help improve the sense that is given and received between levels of change.

3. The organisational level (leadership, direction, culture and structure)
Finally, at this level of change we are taking the messages from the infrastructure of markets, competitors, funding, regulation, policy and technology. Each of these is fundamentally factored by shifting human experience at personal and social levels, and connecting a sense of the organisation’s environment to the individual. Vision can be unifying, as well as contain the multitude of ‘individual senses of purpose’ as Shakespeare had. It can contain the reality of the present and the common view of a desirable future for both the organisation and stakeholders (internal and external). The process of creating and using vision is not a one off set piece event, but a critical tool in the change process that needs to be meaningful and applied daily at every level. The methods we use to make this happen draw on all the levels and help economic agendas, in particular, to find their relevance in everyday experiences.

Taken together:
These three different and complementary perspectives on changing organisational behaviour represent three different views of the world: the psychological, the sociological and the economic. Our challenge is to make the economic realities make sense at the individual level. Similarly, the sociological and psychological language has much to offer the board and partnership/inter-organisational working.

Change management has entered the common parlance and seems to have lost much meaning as a result. Too often we take just one element of this complex series of interrelationships and call that change management. For example, let’s communicate change – an excellent and important element – but if the roles are not well designed, the measures of performance non existent and the organisation structure is still getting in the way, then however excellent the communications, it is unlikely to cut much ice.

There are no universal panaceas; however, when the three elements are combined in a way that fits your situation, the results can be quite stunning. Let’s return to the CEO at the start of the article. With him we reconfigured the organisation, we coached him and his executive team, we built a common understanding of the new way of working and facilitated the new management teams to a new understanding of their role and a different behaviour. Accountability has been sharpened, yet collaboration has increased. The company has broken out of a singular approach to cost cutting and is attacking the market again with vigour.

Keeping track of this ‘alternative logic’ is what makes managing change a stimulating and creative role to have. We work with our clients to enjoy the journey with all its twists and loops. Rigid conformity is not our goal – creating and keeping the sense, coherence, openness and performance, most certainly is.