Managing Business Change For Dummies

Beth L. Evard, Craig A. Gipple

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118069479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Managing Business Change For Dummies gives you practical step-by-step advice for evaluating your organization's change effort from start to finish. This friendly guide brings you specific techniques and tools for each step of the change process -- from how to pinpoint potential problems and resolve them quickly, to how to help employees respond to change with more flexible and positive attitudes.

Part I

Who, Me? Change?

In this part . . .

**IN a DROPCAP**

No one needs to tell you that life often spins out of control. In this part, you discover what change really is and how you and others may feel when uncertainty strikes. You also get a look at the changes that are occurring worldwide — and what changes aren’t occurring.

Chapter 1

Expect the Unexpected

In This Chapter

Living with change in and around you

Keeping your cool when things get messy

Getting comfortable with impermanence

Defining the key tools for successfully managing change

Taking stock of the changes going on in your life

“I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.”

Dr. Seuss Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

N o matter how hard you try, eventually your shiny, new car always gets a few nicks and scratches on it, or even an ugly dent. Your closet probably has a few favorite pieces of clothing that now fit a smidgen too snugly. Your company may have been bought, and work-life as you knew it radically altered. Or, maybe, someone else snatched away that promotion or that great deal for which you worked so hard. Face it — in this life everybody meets with a few “bang-ups and hang-ups” — changes that disrupt their plans. The question isn’t about how to avoid the bumps and bruises that come with change (because you can’t), but rather how you respond when things don’t go as you expected or when life as you know it gets turned upside down and inside out.

If you’ve spent your hard-earned money to buy this book, most likely you want to make change work for you rather than against you. You probably want to take the initiative rather than react defensively or wallow in self-defeating victimhood. And if you manage an organization, you undoubtedly want to lead others into action, not struggle against their self-protective reactions — known as resistance. You’ve come to the right place. You’re holding a book that gives you tools and techniques for succeeding with change — in both your professional and personal life (though we focus more on your work world).

It was Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French scientist who developed both the process that pasteurizes your milk and the vaccinations that protect you health, who said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” You might also say that change favors only the prepared mind.

In this chapter, you jump-start the preparation process. First, we dispel the commonly held belief that change is a now-and-then occurrence. Rather, we show you that change infiltrates every aspect of your life, not just the merger you’re grappling with or the new cost-cutting efforts underway. Then we address how the tough part of managing change really isn’t mastering the technical tactics, but coping with all the messy human hassles — getting employees to do what they don’t want to do. Finally, we present some of the skills that help you become a more effective change manager.

Before you jump into the tough realities and frustrations that come with change, stop a moment. Remind yourself that “information is power.” And that the more you know about change, the more successfully you manage it. Also, remember that while change is about losses and endings, it’s also about gains and new beginnings.

If You’re Breathing, Then Expect Change

You can’t escape change. No one has yet found a way to hold back the night or live forever in springtime. Babies and puppies grow up. Indifferent mirrors keep reminding you about the relentless march of time and gravity. When you think about it, your tastes in food, clothes, people, music, and entertainment, just to name an obvious few, have also altered over the past ten to 15 years.

What about the not-so-obvious changes? Did you know that your stomach manufactures a new lining every three days to protect itself from the acidity of its digestive juices? That means your stomach produces up to 500,000 new cells every minute. Your skin is also busily working away, replacing itself every four weeks. In fact, physiologists have established that in a little over one year’s time, about 98 percent of your body’s cells are new. And then you’ve got your never-at-rest immune system fighting around the clock against invading viruses and bacteria. Basically, you’re a walking, talking change machine.

Now think about work. How much of your job has remained exactly the same over the past five years? Bosses change, peers disappear, and your people find greener pastures. Your customers are fickle, and so, too, is the stock market. The constant centralizing-decentralizing gives you a whiplash. You’re forever getting hardware and software upgrades or a new e-mail virus. More and more companies turn to mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations for what ails them. Oh, don’t forget, while playing organizational musical chairs, you just might be going to school at nights to keep your skills up to snuff. No wonder nerves get frayed, with stressed-out employees getting sick or letting out repressed rage in the office instead of on the road.

Now think about personal changes outside of work. You can write your own unique list here — you get married, a child is born, a parent dies, your best friend moves away, you get transferred to another city, you move into a new house that’s great, your old car goes kaput, and the personal changes just go on and on. It is important to remember that many changes are in fact good. People often benefit from change. The difficulty is not just good or bad changes, but that so much change occurs.

Welcome to the 21st century.

A New Look at Change

So, what is change? It’s adjustments, transformations, transitions, and revolutions. It’s the never-ending cycle of birth, growth, and death. It can simultaneously bring joy and sorrow, gain and loss, satisfaction and disappointment, or all those experiences mixed together. Sometimes change happens so gradually that you never notice the subtle shifts in your life. At another time, in one moment, your life, as you know it, is altered forever.

While change defies simplistic definitions and easy explanations, scientists know one thing about it for sure — without change, life on this planet ceases to exist.

Modifications are messy

Human beings have a love-hate relationship with change because it gives them mixed results. It’s neither all good nor all bad, but contains the seeds of both. The same biological process that quickly heals a...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Who, Me? Change?
• Chapter 1: Expect the Unexpected
• Chapter 2: What Is Changing?
• Part II : Over Two-Thirds of Changes Fail — Don’t Let Resistance Put You in This Statistic
• Chapter 3: Resistance: Looking at Losers and Winners
• Chapter 4: Don’t Shoot! Resisters Aren’t Your Enemies
• Chapter 5: Why People Will Always Resist
• Chapter 6: If Knowledge Is Power, How Do I Get More Of It?
• Chapter 7: Managers Resist Change, Too
• Chapter 8: Skills for Working with Resistance
• Chapter 9: Assessment: How’s Your Organization Doing with Resistance?
• Part III : Planning Your Change — From Calamari to Tiramisu
• Chapter 10: Making Sure That Your First Step Is The Right One
• Chapter 11: Getting Your Act Together
• Chapter 12: Describing Your Present World
• Chapter 13: What Does Your Brave New World Look Like?
• Chapter 14: Creating Your Implementation Plan — Even When You Don’t Want To
• Chapter 15: Now, What Do You Tell Your Employees?
• Chapter 16: Assessment: How’s Your Management Doing with Planning for Change?
• Part IV : Leading the Charge
• Chapter 17: The Many Faces of Leadership
• Chapter 18: Making Communication Work for You
• Chapter 19: Celebrate Successes
• Chapter 20: Assessment: How’s Your Management Doing with Leading the Charge?
• Part V : Taking Care of Yourself — No One Else Will
• Chapter 21: Five Keys to Mental Mastery
• Chapter 22: Powerlifting for the Mind and Body
• Part VI : The Part of Tens
• Chapter 23: Ten Things That Every Change Winner Does
• Chapter 24: Ten Barriers to Successful Change
• : Further Reading