Change the Way You Lead Change

Popular wisdom suggests that fewer than 20% of all change initiatives are really successful. More alarming still for top managers, a survey of 1087 corporate directors, reported in BusinessWeek in 2005, found that 31% of CEOs fired by their boards were removed because they mismanaged change; more than any other cause. Why is this happening--and why do we need another book purporting to have the answer? Herold and Fedor have spent the last ten years pursuing this question through a series of studies that have examined more than 300 changes and over 8000 individuals who have lived through them. They asked executives to think of an unsuccessful change initiative, and identify the key factors that were responsible for the failure. They found that, while almost all advice about organizational change focuses on a few steps applied to a single change, few people actually lived in a one change at a time environment; rather they lived on a roller coaster of change, with overlapping changes being driven by different events, led by different executives, and originating from different parts of the organization. In other words, change is never a stepwise or easily prescribed process. Rather, it is messy, complicated, and its outcomes are easily swayed by a host of factors. In this context leaders need to develop and utilize realistic frameworks for organizational change, and to implement a holistic change model that defines and justifies the proposed change, and takes account of both the abilities of those who will be asked to lead and implement the change, and of the context in which the change is to occur Herold and Fedor developed such a model and then reality-tested theirideas by bouncing them off hundreds of managers who were living change on a day-to-day basis. Those ideas are collected in this practical book.