Why We Need Nemawashi Now!

I just had an opportunity to read a study commissioned by a division of Global Knowledge on the implementation of change management strategies and I have to tell you that it reinforced many of my earlier beliefs. Another study conducted by the International Society for Performance Improvement which tracked "success" for change efforts ranging from strategy deployment to mergers and acquisitions in 49 different applications showed a success rate of 33%- at the risk of being overly dramatic that means that two thirds of those initiatives failed!

Now you are probably asking yourself- What caused these initiatives to fail and hat can we do to improve our chances of success? The majority of studies found two primary causes of failure:

• Employee resistance
• Lack of proper training

The employee resistance factors have been boiled down to three key areas; fear of job loss, fear of increased responsibility, and frustration with the process. As you might suspect, this employee resistance is by far the biggest impediment to successful implementation. The good news is that there are a number of things that can be done to improve your success rate, specifically they include:

• Recognize and account for the "people" side of change management.
• Invest in developing effective interpersonal and communication skills for front line management.
• Recognize that change management is a systemic element of every day reality and build it into your plans and tactics. It is not an initiative it is a fact of today's reality!
• Anticipate what and where your resistance points will be and plan for them.

We are dealing with people! Using buzz words like restructuring, reallocation, re-engineering, etc. may sound sexy, but at the end of the day you are dealing with people. This is our whole foundation of Compliance to Commitment(TM), you give people a chance to "join up" with you rather than attempt to impose a change. At the very foundation is relationships and trust.

I would venture to say that the events of the last few weeks have done little to create trust on the part of employees and the public. Two thirds of the initiatives fail because they don't address these issues. Which group do you want to be in, the third that implements successful change or the two thirds that fail?

You will never implement sustained change without this foundation.