New E-Book Discusses Fundamentals of Change Management

Change management is a word thrown around by executives like a game of hot potato. There is a lot of uncertainty about what the term encompasses. Does it include changes in technology, structure, business processes, or business strategies?

Dan Lock, author of the e-book The Fundamentals of Change Management, says the term is rooted in employee behavior. In some companies, change management is housed in HR, in others you’ll find it in corporate communications or even IT.

While few learning and development departments have taken the reins of change management at their organizations, Lock says that is likely to change in the coming years given L&D’s already established ability to change employee behavior and culture.

Check out our video interview with Lock above or the transcript of the Q&A below. You can download your own complimentary copy of The Fundamentals of Change Management by clicking here.

What was your impetus to put together this type of e-book on change management?

In the last couple of years, I have been doing an increasing amount of exclusively change management projects where I've been asked to work purely with change management as opposed to, say, project management, technology implementation or process improvement, which is my other specialty. What I realized is there's more awareness about the need for change management. It's still poorly understood by business leaders and by technical leaders. So I wanted to put together and lay down my thoughts on the fundamentals of change management, the principles that underpin it. If people understand them and apply them, they can better realize the benefits of change management on their projects.

Many people know generally about change management, but the knowledge is only surface level. Maybe they think it's about changes in technology or structure or business processes or strategies. You say change management is rooted in behavior. Learning and development—our focus—is well positioned to change the behavior of employees through programs and learning portals. Do you think L&D professionals see themselves as these change managers?

I think increasingly they will. Perhaps not at the moment. They are probably focused on their training. And I think they should be integrated more into the change management. And the reason is this: Training is not an event. It's a process. And when you build training into the broader change management process, I think that's how L&D professionals are able to contribute to the behavior change that's required.

Are there any parts of the business that are particularly good at change management? Are departments taking this on as really their strong point?

It’s absolutely unclear in organizations currently. In some organizations change management can sit under HR; in other organizations, it might sit in corporate communications. In other organizations, still, it sits in IT. Every organization is different and so it needs to sit where it makes sense given the objectives that the company is trying to achieve. On the flip side, the fluidity of change management can be negative because people don't really understand what it is. It can become misaligned in an organization, and therefore, the organization will not get the full benefit of the structure and strategy that a change management program can help deliver. It's important that organizations try and think through what they're trying to do, and understand the degree of behavior change that is required for a project or strategy or technology implementation.

Another thing you mention in your book is the idea that often times change management necessitates a change in company or employee culture. At this year's Corporate Learning Week, we had a chief learning officer panel that focused on the topic of company culture. Can you talk about the connections between change management and company culture?

Let's first define what culture is. Culture change is that set of beliefs that govern behavior. So, if we're looking at change management, change management is looking to affect behavior directly, as well. So change management has a place in culture change. Some tangible culture change in and of itself is not an end; it's a means to an end. So, if an organization wants to become more entrepreneurial and more of an innovation culture, that should start showing up somewhere in people's behaviors and it should start showing up in the results. So, if we're talking about innovation, they should start producing new products and selling new products. Change management uses the same concept.

You also present this idea of the need to empower employees and how that plays into change management. Can you explain the impact?

Once again, talking about definitions: My definition of empowerment is that employees have the ability to decide the outcomes of their own work. When you think about it from that point of view, it allows them to make decisions that can get the job done with a reasonable balance. And management, if we can imagine the decision power that they have—they should be trying to push out those boundaries constantly. To do that, you need to train people in judgment and decision making, risk management and so on. Empowerment is the goal of change management, in the end. So, let's say we're implementing a new technology, you want people to reach a stage of empowerment where they now are owning this system; they are now okay to use it. They're coming out with ideas of how they can extend it and using it to its full capabilities to deliver the results for their customers. And that's when you've reached the stage of empowerment. Change management is about getting to that state of empowerment. Training and learning and development are all parts and components of that, but change management—as a whole—looks and takes a unique approach to those individual approaches to get to that objective.

I noticed a lot a different in roads that you used to start talking about change management. Some of it is academic—you mention Maslow's Hierarchy and Efrat Goldratt—and examples from big businesses like J.C. Penney and IBM, and then your own personal experiences in the business world. Can you talk about your decision to focus on all of these different angles and how change management can affect those different angles?

I like to use lots of examples in my writing to bring the writing alive, make it less academic. Sometimes, you can use academic examples like the one you mentioned with Efrat and Maslow's—everybody knows about that. I want to use examples that bring the idea alive that people can relate to, underpinned by academic theory, and also examples that they see in the modern business environment. I use the example of J.C. Penney and then compare and contrast that with what happened at IBM in the early '90s, and also how Jack Welch approached culture change.

It helps these otherwise academic ideas stick in people's heads. And I also like to use a few from just my own personal experience. One of the things I talk about in the book is it's important in change management to force people to let go. So you get all the way to the end, but at some point you have to turn off the spreadsheet, you've got to turn off the old system and you've got to force people to take on the new change and embrace it. I use the example where I was doing Cross Fit. One of the things I realized is to really excel at weightlifting, you can't hold on to the bar. When you get the bar above your head, you grip onto it because you don't want it to fall on your head. But actually, you've got to let go of the bar, in effect, and catch it, and then you push it up above your head. The metaphor is that you've got to let go sometimes to get to the next step you're trying to achieve. I think when people can have a variety of illustrations it brings the ideas more to life and makes them more memorable.