The Change Pact: Building Commitment to Ongoing Change - Hardcover

Strebel, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0273632949 ISBN 13: 9780273632948

Publisher: Financial Times Management, 1998

Synopsis

For many employees change is neither sought after, nor welcome; it's a disruption. To get people to commit--to buy into change--leaders need an approach that links the change effort to individual situations in a way that eventually puts employees back in charge of their own destinies. This book provides a pratical approach for getting employees to support change because they believe it's in their best interest.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Strebel is Professor of Change Management and director of the executive program, Leading Corporate Renewal, to which executives bring live change issues, at IMD, the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.

He has directed a variety of in-company programs for IMD's business partners and associates and has worked privately for numerous multinationals, including most recently, Schroders, Nokia, Nestle, Bosch, World Bank and Coopers & Lybrand.

Professor Strebel is the author of Breakpoints: How Managers Exploit Radical Business Change. His publications have appeared in Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Handbook of Business Strategy, plus many others, including numerous articles in the business press. He is on the editorial board of several change management journals.

Prior to his current position, he was director of research at Imede, one of the founding institutions of IMD. Professor Streel is Swiss, of South African origin, received his BSc (Hons) from the University of Cape Town, his MBA from Columbia University in New York, and his PhD from Princeton University.

From the Back Cover

The key to implementing successful change programs lies in the development of the "compact," a renewal of the total relationship between the individual and the organization. Successful change only happens when individuals are able to renew their occupational, economic, social and psychological commitments to the organization in the context of change initiatives. The Change Pact shows you how to create, develop and implement these contracts as part of a program of ongoing commitment to change.

In today's business world change is an absolute necessity, not just to compete with, but to keep ahead of the competition. The Change Pact shows how successful change leaders get their people to commit to ongoing change and shows how commitment can only be sustained with ongoing, not one-off, change management processes.

In Part 1, learn how to offer every employee an economic, social and psychological contract that is individually attractive, and which reflects how their behavior today relates to the current change effort.

Discover how to address the Change Agents, Bystanders, Traditionalists and Resistors within the company.

Part 2 orchestrates the renewal of compacts with a process that builds on the company's change context.

Master the four basic change processes: Top-down Turnaround, Task Force Change, Widespread Participation and Bottom-up Initiatives.

In Part 3, find out how to move towards an employee-driven compact renewal which gives employees a sense that they are taking the initiative for change.

Ensure that the perceived risk of change is lessened by moving the organization towards learning compacts that support ongoing, productive transformation."Paul has captures the essence of successful change implementation—the real change requires the commitment of your entire workforce. Reading this book will convince managers that they must approach their employees in an individual, differentiated way to gain their commitment and ensure their organization's future success. This book should appear on the shelves of academics, strategists and practitioner alike."—WJ Alexander, Chief Executive, Thames Water Plc

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The chasm is widening between the pace of change imposed by a rapidly shifting environment and the ability of people to cope. Chief executives are talking about total quality, lower costs, customer value, growth, innovation, and the multiple demands of the twenty-first century. And senior managers are making plans for process improvements in service, manufacturing, value chain management, and new flexible organizations for satisfying different markets and customers in the emerging, interconnected economy.

However, the people who are supposed to make it all happen, the people on the front line, are getting more and more confused and distrustful of management's intentions. According to a 1997 survey by the US-based Conference Board, mistrust of management and low morale were the biggest problems in employee relationships. A recent study in the UK reached the same conclusion: individual motivation and commitment in the mid-nineties were apparently lower than in the confrontational industrial climate of the mid-seventies.

The rapid pace of ongoing change disrupts commitment, because it is continually confusing the strategy, altering the task, and increasing the uncertainty. The problem is not merely the disappearance of job security. And the solution is not simply employability, although that is a piece of the puzzle. The problem is the increasing difficulty people have seeing how they fit in, reconciling a growing number of confusing change objectives with their job, acquiring an ever shifting range of skills. It is no surprise that front-line commitment is suffering badly in companies whose managers don't know how to deal with the individual fall-out from ongoing change.

To bridge the chasm and get people to commit to ongoing change, the change leader has to offer them new relationships with the company, relationships that translate corporate change to the level of the individual. What counts is not so much involving them in creating the change vision, but in linking the vision to what people do every day. Since real buy-in to change is an emotional, not just a rational, matter, individuals have to be able to connect the change to their own work situations, economically, socially and psychologically. To get people to support change because they believe it's in their best interests, not just the company's, you have to give them the chance to renew their relationships with the company on all dimensions, in the context of the new external environment. In so doing, you put them back in charge of their destinies.

These new relationships have to be total, in that they capture everything needed to support major change. I call these new total relationships new "compacts." The word "compact" means "an agreement supported by trust." Although the word has other meanings, I use it to capture what is involved when employees and managers work with ("com") one another to create an agreement ("pact") based on trust.

This book, in three parts, will give you the tools for getting your people to agree to new compacts that support ongoing change. This involves building a bridge for people between the compacts they have today and those needed for ongoing change. The process of creating this bridge can be reduced to three steps (hence, the three parts of this book): offer every individual an initial new compact that starts with where they are today, how they are responding to the current change effort orchestrate the renewal of compacts with a process that builds on the company's change context move from an initial top-down process to bottom-up renewal of compacts— start renewing compacts from the top down, but once people understand what is involved move toward bottom-up.

Edition details

• Publisher: Financial Times Management
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0273632949
• ISBN 13: 9780273632948
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248