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Change Management No Longer Optional for Clients

By Kate Nelson and Stacy Aaron

Your clients call you because they’re looking for ways to work faster, smarter, leaner, better. Whether regulations are requiring it, customers are asking for it, or competition is demanding it, your clients are probably looking to change.

To get from “here” (where they are now) to “there” (where they need to be in the future to survive and thrive) is not an easy task. Whether you specialize in helping your clients define “there” or get to that place called “there,” you can’t ignore that Change Management is a critical component to your client’s success.

If they haven’t already, your clients may soon ask you about Change Management. Your challenge, as a consultant, is to be prepared to offer advice and resources on how they can get their people ready, willing, and able to work in new ways.

According to The Conference Board study titled, Effecting Change in Business Enterprises—Current Trends in Change Management, “82 percent of survey respondents identified Change Management as a priority for their company”’ and “99 percent expect an increased need for Change Management over the next three years.”

After experiencing lots of failures with change efforts, organizations are catching on. Change management has gone from a non-existent or oft-ignored topic to an integral part of project planning. If your client is one of the few that doesn’t ask about the people issues central to change, it is your job to bring it up.

But before we discuss how to approach your clients about Change Management, it might be helpful to look back at how the discipline has evolved over the last fifteen years.

Change management has its roots in organization development and organization behavior. In years past, unfortunately, some consultant and clients didn’t understand or value those fields. When we first started consulting in Change Management in the early 1990s, it was a very new service that had grown out of unsuccessful reengineering and technology implementations.

It was viewed by the partners in our firm as optional, a convenient add-on if the budget permitted. Many times, the budget didn’t allow for any formal Change Management work or for only a bare bones approach that didn’t help much. One of us got a call about a project that was underway, with the person on the other end of the phone heralding, “The client has extra budget—send a change person up here!” Another call had a different context, “This project is running off the rails—send a change person up here!” Both calls sent the same message: Change Management was an afterthought or a “nice to have.”

Meanwhile, some innovators and business schools began embracing the importance of Change Management. In 1992, General Electric created its own Change Management methodology. They call it the Change Acceleration Process and have been using it ever since.

With Warren Bennis (one of the early thinkers linking leadership and strategic change) as a close advisor to GE, it is not surprising that they were way ahead of the curve. In 1996, John Kotter, a professor at Harvard, wrote his best selling book, Leading Change. The book set off a spark that increased awareness and interest in managing and leading organizational change.

By the time Kotter’s book came out, many of the large consulting firms, including Anderson, Deloitte Consulting, KPMG, and others had thoughtful, detailed, tool driven Change Management methodologies. Some clients still didn’t see the potential benefits, thinking Change Management was soft and had nothing to do with meeting business objectives.

However, some clients did see the benefit and integrated the consulting methodologies into their projects. They would have a Change Management team work hand in hand with the rest of the project team.

One client that we worked with was a large manufacturer that had a team of twelve consultants and staff on the Change Management team of an Enterprise Resources and Planning system implementation. That team planned and managed communication, developed employee engagement strategies, executed scenario-based role play sessions for employees to get comfortable with new business processes, created new job descriptions for the roles that were changing, and even developed training programs.

After 2000, Change Management continued to build momentum as a business topic. More large companies started developing their own Change Management models and methods. Selling “what Change Management is” got a lot easier, and some clients started to ask for it before the consultants offered it as a solution.

Still, there were plenty of companies that didn’t address people issues. In 2001, The Hay Group estimated that 70 percent of all change efforts didn’t meet expectations. They found that “people issues” were the primary hurdles to success, including inability to lead, ineffective sponsorship and teams, and management’s inability to execute.

Undoubtedly, your clients have experienced some of these failures, so they should show more interest in Change Management now. Today, Change Management is a relevant topic for all businesses. Hundreds of books and articles address the topic. We have many small and mid-size businesses that are new to Change Management but they understand its importance right away.

If you are not an experienced Change Management consultant, you can respond to your client’s Change Management needs with a referral to a trusted colleague, or you can learn a lot from the available resources and offer some direction yourself.

Since the early 1990s, resources on Change Management have grown exponentially. Search out training, certifications, Web-based activities, books, articles, and other resources that can help you and your client address Change Management issues.

If you would rather leave the “people stuff” to someone who does only that, then start expanding your network. As a good consultant, it makes sense to have a reliable network of people who have “complimentary” services to your own.

For example, we don’t do strategy work, but we have some great colleagues who do. When we encounter a client who wants us to help manage change but has not clearly articulated a strategy (the “there” the client is trying to reach), we can at least offer up the name of someone we know and trust to help develop that strategy.

As a consultant, you get it. You’ve been there…When your team has put in countless hours on a plan that never went anywhere; or when the implementation seemed to be going perfectly and, all of a sudden, a fast ball came at you from left field and turned the whole project on its head. So when your clients ask about Change Management, be ready. And if they don’t ask about it, remind them or even warn them if you must—without a group of people who are ready, willing and able to take you “there,” both you and your client will sit by sadly as all of your hard work is wasted.

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Stacy Aaron and Kate Nelson are co-authors of The Change Management Pocket Guide: Tools for Managing Change and the co-founders of Change Guides LLC. To learn more, visit www.changeguidesllc.com.