We can learn about others, learn what they value and believe from what they volunteer to tell us, from what others tell us about them and from what we see. Since what others tell us about someone else always needs to be considered as only an opinion, and what people volunteer is often how they want to be perceived – I favor asking. In order to know an organization, it is very much the same. There is gossip, there is how they want to be perceived and there is asking.
When it comes to organization change, it is pretty critical to ask. You need to truly understand the organization, the issues and the needs going forward to successfully implement lasting change.
Often when I work with organizations, leadership is certain that they have the pulse of the organization. Yet when I interview some of the people about a pending or active change and survey the broader stakeholder group there are always surprises. Once the leadership team was very surprised to learn most people who had a cube, possessed a sign on their partitions that read, “the only difference between this place and the Titanic is they had a band.”
Most change initiatives fail because of a short list of reasons. Research often shows misses such as lack of: management commitment, sufficient resources, or a significant change management effort.
A key component of change success is understanding the “who, what, why and where” of the people who are impacted by the change and in order to do that you need to ask. The change management effort has to start with the expectations of leadership as well as the expectations of those impacted by the change.
When you ask about expectations, concerns and hopes, leadership will start with the goals they agreed to as a group. When you dig deeper, you can get to what they as individuals are thinking. Those impacted start talking about what they think you want to hear. If you can gain some trust and ask questions with a promise of confidentiality on the response, you will open the door.
No matter what the change you want the organization to accomplish, you have to talk to those driving and to those who are impacted. When people have a voice, the change begins to happen during the conversation.