We queried over 1,400 executives and managers to determine corporate response to external conditions and best practices at managing change at the individual, team and organizational levels. Designed to determine what is driving or hindering organizational change today and the elements of agile and resilient companies today, especially how higher-performing organizations view and manage change.
Few business topics have generated greater attention than the management of organizational change. The Human Resource Institute’s series of Major Issues surveys shows that “managing change” was perennially ranked among the top workforce-management issues throughout the 1990s and into this decade.What’s more, research conducted by The Conference Board (2005) found that CEOs around the globe identify “speed, flexibility, adaptability to change” as among their greatest concerns.
Why so much emphasis on change management? Business growth with sustained high performance requires relentless, well-executed change just to keep pace with new markets, technologies, and competitors. The alternative is underperformance, even business failure. Countless business stories have revealed poorly executed mergers, downsizings, or strategy shifts that did not deliver promised results. In other words, organizations must “adapt or die.”
To learn more about this subject, Canadian Management Centre (CMC) commissioned the Human Resource Institute (HRI) to conduct a global survey focusing on organizational agility and resilience. In this survey, the CMC/HRI team focused on the changing external conditions experienced by organizations as well as what companies are doing internally at the individual, team, and organizational levels to manage or even induce change. In addition, we looked at the role of industry structure in helping or hindering change efforts.
Specifically, we wanted to know if there are unique differences in how higherperforming organizations view change and manage it. Therefore, we made an effort to identify the most profitable, competitive, and dominant organizations in their markets as well as the practices, competencies, and other assets they use to manage change. Although it is impossible to attribute causality in any survey, we believe that the patterns revealed are highly suggestive. Below is a quick review of the some of the main findings:
- The vast majority of respondents (82%) report that the pace of change experienced by their organizations has increased compared with five years ago.
- A majority (69%) say that their organizations had experienced disruptive change—that is, severe surprises or unanticipated shocks—over the previous 12 months.
- There are meaningful differences among surveyed organizations in the highest- and lowest-performing categories. Compared with their lowerperforming counterparts, higher performers were more likely to:
- View themselves as agile and resilient.
- See “change as an opportunity.”
- Say that the pace of change has gotten faster but remains predictable.
- View themselves as having better change capacities at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
- Engage in strategies such as training to improve managers’change-management skills.
There are many drivers of change, of course. The survey found that the most important ones are related to the expectations of customers and vendors, new products and services, and technological and process changes. Aside from these, however, the survey also found that a significant portion of higher-performing companies (about 20%) say that they “induce change and force others to react.” This suggests to us that, all other things being equal, the pace of change is unlikely to slow in the near future. There are simply too many organizations that see change as a competitive advantage. These organizations will continue to push the envelope in terms of faster speed to market, more innovation, better customer service, and the quicker adoption of new technologies.
We believe that companies of the future will benefit by finding good ways of measuring their capacity to manage change; that is, their “adaptive capacity.” These organizations will be able to gauge their current agility and resilience and then determine additional needs. In this way, they’ll be able to reduce the risks of being “overexposed” to changes in their business environment.
When gauging their adaptive capacity, organizations will look at four different levels: the individual employee, team, organization, and industry. By developing strategies for each of these levels—and by maintaining a balance between agility and resilience—corporations will be able to boost their capacity for change. This will be an ongoing and very dynamic process of adaptation.
