Like any group of pros, change facilitators can develop attitudes that are damaging to their goals and professional success. The goal is helping a client to realized organization change. Their success relies on making that happen. So what attitudes hamper achieving both the goal and professional success?
One attitude is that the process would work if the client could just get out of the way. If the point is to realize organization change, wouldn’t it be best to let the master on change utilize their knowledge to do the goal? This attitude ignores a basic principle, which is that the change professional is there to the serve the wants of customer. More to the point, it is a need which can be accomplished without the change advisor. The specialist is there to make the change run smoother and with a greater chance of success, nothing more.
Another wrong attitude can be that members of the organization are taking part in willful obstruction of the process. What the change professional may not realize is that there can be political or physical reasons for what seem to be obstructionist actions. On the political end, the person who is obstructing could be waiting for a new, more change friendly, executive to take a position. On the physical end, the organization could be finishing a can’t wait production run that the organization change would interrupt. There are simply too many factors at work for the assumption to be made that obstruction is occurring without a good reason.
Perhaps the worst assumption that can be made is the players for the players for the organization are not smart. The in a giant organization have their jobs because they are smart. Just as the change professional is the master on change, a manager in an organization is the expert in their own field. They understand the limits and potential of their business in a way few outsiders can. The change facilitator must be aware that lacking expertise in change is not an absence of an absence of intelligence.
Any of these attitudes can weaken the organization change process. The change professional must guard against hasty judgment and poor assumptions. While the reasons for a customer’s behavior could not always be clear, it isn’t not an indication that those reasons don’t exist or stem from a shortage of intelligence.
For more information, please see our website: Organization Change