The Change Gap Every Company Faces

Change is an inevitable aspect of life, and as such, it is essential to adapt to it to remain relevant and competitive. Organizations are no exception to this rule and must adapt to industry, market, and customer changes. This adaptation requires a systematic approach that can be achieved through change management. Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from their current state to a desired future state. It involves the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to bring about a successful change.

The Facts About Change

With all we know about change and change management, the statistics surrounding successful change implementation are startling. A Harvard study found that 75% of all change initiatives (https://hbr.org/2017/11/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-change-management) and upwards of 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail at some level.(https://dealroom.net/blog/reasons-why-mergers-and-acquisitions-fail)

So, what is the problem? There certainly is no shortage of change management implementation models or consultants to help guide companies through the process.

McKinsey found the number one cause of failure to be “human and cultural issues” and not strategic or tactical. They found that “human and cultural issues” accounted for 70% of change initiative failures. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/changing-change-management

The Gap Every Company Faces

After writing our book, The Dying Art of Leadership, it became clear to us there was an obvious reason why change fails. The gap hindering success is that the leading change implementation models ignore the science of change and its impact on people. Over the remainder of this article, we will explore how we reached this conclusion. We will delve into the science of the emotions of change and how it compares to many of the most popular change implementation models. We will also provide insight into how to bridge this gap. First, a word of caution. Although the conclusion is obvious, even simple to reach, the solution, while easy to understand, requires a great deal of purposeful and intentional work to implement.

The Elephant In The Room is Grief

No discussion of the science of change is complete without acknowledging the emotional component of change. This component leads to the “human and cultural issues” referred to earlier in this article.

A search of the science of change quickly reveals a link between change and the emotional component of change. The emotions of change refer to the various feelings that employees experience when changes occur in their workplace. These emotions can range from excitement and anticipation to fear, frustration, and anger. Change can impact employee productivity, job security, and overall well-being, and how individuals respond to change depends on many factors, including their personality, past experiences, and personal circumstances. Nearly all of the science of change models links to the Kübler-Ross Change Curve in some way, shape, or form.

The Kübler-Ross Change Curve, better known as “The Stages of Grief,” is a well-known model that describes the different stages of emotions that people go through when dealing with change. The curve has five stages, starting with denial and moving through anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. However, it’s important to note that not everyone will go through all five stages, and some may experience them in a different order or intensity. What follows is a discussion of some of the more popular change implementation models and how they contribute to this critical change gap.

Change Management Implementation Models

Change management implementation models are frameworks that provide guidelines for managing the change process. They offer a systematic approach to change management that includes planning, execution, and monitoring. The following are some of the most popular change management implementation models:

Lewin’s Change Management Model: Developed by Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist, this model proposes that change occurs in three stages: unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. Unfreezing involves creating a motivation for change. Changing involves implementing the change, and refreezing involves stabilizing the new state.

Kotter’s Eight-Step Change Model: Developed by John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, this model consists of eight steps that organizations can use to implement change successfully. These steps include creating a sense of urgency, building a coalition, creating a vision for change, communicating the vision, empowering others to act, creating short-term wins, consolidating gains, and anchoring new approaches in the organization’s culture.

Prosci’s ADKAR Model: Prosci, a global leader in change management, developed this model. The model proposes that change management involves five stages: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. The model focuses on individual change and suggests that individuals must be aware of the need for change, desire to support the change, have the knowledge and ability to make the change and receive reinforcement to sustain the change.

McKinsey’s 7-S Model: Developed by the world-renowned consulting group, this model focuses on seven factors that organizations must align to achieve successful change: strategy, structure, systems, style, staff, skills, and shared values.

While these change management implementation models provide structure and guidance for managing change, they often overlook the emotional aspect of change. Change is a deeply personal experience that affects individuals in unique ways, and organizations must recognize and address the emotional impact of change if they want their change efforts to be successful.

Proponents of these models will argue they do, in fact, contain steps designed to address the emotional component of change. We have found, however, the link to the emotional component of change is only superficial and is largely addressed from the organization’s perspective and the individuals. Here are some examples illustrating this point.

One of the limitations of Lewin’s Change Management Model is that while it provides a useful framework for managing change, it assumes that employees will simply accept the change once they’re prepared for it. However, the emotions of change are much more complex, and individuals may not progress through the stages of the model as smoothly as anticipated.

Kotter’s Eight-Step Change Model does address the emotional aspect of change by emphasizing the importance of creating a sense of urgency and communicating the change vision effectively. By involving employees in the change process and empowering them to act on the change, the model assumes creating buy-in is sufficient to overcome the emotional component of change. However, this is putting the cart before the horse. Unless an organization and its leaders effectively recognize, acknowledge, address, and support the phases of denial, bargaining, anger, and depression employees experience during times of change, the employee will never align with or accept the reasons for change, no matter how many times the message is communicated.

Finally, the Prosci ADKAR model utilizes an assessment process to determine if employees impacted by change have the Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, and Ability to change. This assumes that once an appropriate level of each component is reached and Reinforced, the path for change will be smoothly paved. Desire to change is often pointed to as the critical link to the emotional component of change. While we agree, we find the approaches most organizations follow, and Prosci’s website suggest, are very clinical, transactional, and rational. Suggesting things like sharing case studies and benchmarking examples as if logic can overcome the extreme emotions the stages of grief evoke during organizational change.

Even if these approaches do effectively teach organizations how to navigate the emotional component of change, companies tend to avoid the awkward, emotional, uncomfortable work this step in the process requires. Choosing, instead, to constantly shout the canned messages of the communication plans and hold people accountable to milestone charts, resulting in people being managed out of the organization for being “resistant to change.” Or worse, people half-heartedly implement the change and develop substitute processes to complete the work. All the while, morale, engagement, loyalty, and productivity decline. All leading to the change statistics shared at the beginning of the article.

Don’t Abandon, Augment

The solution to this complex issue may be surprising. Our suggestion is not to have you abandon whichever change you model you have selected or implemented but rather to augment it with some hard cultural work.

At GriefLeaders, we ask our clients to reflect on the following questions:

Do you care about your organization’s Emotional and Leadership health?

Do you understand your organization’s Emotional and Leadership health?

Does your change management process address the emotional component of change in a meaningful way?

Based on this reflection, we then utilize our assessment tool to solicit feedback from the organization, allowing us to bring to bear quantifiable data on the otherwise qualitative and subject discussion.

With this picture, we can help transform the organization’s change management process into a change leadership process through training and coaching geared toward helping them navigate the emotional component of change.

Anthony Casablanca

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