Organization Change Readiness
(Part 1 of 3)

For the past few months, our articles asked the same question [Manufacturers – Are you achieving 500% + on Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE)?  Are you achieving the planned ROI]?  There was a reason and purpose for that.  The reason was and is to draw attention to the criticality of a well-structured business in terms of business management health leading to achieving growth and financial business objectives.

This month, our focus is how to evolve within your factory to capitalize on everything we discussed over the past few months.  Organization change is a fine art.  It is the most difficult part of the journey.  As we have said before, the solution is typically the easy part, the implementation is the hard part to achieve successfully.  This is where leadership with support from change experts are needed to help coach the workforce through the journey to the summit.  Somewhat like the Sherpa of strategic and tactical knowledge leading your team with insight, vision and through implementation.

Over the next three weeks, we will discuss the management domains within the ORGANIZATION CHANGE READINESS business principle.

They are:

1. Business Management Change Readiness
2. Workforce Change Readiness
3. Technical Capability Change Readiness
4. Product Change Readiness
5. Competitor Barrier Change Readiness
6. Customer Change Readiness
7. Pricing Change Readiness

This week, we will focus on Business Management & Workforce Change Readiness.

These two management domains within the principles of organization change are of titanic importance and influence on your business.

To kick this topic off for this month, please do take the time to view our video ‘VLOG on Organization Change Readiness’.  We are hosting two of our LYNXBMG team members in this fire-side chat – Paul Violante (Quality Assurance Management) and Kathleen Niles (CEO of Nessis Inc. – Quality Management Systems).  I have invited them to chat with me on the development of organizations through change.  Both Paul and Kathleen have decades of experience navigating manufacturing firms through change and evolution into the new norm.  Although the VLOG is short, I think you will enjoy listening with useful take-aways from what they have to say on the subject.

Let’s delve into the first domain ‘Business Management Change Readiness’.  This domain has a primary level of importance.  It is about the leadership of the company and the true belief, (based on fully assessing the business from every operational and market angle), that change is needed.  Parking for now that change is a continual process, the type of change we are talking about is strategic, tactical, and necessary for the existence let alone growth of the business.

I have referenced this quote by General Eric Shinseki – U.S. Army Chief of Staff a number of times because of its simplicity in truth.  “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less”.

Change readiness starts with the folks owning and/or running the company.  Ownership of the initiative from the start to the end must be maintained without doubt.  Leadership needs to do exactly that – Lead and coach to establish that the rest of the organization believes the need through realization, and it is the correct thing to do.  It is difficult to implement as it involves the art of people management, excellent communications of the larger plan and pulling the legion in a direction that benefits everyone.  Very difficult to convince employees if the plan is not effectively communicated and at the right time!

That said, there are other factual elements that need to be considered to know if a company is ready for change.  This would be assessed by leadership and their managing team to know if their current business management practices, systems, and processes are in shape to sustain and survive a strategic change in the organization.  This assessment must be done first before engaging the masses of the organization.  If the current ‘business machine’ is not in a state to be evolved, then any progressive organizational change (be it restructuring or turnaround) would likely run into a false start.  Should that happen, the collateral damage will then be yet another hurdle to remedy which will likely derail any near-term successes.

The criticality of getting this right is vital.  You may be thinking right now – Sounds frightening – well yes and no.  I say no because we at LYNXBMG are change agents from the school of hard knocks and manufacturing industry experience.  An organization change must be constructed much like building a factory.  Start with solid plan, set up the foundation (business management team, business management processes, defined roles, responsibilities, and accountability), begin to build the floors, walls, roof (business management & systems infrastructure), pipe in the systems (integration, data flow), furnish the plant (resource management & training), etc…   Anything is possible if you take a pragmatic approach and keep it easily understood.

I have touched upon the workforce a bit.  There are so many elements of the workforce that influences the level of achievable change.  We delve into these during our business management health assessments to understand the culture we are dealing with.  We believe that every person goes to work with the intent of doing a value-add contribution.  If the company and organization is not structured correctly, that realization for your employees to experience is very difficult and, it will begin to foster complacency with under achievement as a result.  No one wants that!

People are your main ingredient to productivity and meeting the business objectives followed by goals of growth and prosperity.  There are a number of areas we look into to assess – are you ready for organizational change?

• Management workforce able to migrate through a transformation?
• What is the workforce staffing plan to execute change?
• Are the right people in the right seats to drive change?
• How will the management and employees cope with a transformation?
• And many more …..

Do you recall ArcelorMittal Dofasco’s iconic motto is “Our Product is Steel. Our Strength is People”.  It is one of the greatest and one that our team truly believes.

Will leave you with these thoughts for now.  We encourage you to reach out to us on this topic.  We are practitioners with a true passion to help manufacturers like you meet your objectives.  It costs nothing to enquire, and we wager that you will be glad that you did.

Next weeks article will be focused on Technical Capability and Product Change Readiness.  Until then, we hope you have taken away some useful and thought provoking information.

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