Change Management
Basically, human beings are not against changes as we are constantly a part of changes, but we are against badly planned changes and against being changed by others. Resistance to change is buried within the ones who are to lead the change as handling a change process requires really good leadership. At AmikiGroup we are of the opinion that it is important to put much more feeling, enthusiasm, communication and commitment into the leadership task when generating change.
Leadership focus is about whether employees can withstand and handle the insecurity connected with change. Everybody is unique and is to be treated as such.
Hence it is obvious to work with the following competences:
Business Competence:
Business competence is about being able to predict the reaction patterns, contributions, needs and well-being of the customers’ and the organization. It is about being able to think strategically and being able to listen and predict barriers, obstacles and challenges. Furthermore, it is about having an overview of knowledge bases and their positions plus professional fields and their appreciation of practice.
Political Competence:
Political competence is about understanding how bases of power are formed and their position in the organisation and about understanding how these bases of power can be influenced. All organisations have invisible intersections which the bases of power control. If you walk through a red light too many times, the organisation no longer walks along with you if the bases of power resist the change. This means to say that these bases of power must be involved, informed and influenced. If you are willing to enter into a dialogue about the change, you have already accepted the basic terms of the change.
AmikiGroup avails itself of a concept we call the powerful 5. The powerful 5 are persons the organisation listens to and respect, they have a special status. If these 5 can be localised and involved, the change is already well under way. It is important to remember that a given change can never be fully planned as we are dealing with human beings. They each come with their contributions. In our experience, employees can often see some areas/nuances the management has not been able to predict.
Social Competences:
Social competence is about the ability to attune expectations and the ability to form constructive relations where contributions, needs and job dissatisfaction, if any, is localised and dealt with. Furthermore, the ability to give feedback is pivotal in the change process. Feedback forms the basis of a mutual consequence in the change process. The ability to localise others’ contributions in the knowledge production and acknowledge their contributions is pivotal when it comes to creating ‘followship’. It is important to be able to analyse how relations are formed and hence be able to draw the consequences of it in the form of rotations, job changes, cross-departmental jobs etc.
Action Competence:
Action competence is about being constantly able to initiate development processes that support the change and in this connection the ability to have the framework under which the participants are to act under control. Included in this is also which code of practice we are to work under and furthermore who has which roles.
It is pivotal to use the employees’ reflections and spaces of action in the change process in spite of their signals of protest. Resistance is not necessarily bad, it merely needs to be handled by the leadership. Leadership focus must at all times be the generation of energy and the mobilisation of resources in order to overcome obstacles. This means that attention must be paid to creating ideas, generating energy and enthusiasm and on retaining and utilising the energy and enthusiasm created.
In order for change to succeed, you must continuously organize communication processes which set the direction for where you are heading. It is important to remember that these communication processes are continuously affected by the organisation and thus require continuous leadership attention.
Personal Competence:
Personal competence is about ensuring that critical incidents do not affect the individual too much by handling the way these incidents are anchored in our consciousness. We must ensure that these thoughts about ourselves do not become decisive to the way we act. The focus of leadership must be to reward and recognise curiosity and the desire to develop if it wants to retain momentum in the change process. Furthermore, it is important to ensure that the individual’s pride and impact remain intact by mirroring one’s own and others’ practice in the change process. On the management’s part this requires great awareness about professional ethics in relation to the individual participant.