Quite a few conversations lately with clients, peers and running partners have centered around business strategy and the effects day-to-day and year-to-year decisions have from a change standpoint. Budgeting, reorganizations and sharing of resources have more change management components than leaders realize.
Especially in our current environment of restlessness, hoarded cash and craving for positive growth, leadership decisions and strategy are focused on fully leveraging where the organization is at the current moment. There is an intense awareness of capability, capacity and resources. Organizations are lean or stripped bare. It is lean or bare depending on what you are trying to accomplish.
Lean if you are intent to carry on with the tightest budget possible (or a little less). Bare if you would like to move into a new future for your organization or function with more revenue, more growth and an expansive attitude.
Let’s take a spin then around CM potential starting from this foundational spot:
Budgeting
Budgets are a crystal clear signal. They signal the direction the organization wants to go for the near future. They either tie to last year or they do not (usually they do, but when they do not it sends a clear message). They telegraph fear or possibility. They point out heroes and, maybe, last years villains.
Don’t think that employees do not read into and between the lines and squares of those spreadsheets.
Where the money goes shows them where they go, what they will do, how they are valued. Where, what and how are three of the six components of the change process. So the budget dance is a place, that I am sure you had not thought of, where CM should be present, visible and ready to help.
Organizational Design
I know a few companies that do reorganizations every year- not just moving people across functions for career building and resource shifting, but true change of functional business models and org. design. On the surface this is a little like a change initiative with no timeline- here is the decision, here is what that looks like, tomorrow you will be in your new role. It is strategy following business environments rather than change to new end states. The problem is those decisions create the same CM waves, unless they absolutely make sense to everyone and there is a history of reorganizational strategy that has been clearly successful.
If you are missing historical success and/or can’t quite illustrate to everyone how this makes sense then you have a mini change management initiative on your hand (CM as its own initiative since this does not really follow a project timeline).
You will of course have a brand new slate of projects, programs and initiatives every time this org shift happens. Having CM in place already with a central entity puts CM before the initiatives. Done well you might just develop a pattern of addressing the two musts of our previous paragraph- makes sense change and historical success.
Resource Sharing
There is a new twist, thanks to the recession’s tweak on business perspective, to moving people around. The tweak is a pattern of dividing up a person (or to make it less personal and easier to insert quietly into a spreadsheet- FTE’s) into percentage pieces. Those pieces get shared across functions or verticals or sales categories.
From a business standpoint I find this exercise fascinating.
Here you have an opportunity for development, horizontal change, innovation, a broader more open viewpoint (and therefore culture) and a very real shot at savings and efficiency. The savings can come by reducing overlap. If a person has competencies that work in two places and can fill that role simultaneously there is obvious savings. The most obvious is when less people are needed to get the work done.
This latest pattern is of course due to the fact that those “extra” people are already gone. Managers must decide how to use short resources effectively this has created a new kind of percentage sharing. That manager may desperately need someone at 50% but be unable to pay more or get the right person with the budget available. Hence percentage sharing. 50% of a person here 50% of that person there.
This is a low level of change in terms of big organizational measurements. It is a high level of change in terms of individual measurements. Now we are talking not about numbers, but actual single people. If this has become a pattern in the organization then done bad you have real, genuine resistance- the kind that comes from distrust, fear and lack of security. Done well though (likely with the support of CM or with really smart connected managers) you have a chance to create end states that are now hard to imagine. Those are the kind that bring in revenue, get everyone on board and out run competitors.
