Last updated on October 12th, 2022 at 07:42 am
Change management is one of the major challenges you might encounter. It is possible that your team rebel against the changes you are trying to implement. It is a hard task indeed! No wonder that 70% of all change initiative taste failure. This is where change management models come into play. There are many change-management models for you to choose from. These change management models offer a plan of action to implement the changes, rather than jumping head-first to the crisis.
McKinsey 7-S Model
This is best used before you begin a change in the organization/team. This is used to comprehend why a change is essential at a given point of time. It helps you figure out what are the changes you should bring in. It essentially helps in introspection of a strategy, or to perform an analysis. McKinsey 7-S model is based on analysing the 7 elements: 4 soft elements and 3 hard elements.
Soft Elements
Shared Values – company values
Skills – core competencies of the employees
Style – leadership style
Staff – employees
Hard Elements
Strategy – business strategy
Structure – hierarchy
Systems – business processes and rules
This model suggests that the elements mentioned above should be aligned to ensure the success of an organization. For instance, if you are adopting a strategy to penetrate the market, you need to ensure that you have the right skills. The leadership style should be in a way that guides the staff towards the new strategy. You need a structure that supports this, and the values and systems should be in line with the goal.
Lewin’s Change Management Model
Once you decide on what change do you want to bring in, you can use Lewin’s change model to execute it. However, this is suitable for large-scale change.
The model operates in 3 steps
Unfreeze: In this step, you are going to let the employees know that you have decided to make some changes to break down the status quo.
Introduce the change: You start making the changes slowly, with proper planning.
Refreeze: You have already made the change and made those changes a part of the process to follow from here on.
Deming Cycle
This is suitable for small changes. This is done in four steps.
Plan: In this step, you identify the limitations and inefficiencies of the current process, contemplate and come up with a new strategy to improve it.
Do: You have decided what changes to make, now it’s time to implement them on a small scale so that you know how the new process work.
Check: You inspect the newly adopted process to see the improvements. You need to check if it is working better than the old one, and also if it is feasible to work in the long-term
Act: If the new process shows good results, you scale it up and implement them company-wide. If it does not show the expected results, you call off the changes and go back to the old process.
Conclusion
Changes are part of improvement. You need to revive the process and operations to derive better results and profit. Bringing in changes to replace a full-fledged running system is challenging, risky and scary. Reading about the implementation is very easy but is a herculean task to implement the changes. You need to follow a proper plan to execute the new strategy without messing things up. The change management models discussed above will help you plan a big change and to implement it.
