It’s an all-too-familiar tale: A CIO pushes a new process, platform or digital transformation effort across the company and when it fails (as 70 percent of all change programs do, according to the famous statistic reported by Harvard Business Review), the CIO pins the blame on uncooperative end users.
This is a mistake, according to Chris Laping, co-founder and CEO of People Before Things and the former CIO of Red Robin Gourmet Burgers. In a presentation at the CIO Perspectives event in Palo Alto, Calif., earlier this year, Laping told the audience about the many times that his own change initiatives would sputter or not be effective.
“As a CIO, I got really obsessed with understanding this thing around change,” Laping said. “After all those experiences, what I’ve learned is that change isn’t an end-user problem. Change and innovation … doesn’t work principally because it’s not an end-user problem, it’s a leadership opportunity. It’s a leadership opportunity that in many cases, remains vacant.”
Change management didn’t seem to make it any better. I would have change managers come and work with me on projects — and what they would do is throw a lot of training and communications at people. They would disproportionately put the burden of the change on the end user … and when they don’t start using the new system, what do we do? We give them more training, and we give them more communications, it’s like ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves.’
Companies (or change initiatives) succeed or fail not because of how smart a company is but how “healthy” it is, Laping said. He defined healthy companies as having low turnover, minimal politics, clear strategy and high productivity. Leadership at the highest level needs to live the changes they want to make for the company. “Healthy is all of the people-related groundwork that has to be done in order for change and innovation to be successful,” Laping said.
“To lead the change we have to be the change,” Laping said. “There are conditions that we influence as leaders that set the table for whether or not these changes will even be successful. And when those things aren’t done, our project teams don’t even have a chance to succeed.”
Laping then outlined three conditions that leaders can initiate to set the stage for successful change. To hear those conditions and Laping’s entire presentation, click play on the audio file below:
