The Hard and Soft Side of Change


Book Description

In The Hard and Soft Sides of Change Management, Kathryn Zukof shows that when you find the sweet spot between process and people, you and your organization can make change less of a hit-or-miss affair. Follow the tools and approaches in this book, and you can start to manage change.




The Hard and Soft Sides of Change Management


Book Description

Change isn’t going anywhere. Learn how to manage it. We live in a wild world of volatility, unpredictability, chaos, and ambiguity, with change seemingly as the only constant. Change can be difficult. It often induces resistance, panic, and fatigue. And, as you may expect or have experienced first-hand, many organizations aren’t handling change all that well, with many efforts resulting in failure. What you may not realize, however, is that some workplace change initiatives are stunning successes, rolling out smoothly and more easily embraced. Why do some change initiatives fail while others succeed? How can organizations and employees handle change better? In The Hard and Soft Sides of Change Management, Kathryn Zukof offers practices and approaches to help you and your organization roll out, receive, and manage change effectively. Namely, Zukoff shows that you need to manage the process (or the “hard”) side and the people (or the “soft”) side of change and find the sweet spot between the two. She demonstrates that when you integrate both sides, you and your organization can make change less of a hit-or-miss affair. Successful change management means deploying sound project management techniques that increase the odds of achieving the outcomes of your change initiative. It also means helping employees understand the need and vision for change, so they feel less threatened by it and become excited and energized by what’s ahead. To deliver best results, you need to: Define the change and how to get there—with project charters and plans. Involve the right people in the right ways—from dedicated change teams to affected stakeholders. Build support, understanding, and awareness—with communication, training, and resistance management plans. Assess progress and adjust along the way—through action reviews and steps to tackle thorny issues. Capturing the inherently messy nature of workplace change—from technology implementations, mergers and acquisitions, and business transformations to office relocations and more—this book offers tangible insights to help you and your organization tackle change challenges. Follow the book’s tools and practices to lessen the messy and objectionable parts of change and actively give your change initiatives the best chance for positive outcomes.




Switch


Book Description

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: • The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients • The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping • The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.




ADKAR


Book Description

In his first complete text on the ADKAR model, Jeff Hiatt explains the origin of the model and explores what drives each building block of ADKAR. Learn how to build awareness, create desire, develop knowledge, foster ability and reinforce changes in your organization. The ADKAR Model is changing how we think about managing the people side of change, and provides a powerful foundation to help you succeed at change.







Making Change Work


Book Description

As organizations strive to remain ahead of the competition, there will inevitably and often come the need for change. All successful organizations regularly use change to improve processes and increase performance. While these times of change can be a great opportunity for an organization, it also can be a time of stress and angst for all involved. Not all organizations are in a position to make these changes effectively and efficiently, and for many their efforts often fall short of the intended goals. Making Change Work: Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change was written to help organizations prepare for and successfully implement change. The price of a failed change effort can be steep, both monetarily and in a loss of credibility. Making Change Work will first provide tools to measure your organization's readiness to change, helping make sure that the efforts will not be doomed to fail from the beginning. The book then provides many tools to apply sequentially and logically in order to gain acceptance of the change throughout the organization. In helping your organization make change successfully, Making Change Work addresses buy-in, acceptance, motivation, anticipation, fear, uncertainty, and all the other messy human considerations that cause change to fail in the real world.




Change Management


Book Description

Change management is the missing piece that takes good ideas and turns them into business success. This book is not only a solid introduction to the discipline of change management, but is the primer to catalyze change leadership and competency in your organization. The responsibility for creating competencies to manage and lead change does not rest solely with HR, but lies within all management, right to the seat of the CEO. This book is a practical look at what it means to manage the people side of change




Management of Permanent Change


Book Description

In the current times of more frequent crises and ever shortening innovation cycles, the management of change has become a crucial task of survival. While it is not a new topic in business research, the developments of the last decade have posed many new challenges for the change management of firms and organizations and have thus also raised many new questions for academic research in business administration, which the present book turns to deepen. Its particular focus is on disruptive change including its driving forces as well as effective and sustainable management. This publication constitutes a collection of articles that discuss change and innovation processes across different sectors of the economy (industry, banking, and retail), the role of leadership and corporate governance for the effectiveness and sustainability of organizational change.




The Softer Side of Leadership


Book Description

Drawing from his thirty-five years as a CEO, popular leadership literature, and the Scriptures, Eugene Habecker makes the case of the integration of soft skills, like emotional intelligence and character quality, in building healthier professional and personal lives and healthier organizations.




Learning to Change


Book Description

"A good balance between theory and practice . . . it definitely fills a void in the [lack of] texts in the area and the change literature in general . . . a good fit for my graduate class on 'Managing Organizational Change.'" —Anthony F. Buono, McCallum Graduate School of Business, Bentley College "Like Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization, this book is a superb blend of theory and practicality. It demystifies chaos and paradox, and it encourages the understanding of organizational dynamics from multiple perspectives. It is refreshing to read a book that presents diverse theories and interventions so even-handedly." —Andrea Markowitz, Ph.D., President, OB&D, Inc. Learning to Change: A Guide for Organizational Change Agents provides a comprehensive overview of organizational change theories and practices developed by both U.S. and European change theorists. The authors compare and contrast five fundamentally different ways of thinking about change: yellow print thinking, blue print thinking, red print thinking, green print thinking and white print thinking. They also discuss in detail the steps change agents take, such as diagnosis, change strategy, the intervention plan, and interventions. In addition, they explore the attributes of a successful change agent and provide advice for career and professional development. The book includes case studies that describe multiple approaches to organizational change issues. This book will appeal to both the practitioner and academic audiences. It can be used as a text in graduate courses in change management and will also be a useful reference for consultants and managers. Features: Discusses the abilities, attitudes, and styles of successful change agents Describes five fundamentally different ways of thinking about change Presents a state-of-the-art overview of change management insights, methods, and instruments Summarizes an extensive amount of organizational change literature Supplies readers with useful insights and courses of action that will allow them to design and implement change professionally Learning to Change became a bestseller upon its initial publication in the Netherlands. The color-model on change is very popular among thousands of managers and change consultants and presents a new approach to change processes and a new language for change.