All transitions involve a change in one or more variables to reach a desired goal. Management of change does not happen in a vacuum and there are always external forces at work to exert enough pull to drive the best laid plans off course. In fact, those forces can cause change to happen where none was planned. Many recent college graduates are facing the reality of those forces when searching for work. The first clue… Read More »When Changes Collide
Several years ago, there was a scholarly article published by the Harvard Business Review, The Hard Side of Change Management. As the title implies, much discussion on change management is on soft issues such as culture, leadership, and motivation. While these are unquestionably essential factors, they are not stand-alone tools to implement large transformation projects. The HBR paper used a simple four-point framework that provides a methodology to measure change management. The four key points… Read More »L.O.V.E. It to Change It
The inflated role that human resources professionals profess to have on culture change in the workplace needs to be tempered with a little reality. One of the most important functions in any business is strong, knowledgeable, and professional HR leadership, but in almost all cases they operate by the grace of company executive management that looks to them to be a value added to the decision making process… not to make those decisions. This is… Read More »Managing Culture Change
The sign at the door of the supermarket said, “Thank you for your patience while we remodel our store.†Since the store was open 24-hours a day, there was no down time for the destructors to do their work. They hung tarps from ceiling to floor, and behind the “Hard Hat Required Beyond this Point†signs you could hear crunching and scraping of old stuff being ripped out to make way for the new. It… Read More »Please Pardon the Inconvenience
The mere mentioning of a name that implies ethnicity can prompt stereotypical responses. A classic experiment reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology sent email messages to landlords advertising apartment vacancies in Los Angeles County over a ten-week period. Names that implied Arabic, African American, or White ethnicity were attached randomly to these messages and not surprisingly the “White†names received significantly more responses. We just passed a grim anniversary of the 9/11 attacks… Read More »Workplace Taboo Part IV – Race and Ethnicity