Resistance to change is natural in organizations, and the consultant must be prepared to handle them with transparency. However, there are groups within which this takes complex forms…
All of us with some consulting experience know about resistance to change. In fact, it is a phenomenon that has already been widely studied, both in its causes and in its expressions.
However, sometimes the phenomenon presents surprising manifestations or exteriorizations.
A case was recently presented to me, which I believe may be of interest to the profession…
Being synthetic, a client requests a reorganization of the commercial area, to achieve an improvement in sales performance.
I meet with the most important members of the organization, and to my surprise, they do not use the most basic tools of business management control, despite being a medium-sized company.
Sales management was basically reduced to passive attention to incoming demand, without outgoing actions, planning or control of the activity of the sellers, that is, in the first step of the evolutionary line in management processes, with one exception, related to a specific line of products.
Obviously, I am faced with a demand from the client, who asks me to plan / propose changes of functions and / or people.
Meditating on the subject, I finally recommend that, in principle, instead of replacing people, or modifying the organic conformation, an attempt be made to modify the procedures followed, incorporating others more appropriate to the objective set.
This includes, as a first piece, the use of a CRM and the registration (by that same route) of the activity carried out by the sellers, to then move on to the development and monitoring of "active" commercial campaigns.
The process takes about three months, with enormous learning difficulties for managers and middle managers.
There arises the most classic form of resistance to change:
- I do not have time to complete information. The system does not work for me, I lost the direct access to the computer "NOT WALKING". It is not practical, it is not comfortable.
In short, the typical arguments, so I'm not going to bore you.
I did the classic in these cases: try to smooth the difficulties out to the possible limit of simplicity.
The CRM that we are using would make any of you laugh for its simplicity… it consists of a shared Excel via the Internet, to work simultaneously and in real time ("cloud" mode), making the input by form.
In other words, for managers, easier is impossible.
Surprisingly, when the new procedures begin to work little by little, in the middle of a board meeting, one of the gentlemen starts with a very circumspect and serious gesture:
«I want to say that I feel quite upset that the consultant, in one of the meetings last week, in which the CEO was not present, said that this was a small company… and I feel that this is a lack of respect… not towards me, but towards the founders of this company.. »(NdeR: the sentimental touch that the speech needed, to touch the heart of the general management… touching.) Concept that he reiterated several times.
Saying which, he looked for the approval of two other managers (one of them of higher rank than the "messenger"), who of course agreed.
Now, frankly, I don't think I ever said such a thing, but if I did, it surely wasn't in the pejorative tone that was hinted at.
I was in front of a remake just a little more polished of «miss, miss, when you were not there, the student Manuel said that his mother is a prostitute and you go out with the director…. and we want to tell him that that made us very bad.
Let's analyze possibilities:
a) the manager in question is real, true and honestly very susceptible (which, in any case, is bad for the task).
But if so, why didn't you say it at the same meeting, or in private, and instead waited to dump it in front of the Director?
b) or, it simply wants to achieve by whatever means the project aborts, and it did so through a concerted "mise en scène"… with its allies (or perhaps its constituents), aimed at discrediting the project's implementer.
Ultimately, what I am aiming at is that the possibility should be foreseen that some managers, in certain cases, do not limit themselves to the classic resistance to change -to some extent healthy, but manipulate within the group, coordinating it, and acting politically in project wear.
These internal policy issues or palace intrigues are more frequent than desirable within companies… and the external consultant must be alert, also taking it as a fact of the operation of the client organization and its members.
But I cannot stop considering three aspects:
- In the first place, that any agreement / manipulation or whatever it is to deteriorate the consultant-person, is insufficient to stop a project change. In the specific case, sooner or later, they must apply, with or without Marino, a commercial monitoring system that allows them to guide the sales team actively.
It does not depend on the consultant… but on the operational reality of the companies today.
In fact, the most reactive managers, if they are successful, run the risk of radicalizing the company's project (should we go directly to a change of people and not of procedures?)
- secondly, it would be much more advantageous for them to participate in the project and intervene to modify it in the most difficult aspects of application, thus making the transformations gradual and better digested.
- Finally, and as a recommendation for consultants who are in this type of situation:
make sure everything is properly documented, recorded, recorded
never engage in an internal conflict of this nature - ignore it. You are not being paid to face a director, even if you have a chance of beating him. It is not your homework.
The consultant is not there to make friends or enemies. It is there to do what needs to be done. So continue your work program unaltered, as if these incidents did not exist.
Forget what they say and focus on what they do.
Analyze this type of behavior as part of the diagnosis, and eventually, if the issue blocks the actions of change (not in the discourse, but in the facts), then yes, start the reorganization procedure, not the procedures but from operators. Because the company has a much more serious problem before it than a contentious manager / consultant: cadres that operate internally rather than acting effectively outside the company (the market).
