Expositor: Mike Boyle, Universidad Louisville

I know, I know, I know, I know, it´s the last presentation of the evening, you have looked at your watches, and you are wondering what in the world this crazy college professor from Kentucky will possibly have to say. Well, bear with me a few minutes. Getting dress was always something difficult for me, I look back over the twenty-five years or so that I have been involved in the various aspects with HR and it occurred to me that just about the time that I get my systems going correctly somebody comes along and changes them. In fact, recently they have changed far more fast than I could even get the changes accomplished. So what I really think what we are going to talk about tonight for a very brief period of time is how to survive as an HR manager in this time of very, very rapid change.
Before we begin I want to tall you this quick story. This woman runs home, enters her house, throws wide open the door and jubilantly shouts "honey, pack your bags, I stopped at the casino on the way home from work and I really won it big"! The husband says, "I can´t believe it, it´s great, should I pack for the ocean or should I pack for mountains". The wife says, "I really don´t care, just get out". I think a lot of times we approach change that way. Some initiative comes along and we tend to throw away everything we have ever been doing out. I think, following Steve this afternoon is very beneficial to me, he kept emphasizing the human side of change and truly if you forget that, your change initiative is going to fail. Who really will make or break you in a change effort? The answer is your employees and as an HR manager if you forget that your employees are in fact human, you are doomed for failure. So often we tend to think of them as robots and that doesn´t work very well.

Well, let´s talk about some basic concepts. There are two different ways to look at change, change always comes from the environment. A lot of times though, we take the initiative and we look at it simply as a reaction, we change because something requires us to change and do it with verbal thoughts, we call that reaction change. A far way to look at change is to say what will best benefit the organization, how can I help the organization, something has got to happen, how can we do it so it´s in the best interest of everybody concerned, particularly the organization. If we are going to take that, we have to take the perspective the change is going to take a lot of energy. Change does not just happen in a positive way without a lot of energy being expended. How many of you have been working far more lately than you ever had before? Probably if you are looking at what you are doing in your work is because something has changed and you having to develop more and more programs to deal with those. But if you get right to it, if you are going to develop the organization, if you are going to remember that the people you are dealing with are in fact in humans, and not robots, and they are going to respond that way, you have got to have some insight to lead this change. But change is a very difficult concept because we are creatures of habit. Many of you drove here today, how many of you drove on the right-hand side of the road? Why did you do that? Did you even think about the side of the road that you should be driving on? No, you just took it for granted. Most of the things that we do in our work environment and certainly that of the lower level employees are things that are done over and over and over again and so they become a habit and we are asking them to change, we are asking them to break some habits. How difficult would it be for you to drive on the left-hand side of the road instead of the right-hand side of the road, it would be very challenging. Go to England sometime and try it, it is very uncomfortable, we are not accustomed to driving over there, we are accustomed to driving over here. Well, we are not likely in our roles to have to have people drive on the other side of the road but there a lot of things that are equally difficult. One of the most common initiative we see as HR managers is something associated with the computer. About the time we get everybody trained on a particular computer program, what happens? Another program comes along. One of my colleagues who spoke earlier, she was saying that her pay check was just over six hundred thousand dollars, that occurred to most of us who work for the university. Well first it´s just flattering to get a pay check, or get a tax receipt that says you made six hundred thousand dollars during the year. I don´t know if in Panama that´s a regular pay, but in the States is not. But they expect to pay taxes on that, well, that became a problem. Why did they have everybody getting tax receipts saying they are making unbelievable amounts of money, it is because there was a change introduced into the system and nobody ever really considered the humans that were going to be operating these systems. They simply assumed that we would put this computer thing in place and that the employees would rise to the occasion. Well, let me ask you a question. When you introduce a change, what always happens to the efficiency? When they introduce a new computer program, what always happens for the first few days or the first few weeks? The answer is efficiency always drops because human are not robots, humans are humans, they have a learning curve, they have to learn how to do it, and so we have a loss of efficiency.
Basic assumptions about change. Change is not going to come without resistance. Change is going to require resistance, is going to encounter resistance from all levels. You are going to have employees resisting it, you are going to have management resisting it, you are going to have suppliers resisting it, you are going to have customers resisting it. Resistance is something that you have to overcome if your change initiative is going to be successful. How come most change initiatives changes fail? It is because people did not anticipate a loss of efficiency, and the ensuing resistance that you are going to find from all levels so they go back to the way it was.

Number two, change does not come without desequilibrium. What does that mean? It means things are going to be really bad screwed-up for a while. When you have a downsizing situation, you hate that that happens but if it does you have many people that are learning to do other jobs. Again it is what we did at the University when we introduced a new computer program. New people when doing new jobs, their efficiency was not as good, that´s what we call desequilibrium.

Number three follows right on the heels of that change will not come immediately, change will takes a period of time, but typically after people learned the new system, assuming the new system is worth having, you are going to have far greater efficiency. Well, finally change is going to go back to the way it was, unless you force it. The University made a decision many years ago to go to Microsoft office. Previously everybody had been using Word Perfect. So when we rolled out how efficient Microsoft Office was we assumed that everybody would immediately start using Microsoft Office, but what did we find? WE would go back to the offices and we would still see the secretarial staff using Word Perfect, even though the better product was on their machines they were still using the old product. Why were they doing that? Well, it goes back to this thing that people are not robots, people are people, they are going to resist the change, there´s a learning curve, and they didn´t want to have to go through it.

The next concept is that change will not occur without ownership in the process. People either be for the change or they will be against the change, there´s no middle ground. Those that are against the change you hope are the ones that get downsized out, maybe that will happen, maybe that won´t happen but in all probability you might have chosen some people you thought they were going to be on the team but they weren´t, and if they don´t have ownership on the process they will certainly going to be a negative draw on it.

The next thing to look at is that change is never complete. We talked about this in the beginning. Change by virtue of its name, means that things are changing and changing and changing. So once we get something rolled out, before we get it completed something else is going to come along. We heard a lot about various management initiatives, quality initiatives today and by the way, I have thoroughly enjoyed being here today enjoying everything that was said. But I have been in this business for twenty-five years, and do you know how many quality initiatives or many management initiatives I´ve seen in that period of time? Quite a lot of them just as you have, so about the time that we get it infused into the organization, what happens, we have a newer version, a newer adaptation comes along so the change is never complete. The next to final one is, change will not come unless the group sees the need for it, and then the final one is change is less traumatic if there are options. Let´s talk about those for just a second. It is so often assumed that upper management will make the decisions and they will not even share with lower level employees what the vision is that the organization is going to look like. I am currently involved with a major governmental organization and I am going to help them work through this change process, so when I went in and said I want you to first level with the employees and tell them what the picture is going to be like when this change is over with, the six very high ranking executives looked at me like I had lost my mind. They said "what do we care what the lower level employees think about this, they are low level employees, they are paid to work, we are paid to think." And I just about fell out of my chair and said "who is really going to get the work done, it is these people that you are talking about, they are going to be scared, they are going to think there´s a possible loss of the job, we need to very upfront with them, we need to tell them what´s going on". Think about that from your own perspective. If there´s going to be something happening to your job, do you want to know about it whether it is good or bad? Absolutely, I think we all want to operate that way, so why on earth would we assume that the other employees in the organization are any different. It doesn´t matter whether they are going to be downsized out or whether they are going to stay, we still need to paint the picture what the organization is going to look like and if I may reiterate a point Steve said earlier, don´t blow smoke, they are going to know it if you do. What happens to your credibility the first time you lied to your employees, it´s gone, they are not going to trust you again. I have spent many years learning this lesson because I used to sugar coated, I have been doing consulting with change organizations for literally twenty years now, and I used to go in and I would paint a very glowing picture and when it didn´t go exactly the way I said it would, it was so difficult to lower the hell. And so maybe you can learn from me. Yes, it is good to paint a good picture but be honest about it and don´t be going out there loosing your credibility.

The next slide that we have up here is simply how does an organization goes through change. You have the norm, that´s what we are comfortable with, that is our habit. You get up and you go to work at a certain time, you do your job and you know when you are finished and then you go home. Something in the environment changes, a new product, your organization is going to turn out, a new product comes in, a new computer, a new whatever, maybe is a new quality initiative. Well the problem is there and we must have a plan of action of how we are going to implement it into the organization. What happens if you don´t have a plan of action? Change is going to occur, but there´s a big difference between a positive change and a negative change. Management proposes the plan to the workers, the workers make an individual decision to accept or reject the plan, the plan is implemented and then the plan becomes the new norm. We notice here who proposes the plan to the employees. The management does. You as the HR manager are probably a member of management but we have found that you need to be very careful about who actually does a lot of the announcements to the employees. Why? Because you want to be very upfront and you want everybody to understand where is this change coming from, is not your decision, is somebody else´s decision, so make it look like it´s a team effort. Once we have people hear about the change and believe me, they will know before it´s being announced. Psychologists tell us that it goes through these four stages, now depending on which books you read you may see six or seven stages, these are the basic four I think people go through it. When they first hear about the change what do they think? "Those people have lost their minds, this is no way this is going to work, I am just going to give them my piece of mind and tell them how stupid they are". Have you ever had anybody do that? Have you ever thought it yourselves? The first time they announced that they were going to make a change through your department, what did you think? You though it was the stupidest thing that ever come down. Well, we all do that, that´s human nature. Once we begin to realize though that this management is serious, then we start looking for ways to sabotage it, we start looking for ways that it´s not going to happen to me, we start looking for things that say "well maybe the organization is going to do it, but by golly I am not going to do it, don´t let the door hit me on the way out." Within just a few days people begin to accept the fact that the change is going to occur and that they do have the decision to stay, or they have the decision to leave so at that point start exploring, "Well, this is going to be ok, maybe I can survive this, you know, it might even be good". And then finally they begin to taste it a little bit and they realize it´s a pretty good thing and they become committed to it.

Let´s look at each one of these stages individually. How do we help people through these various stages. In fact, if you get nothing else out of tonight, these next few slides maybe beneficial to you because when it is first announced, when they first hear about it they are going to invariably hit the denial stage. First thing you must do is provide information and facts about the reality of the situation. Is the reality normally better or worse than what they think at this point. Is typically not nearly as bad, specially if they heard it through the grapevine. The grapevine is going to say we´ll probably going loose half of our employees, well the reality is that you are not going to loose half of the employees, you are going to get rid of five percent of them or something, so paint the picture, let them know what the reality of the situation is. Number two, provide an opportunity to be involved in the process, provide an opportunity to open up. People have brains, people like to use their brains, at this point they want to talk, they want to let their views be known, who do they need to be talking to? Well, you have to somebody within the organization to talk to, there are various companies that can come in and work with you on change, they can provide individuals for these people to talk to, now we are not talking necessarily about the people leaving it can also be the people staying, You need to have somebody there that knows what´s going on that they can actually talk to and open up. It´s amazing when people start talking through this denial the fact that it´s not going to happen by the time they get finished talking they already moved on to the next stage, but unless they talk about it, it takes them a longer period to go through this process. The next stage that we call is resistance, remember, resistance is defined as they know it´s going to happen but they don´t like it and so they are going to fight it. Be accessible, well we heard that one in the slide before, have somebody there for them to talk to. Number three, listen and acknowledge feelings. Is it any of this stuff logical or is this all emotional? This is all emotional stuff, people are emotional, they are not computers, they are not robots, they want to talk about it, they want people to listen to their feelings, they want people to know that they are concerned about all of the essence so if you would simply provide somebody, yourself or somebody else that can listen to it, this would help a lot of getting them through the stage. But you can´t preach to them at this point, you have to be very empathetic, you have to be very supportive. Provide a trust relationship rather than just information and finally affirm the past but confirm that the future still lays ahead. What are we doing here? We are simply saying that yes, the change is going to occur, I know you liked it the way it used to be, so did I, but the reality is we are going this way, let´s all get on it, let´s all make it very positive thing for the future and I think it is going to be very beneficial for all of us. Is what they are really wanting to hear? Yes, it is definitely what they are really wanting to hear. Why are they having the resistance in the first place? Because they are scared, you are providing an avenue to help them alleviate some of this fear that they have. Well, you may come back with the question, what happens if they know that they are going to be leaving the organization non-voluntarily, they are getting downsized, be honest with them, let them know this is the time to do it. I know there are a lot of constrains that you have to go through but the resistance and the listening certainly is probably more important there than it is for people that are actually staying. The next stage that we go to is called exploration. Exploration simply is another avenue to give information. Encourage questions, they many times will have to learn to do new things provide the training for it, provide the training in a very supportive way. Continue a two-way communication, establish short-term goals. Many of the change initiative I have been involved with in the last several years have involved rolling our new computer programs. I told you already a couple of horror stories about this. But think about when you have learned the computer programs or when you have taught other people about it or it has gone through your organization, people were really exited about it first and then when they realized they were going to have to use it they became scared of it and you had a few people in the organization that started playing with it and they learned how to do it and they thought it was so cool, what happened at that point? Did word kind of get out that "hey, if you play with it just a little bit this actually does work better than the other one". Yes, what else happens at this point, though? Did the horror stories about how the six hundred thousand dollar tax document went out to all the employees also served at this point, they do. Exploration stage means that they are exploring it, there´s going to have to be room for failure. Remember that any time you have a change initiative efficiency always drops for a short period of time and if you cannot allow for that, you better not start the change initiative in the beginning. So when we say short term goals, really what we are meaning here is people have got to have the opportunity to experiment, they got to have the opportunity to fail just a little bit, as they learn through it. When you first learned to walk did you just hop up and go across the floor or did you fall on your bottom a few times? Well, that´s the way it is anytime we learn something new. When I learned to ride a bicycle I skinned my knees, when I learned to do a computer, everything I learned how to do I have had some failures involved and is very silly for us to assume when we roll a change out to an employees they are going to have a maximum efficiency right over the bed. Finally the commitment phase. You got to affirm a cooperative progress, that means that we are all working together on this you are not a lone ranger, again this is a communication thing. You got to determine individual roles, you got to formulate and articulate the mission and the vision, you got to establish long-term roles and you got to allow freedom to move forward. When you begin the change initiative, do you know for sure exactly what everybody is going to be doing once it is rolled out, the answer is never. You may think you know who is going to be in what slot but you may also when you put them there find they have no talent for that so at this stage that´s kind of what you are doing from a management point of view is putting the round pigs in the round holes. Doing the final decisions about how all the process is going to come in and you need to leave people with the idea that they need to continue to experiment, they need to continue to learn because they are at the beginning certainly not at the ending. And so if we want to have the key to having people successfully come through the change process you must understand that people´s greatest fear is the fear of the unknown How about you, are you afraid of the unknown? And most of you are managers. You got pretty high ranking jobs, you have been through a lot of things and you are still scared of the unknown. What about some of your lower level employees that there ability to feed their children relies on their ability to make a living and they are very scared that this change may impact their ability to feed and clothe their children. Number two, emotions, always overshadow logic. If it was easy to go through change there would not be the stress involved. By far the most stressful things I ever experienced in my role as a change agent or as an HR manager comes form all of the weird stuff that always comes about it is not the change itself is all of the things that go along with it and I think is because I am human and is because of the people I am dealing with are human and people do not act rationally all the time, in fact sometimes if I ever react rationally they act on an emotional level, that´s why we got to paint the picture. A logical reasoning may not resolve in change. Just because the secretaries have Microsoft Office on their computers does not mean they will use it, they may continue to use the old Word Perfect simply because they are comfortable with it.

Let´s talk now a little bit why people change. Very simply there are three categories psychologists tell us about why people change, they are security, status and sex. Security means they are forced into and they do not have any choice. Many times in an organization this is the situation. The organization is changing, if they wish to continue with the organization they will have to change with it, it is called cohesive power. There are many times though that change comes from the individual they change because they want to because they will receive a more status out of it. Do this and you are going to get more money, do this and you are going to get a promotion, do this you will have what ever happen to you. Why are you all here tonight? You could be home watching reruns on the television, I hope you are here to learn something. And so maybe there is going to be some change occurred but nobody forced you to be here you are all here out of the second category, out of status. Maybe this will make your job easier, maybe you´ll be able to get a promotion, maybe, maybe, maybe, it´s hoping for the future. The final one is very powerful and is should never be used in an organization, we call it sex appeal. If you don´t believe this one is powerful and prevalent, sit out and watch an hour´s worth of television. Ninety percent of the advertisers that you are going to see on television use some form of sex appeal to sell their products. How many beer marks have you seen that had ill-applied young women running around on the beach. What in the world has that got to do with selling beer. Absolutely nothing. I was presenting this seminar last week and a participant held up his hand and said "oh, you could never use sex appeal to change an organization" and we spend about an hour on that, it certainly can happen, there´s lot of ways to do it, we don´t have the time to get into details here, but I am sure that most of you have seeing situations where an organization has put somebody in charge of an initiative simply because they were very attractive, they were not particularly competent but they were attractive.

Well, let´s talk about each of these, first two individually let´s talk about security first. Security is based on fear tactics. Fear tactics only work when there is an immediate or anticipated harm. In another words, if you are going to go out and scare people you got to have something to scare them with. What about if you come and tell people that if you do this twenty years from now you might have a problem, are they likely to make an immediate change at that point? If you tell them though that they may die within five minutes if they don´t do this are they likely to accept it, yes, that´s what we are talking about here. Number two, fear tactics don´t work if they have been misused in the past. It´s the story of crying wolf. If you have gone out and scared people in the past and nothing really came about, if you told them that the change was going to occur three times before and it didn´t happen, are they likely to believe that it will happen this time? No. You see that goes back to the credibility issue. Fear tactics don´t work if the message is perceived to be exaggerated. I emphasize here the word perceived. It doesn´t matter whether it is exaggerated or not, it matters whether the people believe that it is exaggerated and then you always have to deal with this phenomenon of human nature. Most people believe that it could never really happen to them. I have seen so many cases, you role out what somebody needs to do in order to keep their job a change initiative is going to occur in an organization and you see two or three people that been in the organization for a long period time and they are not doing what is necessary in order to keep their job and you go talk to them and they say "well, I have been around here for thirty years and the organization can´t exist without me so I am too important I don´t need to go do all that training". What do we call people like that? Unemployed, unfortunately. Ten years does not really matter in most organizations anymore. The next slide that we have talks about status. Remember status is when people change voluntarily because it will make their lives better. Well, if you are going to use this as a change initiative you must have the people where they believe that they can obtain that position. If you come and tell me that if I did this and this and this I could be the next president of the United States, would I believe you? You all could say no to that one, it´s ok. Absolutely not. Why would I not believe that I could be the next president of the United States? It is very simply I cannot see myself in that position, I don´t think that it could really occur, and if I cannot see myself in that position then I am very unlikely to do what´s necessary for the change. Number two, even if they can see themselves in that position they must also believe it is obtainable. Let´s say that I did believe I could be the next president of the United States, or of Panama I would simply have to see if it could be done within my lifetime. If I lived to be seventy years, how many people are going to be president during that period of time? Say about fifteen probably. And you´ve got x number millions of people that all can compete for that, what are my real chances of that happening? They are very, very remote and so you see I don´t think that goal would be obtainable. Finally, people must see it as worth the effort. A lot of times people have to have advanced college degrees in order to move into a new position in the organization. That requires night school, that requires shuffling family, job and really having no life for a period of time. Is it worth it? Well the person really has to believe it´s worth it or they are not going to put out the effort for it. You have a hand-out that was handed to you. I want you to take just a few seconds here and look at the exercise number one, and it says why do innovation fail? We don´t have time to go around and talk individually on this, when we do this seminar in three days we spend quite a lot of time on this exercise, but I want you to think very critically about why something within your organization or something you know about didn´t work. There could be lots and lots of answers to this, but typically you start going back to the fact that nobody really thought out how the change ought to be handled. They simply said "here´s what needs to happen" and so they assumed that everybody else would follow suit and see it exactly as they did. Maybe they didn´t communicate the vision properly, maybe they used fear tactics when they didn´t need to, there can be a very, very long list of things but the key typically of why an organization did not have a successful change initiative generally goes back to the process that they were going to go through was not appropriate or not well done. So, take that one, think about it. If you want change to occur though you got to have some help. As an HR manager can you do it by yourself? Absolutely not. You got to have what we call an opinion leader. Now there are many ways to handle this. An opinion leader is someone within the organization that has the answers. If you want to know something what´s occurring in the organization, do you have somebody that you go talk to . If I want to know what´s going on in the University I go do the president´s secretary, so I can ask her what´s going on, does she know? Yes. Every organization has opinion leaders and you need to have the opinion leader on your side. They are the ones that very likely folks are going to go to for the information.

Characteristics of opinion leaders. Opinion leaders are people that have access to external information, in other words, they know what the great plan is, they know what people are saying, why can I go to the president´s secretary and find out what´s going on? Simply because she has access to information that I don´t have. Number two, they have to have accessibility to the workers. If you are going to use them as an opinion leader, they got to be there where they can talk to them. Would I make a very good opinion leader for my job today? Probably not, because I am in Panama and I work in Kentucky, so nobody can get to me to talk to me extreme example sure, but it´s kind of silly sometimes we pick up a person to be an opinion leader and then they are not there, they can´t really be a part of it. There are typically perceived as having a higher social economic status meaning they are better educated, they have more money, they have a job that is in the right place, at the right time and they tend to be more innovative. What do we mean by an innovative person? WE mean somebody that historically has had the answers and they also had insight to the answers. There is a difference between having the information and knowing what to do with it. The next thing that we have on our agenda tonight is to look at exercise two. You wrote down an innovation that didn´t work about five minutes ago.....