Stuff I'M Thinking About

Organisational change is hard to manage. When new positions are created as part of a change process, getting the right people can be the single biggest success factor. The impact of a poorly chosen leader can quickly scuttle all our best efforts.

Most change programmes involve the creation of a new operating model, a future state. A case for change is created to outline the reasons for the change and to provide a plan for the migration from the current state. This is used to garner executive and board support.

This future state will frequently require changes to roles within the organisation, and this is often presented as a way to get some ‘new blood’ in the door to catalyse the change. Existing staff sometimes are thought to be resistant to change, and thus avoided for these roles.

These new roles have new duties and responsibilities that are align with, and will support, the future state.

The challenge when hiring for these roles is to find someone who can do this new role, and can do it in an organisation that is in a transitional and somewhat chaotic state.

There are many forces at play during organisational change.

A major one is organisational inertia, the strong tendency of the company to continue as it always has. There are three driving forces (with credit to Roger Martin):

• Formal: structures, system and process to meet goals
• Interpersonal: patterns that form as people work on problems together
• Cultural: mental guidebooks that drive collective interpretations and actions

Even with a structural change and pressure from above, people will tend to continue to do things the way they always have. This cannot be changed overnight, and the change must be led, not driven.

A new recruit will need to understand these two points—instability and inertia—and be able to lead effectively in an environment where those are dominant forces.

The pressure to follow the well-worn paths of the current state, paths that continue to be reinforced by their colleagues, will be high. Do they understand what this pressure looks like, and know how to model behaviour that points to the future state, while respecting the work done in the past?

They will also need to understand their own biases, in the form of past experience, and models and heuristics they applied in their previous roles. Do they have a method for recognising and overcoming their biases, and critiquing their models to determine if they are suitable for the new role? They need to quickly quell biases, and decide which models do not apply here, and develop new ones as needed.

The tendency is to hire people who have worked in similar roles elsewhere. Have they done this role before? If they have not been a leader in an environment of high change and uncertainty, then there is a reasonable chance they may not succeed. The key skill needed is not the ability to ‘hit the ground running’, it is the ability to manage and lead in a highly complex environment, more complex than either the current or future state might suggest is the case when looked at individually. A friend of mine called this tendency ‘hiring for the past’.

Beyond that, they must also be able to manage, lead, and coach staff—some of whom will have been hurt in some way by the change process—through the transition period. On top of this, they need to be able to manage your (the hiring manager’s) expectations. It has been said that no plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength. During a change programme, this main strength goes well beyond the organisational inertia I mentioned earlier.

In recruiting for change, we must look beyond the ability to do known tasks or alignment with currently understood operating models or roles. We must find people who can lead, model future behaviours, understand and manage the complexities of other people, and simultaneously operate effectively in the chaos that exists in an organisation in transition.