Redundancies mean smaller organizations, and smaller organizations require different ways of working. If you lose some of the Accounts team, who will process the invoices? The credit crunch is hitting businesses in different ways, and one of the impacts on project managers is being involved in projects to sort out some of these issues.
“Ideally, you’d like to right-size the organization based on what’s required by the way work gets done; however, I haven’t noticed that there is any conscious alignment right now between right process and right size,” says Jonathan Gilbert, PMP, director of client solutions for ESI International. There has been a rush to cut costs by cutting staff, and while project managers seem to be faring relatively well when heads are lost, we are still impacted by organizational changes. “The economic downturn has resulted in a current shift in organisational focus away from implementing long-term changes, such as process improvements, and toward the quick hits created by the current spate of organizational downsizing,” adds Gilbert.
There is also the issue of where to spend the available capital. There’s less money available for new projects and programmes, so companies have to prioritise what to spend time, effort and therefore money on. And it’s even more important that any changes they do invest in ‘stick.’ There is no point delivering change for those changes – of any kind – to not ‘take’ within the business.
“Trust needs to be the underlying environment in any change initiative,” advises Gilbert. “Currently, there is a paucity of trust in organizations, as organizational members question the need for downsizing, and organisation leaders wonder how hard everyone is really working. My experience tells me that when times get tough, leaders tend to deal with the massive disequilibrium of tough times by micro-managing, which breeds even more distrust.”
As project managers we can contribute to fostering trust within our project teams by following Gilbert’s three steps for successful change initiatives:
- Identify the necessary change, communicating directly the intent and direction that the change implores
- Engage the workforce in aligning around the intent and direction of the change, thereby creating an environment that allows people to have their own insights about the need for change, and the necessary direction and intent of the change
- Implement the change in a way that allows the people who have to live with the change a chance to execute the prototype solutions for enacting the change.
Essentially, involving people every step of the way without micro-managing them will increase your chances of the change being accepted and therefore becoming the new status quo.
If that all sounds quite complicated to implement, focus instead on building your proficiency as a professional project manager and agent of change. Gilbert’s four top skills for improving your abilities to manage change successfully are:
- Deep listening: the ability to hear and empathise with the people being impacted by the change
- Emotional intelligence: a facility to understand the physiological, neurological and emotional responses that we all have to change in our lives
- Questioning: the ability to ask questions that allow people to have their own insights about what the change really means (as a leader, you cannot tell people what insights they should have – they have to arrive at them on their own)
- Patience: an ability to suspend urgency for a time while people work through their responses to change because everyone will adapt to change at different rates.