Understanding leadershipSeptember 24, 2017
Behavioural change? Not helpful!
"Behavioural change" is old wine in new bottles
First, the behavioural change advocated here is old wine in the new bottles of the consulting scene. Already in the 1980s debate on "social techniques" gathered pace. Then as now the core question is how decision-makers influence behaviour in their sphere to push through products and processes they consider right. In companies that is called "change management" or, in digital evangelists' words, "transformation".Not acceptance but employee expertise and participation are required
Change projects drastically alter work organisation and job content in companies: functions disappear, new ones appear, new knowledge and skills are required, new forms and hours of work are introduced. People must adjust to their familiar workplace changing or vanishing. Employment relations and work contexts shift, and formal co-determination rights may erode. Poor preparation for such transitions breeds mistrust and demotivation—yet efficient business processes need a culture of trust. Many work steps have become "worn in" over years. They are undocumented and known only to local staff. Without using this process knowledge, real improvements are rare. Much does not work as planners intended; large projects fail by being implemented beside reality. "Deals are done and work gets done although we have SAP!" is a line often heard in company surveys. Change management should not aim merely at steering employee behaviour to secure acceptance of decisions made elsewhere. It should consider the "employee perspective"—experience, knowledge, skills, expectations and needs. Employee views must enter change processes and weigh seriously in strategic choices. Only then will people share process knowledge for change projects. When they are asked, know their skills matter for success, and feel they remain important after restructuring, change can truly succeed.Behavioural economics? Yes—but draw the right conclusions!
Readiness for change requires a view of leadership in which employees are actors with their own interests and power, met as equals. Employees are the economic counterpart of employers. Both invest in the relationship; exploiting the other would be foolish. In this view the employee is not an object to be driven to certain behaviour but human capital enhanced by people-oriented investment and competitive advantage. More leaders share this view. Change management must be part of strategic human resource management.Giddens can guide decision-makers
If change is wanted—call it "transformation" if you like—decision-makers should look at supposedly old classics. Anthony Giddens' structuration theory in the 1980s already gave guiding impulses for managing change (cf. Giddens 1984):- Giddens on reflexive steering and rationalisation of action: Motivation for change is achieved step by step. Employees may grasp and follow change goals, but motivation for each action step comes from subjective interpretation of those goals.
- Giddens on co-presence: Only when change goals are found and implemented with employees do they touch subjective individual goals and become motivators. Success in subjective action gradually builds "memory traces" and social practices marking similar patterns as successful and satisfying. By finding the "big goals" in small subjective aims, actors experience themselves as fulfilling their own interests and as part of the whole.
- Giddens on social integration of structure: In change, structuring action and action-guiding structure can optimise each other until little external structuring is needed. Leadership then observes the "branching consequences" (Giddens) of ongoing structuration and steers them. Change management, heeding structuration, does not drive change but initiates it and observes and steers while momentum comes from actors themselves.
Micropolitics as driver of organisational change
Change in companies also happens constantly without change or "transformation" efforts—through micropolitics. Actors pursue their interests and try to shift conditions in their favour. To close, a apt quote from organisation scholars:"In organisations life rages. Far from the anaemic entities that haunt traditional research as 'organisational structure', measured top to bottom, they are arenas of fierce struggle, secret deals and dangerous games with shifting players, strategies, rules and fronts. What holds them together are partial convergences of interest, alliances and coalitions, side payments and sidelining, collaboration and résistance—above all powerfully exercised pressure and structural violence; who would believe this messy mix could be held together otherwise? The Machiavellis of the organisation are surrounded by brakes and drivers, change agents and agents of yesterday, martyrs and parasites, grey eminences, passionate players and clever tacticians: all micropoliticians. They pay prices and set points, build blockades or jump trains, end up sidelined or fall upstairs, take cover or rope down, pass the buck and fetch reinforcements, seek backing and insurance, establish bridgeheads and let bombs go off, create facts or seek dialogue. That they care about the matter cannot be denied—but always alongside runs the fight for positions, vested rights, resources and careers, influence and power." (Küpper/Ortmann 1992, p. 7)
References:
Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1995). Die Konstitution der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt. Küpper, W., Ortmann, G. (1992). Mikropolitik. Rationalität, Macht und Spiele in Organisationen. 2nd ed. Opladen.More on structuration and micropolitics in change management
in my book Praxiswissen Führung – Grundlagen – Reflexion – Haltung, published 28 October 2017. Heidelberg: Springer/Gabler, ISBN 978-3-662-50526-7Teilen:
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