There is much academic narrative available on barriers to change within organisations. This blog does not seek to examine all these areas but provide a variety of solutions that may assist with removing barriers to change.
An organisation will often have barriers to change both at the corporate and individual level.
The corporate level may well find a sense of inertia with uninspiring management and products and services that have not evolved over time. Indeed, some entities do not actually want change.
The author finds the shadow side of organisations the greatest area of resistance. Executive functions often fail to identify just how entrenched staff can be to existing roles, functions, and ways of working. On the surface the board may think that everyone is signed up to the planned change, but underneath this is quite the opposite.
So, discovering the ‘shadow side’ of a business can be highly informative and reveal a dissonance that was clearly unexpected, and an obvious barrier to any meaningful change programme.
The barriers at individual levels may often stem from fear of job loss, loss of authority, greater work, exposure of working practices or indeed lack of competence to fulfil a new role.
All these barriers to change can be teased from the ‘shadow side’ of a business and need to be highlighted and treated.
For further information and to book your change survey please contact: Marcus J Allen at Thamer James Ltd. Email: [email protected]
Marcus has twenty years’ experience in delivering successful change management projects in the areas of business processes and compliance.
Projects include organisations that have faced mergers and acquisitions and need to embrace a compliance culture rapidly and required assistance with change management. Through to large leisure sector businesses implementing a controls environment with parts of the business resistant to change. A change programme was successfully introduced.
Marcus holds the respected Diploma in Governance, Risk and Compliance from the International Compliance Association and holds a master’s degree in Management Learning & Change from the University of Bristol. Marcus is a Fellow of the Institute of Consultants and Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.