Recently I responded to a LinkedIn discussion asking “how important is a change management strategy to the success of an improvement program?” I wanted to re-phrase the question and expound on my answer.

First of all, no strategy, as good as it might be, will ever deliver any value unless it is well implemented and executed. Assuming that this is the case, here are my top 5 reasons why a change management strategy matters in any type of organizational change:

1. Change is personal. Change is almost always interpreted and experienced at a personal level and people react to that in a very real sense. A good CM strategy should address these dimensions of the change program.
2. The soft stuff is the really the hard stuff. The technical work is easy compared to the work it takes to shift and improve the leadership styles, communication styles and patterns, beliefs and assumptions that influence behavior, etc. that will support the change. A CM strategy should include interventions to address these issues.
3. Successful change requires a change in mindsets and/or behaviors. It’s about influencing hearts and minds, not just informing eyes and ears. Saying so doesn’t make it so. A CM strategy should always include a solid communication but a communication plan is not a CM plan.
4. Change must be sustainable to be successful. This requires a change in areas such as decision making, performance management, metrics and accountability, rewards practices, etc. A CM strategy should include strategic changes to specific levers that will enable and reinforce the change in the long term.
5. Make real impact. An effective CM plan should tie specific CM interventions and deliverables to business outcomes and should include measurable ways to evaluate the degree to which the CM plan is indeed successful.

For these and other reasons, most organizational change programs fail to deliver the expected ROI. A colleague in the ERP business, shared with me that a client had called them back two years after implementation. They wanted to re-train the users because they were not using the new system as intended. In fact, they were still using much of their legacy practices from the old system. What happened? They spent millions in implementing a good solution that was never fully adopted by the people. (By the way…training is rarely the answer! But that’s the subject of another post later).

A good CM strategy, well implemented, would have accelerated their ROI expectations and saved them the cost of rework (re-training), not to mention the loss of productivity over the two years following the implementation. So, how important is a CM strategy? You do the math!