Time For Change

Make time your friend in a change process.

Change requires time, but if it doesn’t happen quickly enough according to your client, it suddenly becomes a constraining factor.

If someone has been working according to certain processes for years — in some cases, decades — it takes quite a bit of time and effort to make changes. This applies to one person, and even more so to a large group of people.

As a coach in mostly larger organizations, I frequently encounter misplaced expectations regarding change. It is often thought that changes in the way of working will be “implemented” within a few months — or sometimes even weeks.

It sounds so good: “We have been working very successfully for some time, but now we want to take the next step in our growth, so we are starting change process X.” The accompanying tight schedule is often made before an experienced coach is hired. This leads to unrealistic plans that you as a coach are confronted with from day one.

On paper, it’s just a matter of doing an introductory session with a full room and then starting with the new way of working. Maybe a few learning points here and there, that still sounds logical, but after a few weeks of working this way, everyone should be used to it, right?

And then reality hits

The practice is much more stubborn. To begin with, it already takes quite a bit of time to gather a whole team — let alone an entire department. One person is still not back from vacation or the other is already leaving again. And half of them work part-time, but not all on the same days, of course. Not to mention the remote workers. Because you preferably start such a large change process when you are all face-to-face in one room. In short, you already start with about three weeks of delay if you’re not careful.

Anyway, then we’ve had the kick-off and we can actually get started! Or not. Not everyone agrees with the new way of working, not all roles are assigned, and technically the new work administration system is not yet in order.

After some smoothing out, we can finally get started for real. Then it often turns out to be difficult to put what you’ve learned into practice. Not everyone learns at the same…