Responsibility – a Key Ingredient for Change

One thing I look for when working with a new client is whether they are taking any responsibility for the problems within their organization. I find the more a client is willing to accept the hard truth that some of the things going astray are their fault, the easier it will be to implement positive change.

There are always plenty of scapegoats for problems: senior management blame junior management and junior management blame those higher up. Companies manage contractors badly and then blame the third party supplier. Managers blame their staff. Of course in some circumstances blame is fairly attributed. If you’re working with an inept company all the best practices in the world might not engage them. However many cases of poor performance lie with us the performers, not the people and the environment that surrounds us.

When I first started delivering large project management change programmes I assumed giving people a reality check on their management behaviour would be fairly straightforward. I set up some simple metrics to measure their performance; comparing estimates with actual delivery times, feeding back project performance in lessons learned meetings, customer satisfaction surveys and so on. What amazed me in those early days was the tenacity that we all have to find anyone or anything to blame our non-performance.

What does all this mean for us in practice? I think a realization that change takes a long time and that most organizations are always widely optimistic about how quickly it will come. A new system is implemented and it is assumed everyone will quickly modify the way they work to use the new tools. When this doesn’t happen the system is blamed and a new project is started to replace it or considerably reconfigure it. This sequence can depressingly be repeated many times.

I think the main lesson for us all in business when it comes to change is simply this…patience.