Change upon change.
Europeans advising Europeans. Ralf Langen about change management in companies.
Pleon is a new European consultancy. Its vision is unusual: Implementing the intelligence of various countries and regions for a joint network economy; emerging from a host of mental and cultural nodules a common, trans-national network is to develop without any hierarchy or dominance from above. A European enterprise undertaking the proverbially high-flying attempt to make an omelette without breaking any eggs. In the coming months, we will be accompanying this unique mission with reports and essays. From a Europe that is growing together because it belongs together.
We are living in the fastest economic age ever. Acceleration has reached enormous magnitude. It is driven by the markets’ own dynamics, advancing globalisation, politics, the demands of the financial markets and technological development. The success of businesses with a future can be gauged from how they can keep up with the speed and scope of these changes. One thing at least is clear: Anyone turning against the fundamental change in industry and society endangers their own existence. What is even worse: Clinging to what prevails will sink you. There is no end to this change culture in sight. Indeed, quite the contrary is true: Change inevitably leads to change.
How does the company stand strategically and how is it changing its structures? What corporate culture is being striven for? How are newly created units or acquired companies being smoothly integrated into the existing culture? How can business processes be optimised for swifter, better, more economical action on the market? How to enhance the degree of innovation of products and services? How to fine-tune the route to market without losing customer focus? And how do you manage to bring about a new way of thinking, feeling and working in a company on a permanent basis?
Change management invariably materialises on three levels: Firstly, developing new products and markets, secondly improving value creation, and thirdly creating values. To put it in a nutshell – being profitable and innovative, at the same time presenting a corporate culture as a line to pursue, in which employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders can form a network.
In other words, change management only bears fruit if it supports strategic corporate objectives, whileestablishing identity and offering orientation. And precisely here is the rub, since these two levels are no longer so mutually compatible. A great number of businesses operate on an either/or basis. They fire employees, pinning their hopes and aspirations on outsourcing and offshoring to upgrade their profit situation. Internal corporate worlds turn flaky, issues hitherto customary and familiar being challenged. The upshot: a culture of fear is prevalent in many places, mutual mistrust is on the up. This puts a damper on building an attractive corporate culture as well as a foundation of trust.
This is why the character of a change process and the management of changes must always be constructive. Otherwise, brazenly announced changes quickly turn into shamefaced crisis management. The high speed of changes in the business world and society will compel companies to seek a confidential relationship to their stake and shareholders more than ever in future. Businesses will have to ensure that these players get a clear picture of the company and its proficiency and that they remain loyal. At the same time, they will have to provide the people in the company with “identity”. What this means is that all the staff must be aware of what performance they personally can contribute to the whole, what their company’s next overall goals are, and why it is essential for everyone concerned that these goals are reached. This has to do with the fact that feeling integrated and approved is worth more to employees today than the actual amount on their pay cheque.
This dual aspect leads to all these change processes requiring intensive communication – both inwardly as well as outwardly. Why is this so? Quite simply, communication is not only the lubricant for all innovative, social and mental processes in a business, making change processes easily comprehensible and thus explicable. Notwithstanding this, communication is also a strategic change lever for management – particularly in times of valueoriented corporate governance. This means to say that communication is the crucial factor for success for any change management, no matter whether it is a question of “dramatic” reorganisation processes such as mergers, corporate splitting, restructuring or repositioning, or of less dramatic transformation processes such as strategic re-orientation or improvements to the innovation process. Intelligent management of communication is a central requirement made on modern corporate governance.
For this, Pleon offers just the right know-how. And, as external specialists, we at Pleon make this know-how unfailingly available for dramatic or less dramatic change projects. As a European consultancy, the Practice Group Change & Internal is an international network nodule for know-how requisite to diagnosis, experience and solution-finding. In the last ten years, we have been constantly developing all those diagnostic tools and research approaches that timely focus on critical issues and concrete barriers. For management decisions in ambiguous situations with hazy trends, we implement comprehensible scenarios with clear-cut, professional story models for the change process as a whole. We evolve customised platforms and communicative formats to enable executive boards and top management to effectively provide the process with dynamics and direction. We support the substantial players in the change process with coaching and training sessions. Equipped as we are with profound know-how in the “best practices” in communication management, we ensure optimisation or re-orientation of corporate communication. Namely, a new way to approaching issues and changes to thinking, feeling and acting inevitably necessitates new communication to boot. This starts with developing new substance for internal and external communication and extends right up to organisation consultancy for the key disciplines of communication. Rounding off this particular module is controlling for its realisation as well as well-established monitoring of the effects of this form of communication.
Communication in the change process is not developed as an armchair exercise – and is certainly not brought to fruition there either. In all change briefs, we therefore implement “dynamic teaming” with the customer side, working on the companies’ structures on the spot and activating their resources in dialogue with our clients. Here, we see ourselves as strategic consultants for management, as translators of strategic stories, and – at the same time – as operative communication managers we make sure transparent programmes are realised efficiently.
Such an approach makes high demands on our consultants. They have to have excellent process expertise, a sound understanding of corporate management, comprehensive communication know-how and outstanding coaching qualities. For this reason, change is a “senior business” for Pleon, practised by consultants on a partner or senior consultant level, working together with well-trained teams. Quality management in our very own business therefore has a high importance for us – with our consultants from all over Europe meeting and exchanging ideas and experience on a regular basis to improve methods and tools. Here, too, the key concept is also “practices”. In the end, “practices” means nothing other than “a consistent way of doing things” – this is even more true in change management. What trends are perceivable today in the variegated consultancy field of change management, if the change processes in the business world, politics and society are questioned, as we do, from the communication viewpoint?
1. It’s reputation, stupid!
The business world has been clearly focused on in moralising debates in the media and society in the last few years. The trustworthiness and legitimacy of corporate decisions are jeopardised not least by a whole gamut of scandals à la Enron, Mannesmann/Vodafon, Parmalat or Arthur Andersen. The scope of action exercised by executive boards and top management is being increasingly narrowed down on the morals front, categories of good corporate governance playing a progressively greater role even in buying and investment decisions. This puts top business executives under pressure – they are under relentless observation by a critical stakeholder society. Strategic changes, radical changes in direction and adjustments to corporate logic must no longer simply be well-founded and justified, they must also be focused in a very sophisticated manner on the expectations held by different target groups. This is fundamentally a question of active reputation management. Moreover, top executives are an essential factor for a company’s reputation. Projects for change are fruitlessly aborted today, because the exponents of change are unable to cope with correctly assessing or managing reputation dynamics. At Pleon, change management is thus very consistently related to managing reputation and maintaining a business’s credibility.
2. New competences for HR management
The new clients for systematic change communication are increasingly coming from the ranks of human-resource departments and project management. It is precisely these two functions in business that in the last few years have acquired the competence for player-oriented communication and a sophisticated perception of change processes. An understanding of roughly broken-down target groups as a basis for the communication reality in businesses, and a communications approach – with rather a journalistic touch – banking on the effects of media communication do not facilitate the change process any further. It is especially the staff developers and the specialists for lifetime learning from human-resource management who take an interest in communication from the players’ perspective and call in (external) specialists for personnel communications. All too frequently, it is namely internal communication in companies that fades away into obscurity in the all-devastating medium Intranet.
3. Blueprints for enduring integration
If border-crossing business take-overs tended to lead to a state of emergency in companies up to a few years ago, then mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances have very much become a part of everyday life for international companies today. Yet very few have managed to establish a robust infrastructure and serviceable competence centres for the resulting integration tasks and the management of the partially intersecting change processes. This organisational task is being addressed with a high priority by company headquarters at present. With our long years of experience in change management and a typically European feeling for the cultural differences in business, we offer a high degree of consultancy authority to deal with integration tasks in a specific corporate system. We practise change management for our clients in this sense, too, that is – with system solutions and competence reorganisation – we simultaneously transform the way changes in businesses are approached.
Ralf Langen (Munich) is a partner at Pleon Kohtes Klewes, and heads the European Practice Group for Change & Internal at Pleon, one of the leading PR consultancies in Europe and a subsidiary of BBDO Europe.
Translation: Gordon Broxton-Price
This article appeared on changex.de