Six images of change management

Chapter 2

Images of Change Management

Learning objectives

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

LO 2.1Evaluate the use that different authors make of the terms change agent, change manager, and change leader

LO 2.2Understand the importance of organizational images and mental models

LO 2.3Compare and contrast six different images of managing change and change managers

LO 2.4Explain the theoretical underpinning of different change management images

LO 2.5Apply these six images of managing change to your personal preferences and approach, and to different organizational contexts

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LO 2.1What’s in a Name: Change Agents, Managers, or Leaders?

This chapter focuses on those who drive and implement change. We first consider how those individuals are described, and then explore different ways in which their roles can be understood. This is not just a theoretical discussion. An understanding of organizational change roles has profound practical implications for the way in which those roles are conducted. And if you are in a change management role, now or in future, the way in which you understand your position will affect how you fulfill those responsibilities and whether you are more or less successful.

The use of terms in this field has become confused, and we first need to address this problem. Do the terms change agent, change manager, and change leader refer to different roles in relation to organizational change? Or are these labels interchangeable?

For most of the twentieth century, the term change agent typically referred to an external expert management consultant who was paid to work out what was going wrong in an organization and to implement change to put things right. This model is still in use. In the United Kingdom, if your hospital is in financial difficulties, the national regulator, Monitor, will appoint a “turnaround director” (external expert change agent with a fancy job title) to sit on your board of directors and tell you how to cut costs and restore financial balance. External change agents do not all work like that. Many adopt the “process consultation” approach popularized by Edgar Schein (1999). Here, the role of the “expert” is to help members of the organization to understand and solve their own problems.

Today, a change agent is just as likely to be a member of the organization as an external consultant. The term is now often used more loosely, to refer to anyone who has a role in change implementation, regardless of job title or seniority. Given the scale and scope of changes that many organizations face, a significant number of internal change agents may be a valuable—perhaps necessary—resource. Internal change agents usually have a better understanding than outsiders of the changes that would lead to improvements. In short, when you see the term “change agent,” it is important to check the meaning that is intended, unless that is obvious from the context. When we use the term change agent in this book, we will always indicate clearly to whom this applies.

Conventional wisdom says that, with regard to the other terms in our section heading, management and leadership are different roles, and that this is an important distinction. One of the main advocates of this distinction is John Kotter (2012). For him, change management refers to the basic tools and structures with which smaller-scale changes are controlled. Change leadership, in contrast, marshals the driving forces and visions that produce large-scale transformations. His main point, of course, is that we need more change leadership.

This argument has two flaws. The first concerns the assumption that large-scale transformations are more meaningful and potent, and are therefore more valuable than small-scale change. They are not, as the discussion of “depth of change” (figure 1.1) in chapter 1 suggested.

For example, Cíara Moore and David Buchanan (2013) report a change initiative called “Sweat the Small Stuff.” Staff in one clinical service in an acute hospital were asked to identify small, annoying problems that had not been fixed for some time. These included broken equipment and faulty administrative processes. The five problems were addressed 32by a three-person team including an “animateur” who set up and coordinated the project, a clinical champion who engaged medical colleagues, and a “who knows who knows what” person whose administrative background and networks helped the team to identify shortcuts, “workarounds,” and “the right people” to solve these problems quickly. All five problems were solved within five days. The total costs came to £89 for a piece of equipment, and the 40 minutes that the animateur spent in conversations. The benefits were “financial (US$35,000 income generation), processual (safer patient allocation), temporal (tasks performed more quickly, less waiting time), emotional (less annoyance, boredom, frustration), and relational (improved inter-professional relations)” (Moore and Buchanan, 2013, p. 13).

One of the overarching benefits of “sweating the small stuff” was better management-medical relationships, laying the foundation for further improvements, in this area and in others. Fixing the small stuff was beneficial in its own right and was the precursor for future major changes. The animateur’s job title was “operations manager”; was she a change manager, or a change leader?

The second flaw in the argument concerns the belief that the contrasting definitions of these management and leadership concepts will survive contact with practice. They do not. While it may be possible to define clear categories in theory, in practice these roles are overlapping and indistinguishable. The general distinction between management and leadership is challenged by Henry Mintzberg (2009, pp. 8–9), who argues, “I don’t understand what this distinction means in the everyday life of organizations. Sure, we can separate leading and managing conceptually. But can we separate them in practice? Or, more to the point, should we even try?” He asks, how would you like to be managed by someone who doesn’t lead, or led by someone who doesn’t manage? “We should be seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as management practiced well.”

In short, management versus leadership is not a distinction worth arguing over, and may be more simply resolved by a combination of personal and contextual preference. In this book, we will use the terms change management (or manager) and change leadership (or leader) synonymously—unless there is a reason for making a distinction, which will then be explained.

LO 2.2Images, Mental Models, Frames, Perspectives

More important than the terminology, the internal mental images that we have of our organizations influence our expectations and our interpretations of what is happening, and of what we think needs to change, and how (Morgan, 2006; Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012; Bolman and Deal, 2013). We typically hold these images, metaphors, frames of reference, or perspectives without being conscious of how they color our thinking, perceptions, and actions. These images, which can also be described as mental models, help us to make sense of the world around us, by focusing our attention in particular directions. The key point is that, while an image or mental model is a way of seeing things, a standpoint drawing our attention to particular issues and features, it is also a way of not seeing things, shifting our attention away from other factors, which may or may not be significant.

For example, if we have a mental image of organizations as machines, then we will be more aware of potential component “breakdowns” and see our role in terms of maintenance and repair. In contrast, if we think of organizations as political arenas, we are more 33likely to be aware of the hidden agendas behind decisions and try to identify the winners and losers. We are also likely to see our role, not as maintaining parts of a smooth-running machine, but as building coalitions, gathering support for our causes, and stimulating conflict to generate innovation. Shifting the lens again, we may see our organizations as small societies or “microcultures.” With this image, we are more likely to focus on “the way things get done around here,” and on how to encourage the values that are best aligned to the type of work that we do. A microculture image highlights the importance of providing vision and meaning so that staff identity becomes more closely associated with the work of the organization. Each frame thus orients us to a different set of issues.

There are no “right” and “wrong” images here. These are just different lenses through which the world in general, and organizations in particular, can be seen and understood. The images or lenses that we each use reflect our backgrounds, education, life experiences, and personal preferences. There are some problems for which a “machine” image may be more appropriate, and other problems where a “microculture” image is relevant. Some problems may best be understood if they are approached using two or three images or lenses at a time.

Those who are responsible for driving and implementing change also have their own images of organizations—and more importantly, images of their role as change manager. Those images clearly influence the ways in which change managers approach the change process, the issues that they believe are important, and the change management style that they will adopt. Like the child with a hammer who treats every problem as if it were a nail, the change manager is handicapped in drawing on only one particular image of that role. It is therefore important, first, to understand one’s personal preferences—perhaps biases—in this regard. It is also important, second, to be able to switch from one image of the role to another, according to circumstances. This ability to work with multiple perspectives, images, or frames concerning the change management role is, we will argue, central to the personal effectiveness of the change manager and also to the effectiveness of the change process.

We will outline six different “ideal type” images of managing change, describing the assumptions that underpin each image and the theoretical views that support them. We will then explore how change managers can draw from and use these multiple perspectives and images of managing change.

LO 2.3The Six-Images Framework

How are our images or mental models of organization and change formed? To answer this question, Ian Palmer and Richard Dunford (2002) first identify two broad images of the task of managing, which can be seen as either a controlling or as a shaping activity. They then identify three broad images of change outcomes, which can be seen as intended, partially intended, or unintended. Why focus on change outcomes and not on the change process in this approach? The outcomes of change do not always depend entirely on the decisions and actions of those who are implementing change. Change outcomes are often affected by events and developments outside the organization, and which are beyond the direct control of individual change managers, whose intentions may be swamped by those external factors. How change managers see those outcomes 34is therefore a significant component of their image of the change management role. Combining these images of managing and of change outcomes leads to the six images of managing organizational change summarized in table 2.1: director, coach, navigator, interpreter, caretaker, nurturer.

TABLE 2.1

Images of Change Management

Images of Managing

Images of Change Outcomes

Controlling (Roles and Activities)

Shaping (Enhancing Capabilities)

Intended

director

coach

Partially intended

navigator

interpreter

Unintended

caretaker

nurturer

Management as Controlling

The image of management as a controlling function has deep historical roots, based on the work of Henri Fayol (1916, 1949) and his contemporaries (Gulick and Urwick, 1937) who described what managers do, captured by the clumsy acronym POSDCoRB. This stands for planning, organizing supervising, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting—activities that the change manager, as well as the general manager, may be expected to carry out. This reflects a “top-down,” hierarchical view of managing, associated with the image of organization as machine. The manager’s job is to drive the machine in a particular direction. Staff are given defined roles. Resources (inputs) are allocated to departments to produce efficiently the required products and/or services (outputs). This image is today reflected in the work of Henry Mintzberg (2009), who describes contemporary management roles in terms of deciding, focusing, scheduling, communicating, controlling, leading, networking, building coalitions, and getting things done. Harold Sirkin et al. (2005) argue that “soft” factors such as culture, leadership, and motivation do not significantly affect the success of organizational change, and that change managers should concentrate on the “hard” factors instead—controlling, communicating, scheduling, monitoring. The hard factors have three properties: