You might have tried introducing change initiatives in the past and bemoaned all the time, effort and budgeting it took to get precisely nowhere. The experience might even have put you off making further attempts, and left you digging your heels in like everyone else in the company, declaring that "nothing's going to change around here."
Honestly, you can't afford to maintain that stance if you want your company to evolve and progress. Maybe you're looking to pass the baton to the next generation, or even planning an exit strategy - whatever the future holds, you'll surely want to maximise its potential and the only way to do that is by getting your employees engaged.
Here's some great advice from Lisa Bodell at Forbes;
Summarise Your Key Objectives
Number One in Lisa's book is to involve your people in the process - not a favoured few, but everyone who wants to use their voice. Autonomy - the ability to make decisions in one's own right - is a basic human need on the road to self-actualisation. You must feed that need if you want to get the best from employees and their full commitment to any new strategy.
You really need to Find the Pain - people won't readily expose the underbelly of their thought process so it's imperative that you bring an outsider in to enable them to offload in safety. Every manager and his uncle will want to second-guess who said what; to remove that temptation, a provider like WorldLine will compile a Report that gives full diagnostic information with none of the identifiable factors (like direct quotations or reference to specific sources). You can't do this in-house - trying will only exacerbate your problems.
Then you need to garner some flexibility of thinking. Nobody is perfect, and self-analysis at the top is crucial for excellence to evolve. When changes in the way things are done become recognisable for the better, others want to follow that act and have more confidence in doing so. You cannot expect operators to behave differently if you do not address the things that don't work in what you've been doing all along.
Sometimes that's as simple as the way you refer to people - I've heard shop-floor workers called all kinds of things, inevitably disparaging and understandably exacerbating a them-and-us problem. Even referring to different areas of the business with different terminology can be destructive - these things are easy to change but sometimes hard to spot, especially if you've been doing them yourself. Had we the power the giftie give us....
When you're well on the way to making changes stick, put a communication platform in place that allows for transparency and a sharing of achievement across the board. Make sure it's fully inclusive and everyone can participate, contribute and access the updates. When a culture starts to feel like it's coming together, all kinds of benefits will pop up and you want to capture those for everyone to see, forging recognition and reward in the process of managing change.
Once the scene is set for excellence, continuous improvement will naturally take its course and flow as you would want it to, because everyone is on board. There will doubtless be some stragglers and skeptics, but as long a key players are enjoying the ride, even the hard-nosed will follow in their own way.
Beware the Saboteur
However, be very aware that someone in mid-line management might not want anything to change at all, and will go to great lengths (even sabotage) to ensure that they hang on to;
Resource guarding. Information that should be freely available is kept under wraps for personal benefit, only seeing the light of day when they want it to (if at all).
The right to undermine. Some supervisors are fixated on their power base and see the belittlement of others as a dopamine hit - it won't happen in front of you, so keep a close eye on behaviours and signs of distress.
Credit for everything. Ideas often come from those doing the job, but line-management protocols can mean they never get to see a reward or even a thank-you for their innovation.
Protect Your Natural Assets
Make sure accountability is protected across the board, so that you remove the tendency to blame and replace it with a desire to take responsibility for actions. This may appear to be difficult to implement, but in truth it's very easy and takes no time at all to take root. People like transparency, they want to be respected and considered - and everyone loves to trust. Trust is a basic commodity that permeates the natural world, it's essential for survival of the collective and it's imperative that you instil it in your company.
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