How to Implement Organizational Change Successfully

Change is inevitable in business. To remain viable, organizations must adapt to internal and external shifts.

Business leaders have a responsibility to be catalysts for positive organizational change. That change can’t occur without proper implementation.

To help you transition to a new leadership role, here's an overview of organizational change and how to implement it successfully.

What Is Organizational Change?

Organizational change involves altering one or more of a company’s major components, such as its culture, infrastructure, and internal processes. To guide your organization toward success, you must be proficient at navigating change.

Change can be difficult to manage. It can be predictable or unexpected and occur gradually or all at once.

“The reality is that companies won’t keep perfect pace with all the change that’s evolving in their industry, or in consumer needs and preferences, or in technological advances,” says Harvard Business School Professor Joshua Margolis in the online course Organizational Leadership. “That's why periodic leaps in how organizations function are required to catch up after lots of small contextual shifts accumulate.”

According to Organizational Leadership, you can categorize organizational change by its:

• Degree of difficulty: How difficult the change will be to implement within your organization, including how much effort it requires, how easy it'll be to modify existing practices, how simple it is to understand, and how much of your organization will be involved
• Nature of the upgrade: The type of upgrade needed to repair your organization’s broken components or pursue new opportunities

Within these categories, you can measure organizational change's magnitude using a spectrum from adaptive to transformational change.

• Adaptive changes are small, incremental, and occur gradually over an extended period.
• Transformational changes have a much larger impact and typically occur dramatically and suddenly rather than incrementally.

Most changes won’t be solely adaptive or transformational but instead occur between the two. To be an effective leader, it's vital to learn how to implement changes on both sides of the spectrum—and everywhere in between.

6 Steps to Implement Organizational Change

Organizational Leadership breaks the change implementation process into six steps, known as the CHANGE model.

1. Conceptualize: Distill your organization’s complex issues into a clear picture of root causes and potential solutions.
2. Hear: Gather perspectives from different team members to learn what you do and don't understand.
3. Agenda: Craft a plan based on the issues you identify and perspectives you gather that establishes the direction your organization should go and how to get there.
4. Nexus: Identify the features within each component of your organization’s architecture that will drive change.
5. Guide and govern: Use yourself to implement change within your organization.
6. Engage and execute: Encourage others to participate in change implementation.

This model illustrates the various teams within your organization that must participate for change to be successful. To break this down even further, you can separate these steps into three groups.

Conceptualize and Hear

When compiling information, it's crucial to consider multiple perspectives.

“Conceptualize and hear work in a paired cycle,” says HBS Professor Anthony Mayo in Organizational Leadership. “As you listen in hear, you refine your conceptualization of the challenges and opportunities facing the organization and the root causes.”

Avoid jumping to conclusions during this stage. It can be easy to judge a situation quickly based on initial observations, but doing so can cause you to overlook critical data.

Successful implementation requires gathering all relevant data, observing the internal and external environment, examining change’s potential impacts, and considering feedback.

Agenda and Nexus

Once you’ve thoroughly researched the situation, your next step is shifting from analysis to action. This requires a clear blueprint for how and where change is needed.

“Agenda and nexus go together,” Margolis says in Organizational Leadership. “Nexus—meaning intersection—specifies where the change needs to occur within the organization and which architectural elements to start with to execute on the agenda.”

To succeed at this stage, ensure your agenda is compelling. If others in your organization don't understand or aren't excited about it, it'll be more difficult to implement.

Guide and Govern/Engage and Execute

The CHANGE model’s last two components are critical to putting your plan into action.

“Guide and govern—together with engage and execute—are about implementation," Margolis says in Organizational Leadership. “How can leaders use themselves to mobilize people, communicate in all directions, review progress, and correct course?”

Since change often requires modifying how to accomplish tasks, implementation can be arduous. Effective communication is key to reducing resistance.

Here are four tips for communicating change to your team:

1. Share a vision: Confirm your team knows how the change benefits them and the company.
2. Tell a story: Get creative in how you communicate the change. Whether portraying it as a heroic tale or using graphics to convey its benefits, telling a story can help get employees on board.
3. Make your team the heroes: Verify that others understand their role in the change so they feel like heroes rather than victims of it.
4. Chart the path: Organizational change can be difficult, making it critical to ensure your team knows how it helps them and the organization over the long term.

In this stage, leading by example can be the difference between succeeding and failing.

“Leaders don’t just guide and govern change,” Margolis says in Organizational Leadership. “They themselves change as they lead their organizations.”

Be approachable and open to feedback. You should also set an example for others. When influencing others, actions speak louder than words.

Leading Successful Organizational Change

Depending on the change’s nature, strong internal resistance is likely. Your change initiative could be perceived as disruptive to your company’s culture or intimidating because it’s unfamiliar.

“Although familiar practices may have outlived their usefulness—or soon fail to work as well as they once did—those comfortable habits and reflexes remain because they’re how your company achieved success in the past,” Mayo says in Organizational Leadership.

The mentality of “it worked before, so it'll work now” can hinder innovation, which requires open-endedly exploring novel ideas. Overcoming that mindset requires intention.

“As a catalyst, you, the leader, must ignite change,” Margolis says in Organizational Leadership, “acting as the spark that inspires, encourages, enables, and reassures your team so that they can adapt in both small and large ways to deliver value continuously.”

Preparing to Lead Your Team to Success

If you're ready to improve your leadership skills, taking a training course, such as Organizational Leadership, can enable you to reap several benefits and gain the skills to lead and implement change.

Whether you’re already a leader or working toward becoming one, a leadership certificate course can help you develop your professional network, communicate effectively, and build a strong corporate culture.

While change is inevitable, you can successfully navigate it with the right skill set.

Are you ready to develop the skills to implement change? Explore our online certificate course Organizational Leadership—part of the Experienced Leaders curriculum in our yearlong Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program. It comprises seven courses to help you build the skills and knowledge to grow as a leader in the modern business world. Download our CLIMB brochure to learn more.