The problem of obtaining internal buy-in to a major operational change in an organization is easily the most overlooked factor in such enterprises, and it is often actually the most important. Whether resulting from a merger/acquisition or restructuring/process-reengineering, failure to account for the human factor in the affected organizations is a big reason why such efforts have so poor a record of achieving their highly touted goals.
There is really only one alternative: sell it. It’s hard work, but if you want the project to actually succeed, you have to bring the staff on board. Manipulative or Machiavellian devices such as reassignment, political maneuvering, intimidation through positive and/or negative sanctions of various sorts, and the like will possible get you past the immediate period or aftermath of the change event, but this only masks your ultimate failure to optimize the intent of your change efforts. In fact, they typically guarantee your failure to do so by increasing the climate of cynical skepticism in the workforce (regardless of how well its members may have personally survived the process).
So, sell it. You’ve made the case for how your project is beneficial for the organization to the board, senior management, investors, and the like. Now, make it to the staff. Show them, unit by unit, location by location, how it will make the organization more profitable, effective, and competitive. Also, explain how it will make the staff more efficient and productive.
More than that, engage them in the details of its implementation in their own units or workspaces. Ask their advice, put them in charge of elements of its activation. Establish systems – whether actual live or organizational intranet-based discussion groups – for extracting their feelings and ideas about it. Let them vent without retribution. It is just as important for the project’s success for negative, as well as positive, impressions about it to surface. In time, the staff will find themselves accommodating themselves to the emerging reality with greater understanding of its implications as well as its intended effects, and they will help you set the organizational sails to the new winds of change.
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