Organizational Change Management Maturity

Outlined below is a guide to Parker Avery’s five stages of organizational change management maturity. Use these descriptions and recommended next steps to guide your company’s efforts in successfully building change management and transformational leadership capabilities.

If you are curious about your own company’s maturity relative to successfully navigating change and leading transformation, we invite you to take our organizational change management maturity assessment. It consists of ten questions that will prompt you to consider many different facets of how your company currently handles change. Your answers will pinpoint where your company is relative to enacting strong change management capabilities, and we provide specific, pragmatic steps you can take to reach the next level.

At the Novice Stage, the organization may be aware of and consider the people side of the change, but leadership needs a formal approach to managing change with respect to the company’s people. Often companies in the Novice Stage communicate a high-level plan at a town hall or similar event, considering that effort sufficient for the entire organization. As a result, leadership typically underestimates the impact of change on the people involved and are surprised when the change is not readily accepted. In addition, there needs to be more focus on equipping senior leaders with change leadership skills, and more structure should be in place for management levels below to ensure they are empowered and equipped to help their teams navigate changes.

Great news! If you took this assessment, you perceive a gap in your organization, but where do you start? It’s easy – at the beginning.

• Educate yourself. Visit our Expert Guide to Organizational Change Management page to learn more about the fundamental concepts of change management and its critical elements. This will help you better understand what needs to be done and how to approach it.
• Find like-minded people. Identify change advocates and start building an informal network to share your learnings; gather a cross-section of senior executives, middle managers, and front-line staff from various departments and business units.
• Align on a shared understanding. What does organizational change mean in your company? Is it a process, a set of competencies, or both?

In the Apprentice Stage, the organization considers the people side of the change and attempts to implement a change plan; however, there needs to be a consistent change approach or toolkit, and the effort stalls a few weeks into the initiative. Leadership gives lip service to the importance of the people. They provide a perfunctory status update at all-hands meetings, falsely believing that the management levels below will reinforce the message. This stage implements a change management process as a last resort, which is too late. There needs to be more focus on equipping leaders with change leadership skills so change initiatives can be proactively shepherded to success.

You’re heading in the right direction – your company realizes change management should be essential to your organization’s success; however, it’s failed to realize the benefits of a proactive change approach. Your next steps could include:

• Picking one business initiative on which to focus (e.g., department)
• Selecting a digestible change process that the team can manage at a high level
• Rallying an informal group of change advocates and ensuring the team aligns on a shared understanding of what organizational change means to your company

In the Expert Stage, the organization realizes it must do more than apply change management principles to a handful of (usually IT) projects. The executive team realizes that leading change is not the responsibility of a few people but of anyone in a management role. As a result, the company mandates required training for some or all of its management teams. In addition, leadership identifies success metrics to monitor the organization’s improvement in leading and implementing change. Still, the progress is slow, and some groups have reverted to the “status quo.”

Welcome. You are in good company (no pun intended.) It is easy to take a “command and control position” and mandate improvement, except it’s counterproductive. Who wants to attend the required training? So instead, use these tactics:

• (Help) define the desired behaviors leaders need to demonstrate to be ‘change-literate.”
• Identify how the expected behaviors appear in daily business life (i.e., What do the behaviors look and sound like?)
  • Intercepting a discussion’s downward spiral by interjecting a “What if we reframed the question?”
  • Building on others’ ideas, “Yes, and then we could…”
  • Redirecting the conversation by moving the team to the “circle of influence” These are all exciting comments. Still, we have no control over those decisions, so let’s focus on what we can influence.”
• Watch, observe, and call your leadership’s attention to the small efforts; they lead to great things

In the Mastery Stage, a committed effort has been made to embed change competencies throughout the organization; characteristics like adaptability and resilience are celebrated, and prospective employees are interviewed for these traits. As a result, continuous improvement is a way of life, and all levels of the organization are empowered to identify challenges and bring solutions. In addition, there are virtual and in-person forums where team members can exchange best practices and share ideas for solving problems. As a result, the organization has developed a culture of resilience and adaptability which advantages them in the marketplace.

You’ve arrived! You are the best in the class…for now. It is easy to relax and shift focus away from the behaviors that got your organization this far. Give it three months without a concerted effort to continuously improve the organization; soon you will hear:

• But we crushed it last time.
• Don’t fix what’s not broken.
• This worked last time, don’t go looking for trouble.

Pay attention; those are the whispers of our nemesis, the status quo. Continue to challenge, learn, improve, and stretch. How high is high? What if we tried this? Let’s layer onto that idea. You get the picture – daily leadership habits add up to tremendous organizational outcomes.