Organizational change results from daily activities such as onboarding new employees and designing new organizational structure as a firm grows.
CATMEDIA works with subject matter experts in the areas of organizational culture, organizational change, and organizational learning to help you manage change and evolve your organizational culture.
Initiating Change
Mergers and acquisitions often bring about organizational culture clashes, and management may see the need for formal change management to assimilate the two cultures and numerous operations processes. As firms work to remain competitive, they add products and services that require new procedures to sell, service, or maintain the product or service. Organizational change management requires significant communication – why change is needed, who is affected, how they are affected, when they will be affected, what other procedures and activities are affected, and the path forward. All employees become involved in managing change, and some may resist organizational change. Change management has been part of business operations and research in the U.S. for five decades. Studies over that time period consistently show change management program failure rates in the range of 60% to 70%.[i]Sustaining Change
Peter Senge, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading researcher of learning and change, and his colleagues presented two key lessons from a decade of research: organizational change is difficult to begin and to sustain. And, organizations might want to try thinking more like a gardener. Nurturing change through organizational learning, rather than thinking like a mechanic – trying to “fix” the organization by controlling, and managing change. This change in philosophy requires a bit of change management itself! Managers and researchers have proven that organizational culture, organizational change, and organizational learning are closely linked. We become more empathetic to other cultures and more likely to adopt a different organizational culture when we learn more about the culture, how it compares with our own organizational culture, and how we might “try on” parts of the new culture.Competitive Advantage
We bring about organizational change when we first bring attention to a need for change, learn about the ramifications of the change, and actually change our behavior. Jack Welch [ii] said, “An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” Therefore, in order to manage organizational change to ensure competitive positioning, the organization must learn how to learn, and how to turn learning into action. We can help you assess how your firm creates, acquires, transfers, and applies knowledge. Assessment tools can determine your firm’s or team’s resiliency, its adaptability, and its readiness to change.Delivering Change
We help clients deliver formal classroom training, both instructor-led (ILT) and virtual instructor-led (vILT), as well as webinars and eLearning. Our network of certified coaching professionals delivers a variety of coaching and mentoring services. CATMEDIA facilitators nurture informal learning through experiential learning activities and guiding action learning groups. CATMEDIA’s change management services help your team sharpen its continuous learning and problem solving skills. We welcome the opportunity to assist you in your organizational change management through research regarding organizational culture, project management of organizational change initiatives, and other change management projects.Tell us more about your next project
[i] Ashkenas, R. (2013). Change Management Needs to Change. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: here [ii] Retrieved from: here