Used as Part of a Change Management Programme

 

Change Management

There are many ways in which Enquire Within can contribute to a change management programme: it will help you analyse problems and opportunities, help the key decision-makers clarify and compare their frames of reference, etc. Organisation change needs the clear thinking and in-depth analysis that Enquire Within is uniquely able to facilitate.

Change Needs

There is one particular configuration of Enquire Within which enables the user to make a highly significant organisation development intervention, by first of all defining the organisation’s current culture and then working with managers to decide how it needs to change to support the wider change process. When the goalposts are changing, or need to change this application helps you confront the differences between the skills used to work towards the old goalposts and the skills needed to work towards the new ones.

An Example about Effective and Less Effective Performance

Using only the first few steps of the Enquire Within process, you interview a sample of managers in order to learn the terms in which they describe effective and less effective performance. You then perform a simple content analysis of their answers, looking for the predominant themes.

For example:

• In an oil company noted for its low-risk behaviour, 30% of the content of people’s descriptions could be classified as ‘knowing the right way to communicate with Head Office.’
• In a retail bank needing to adapt to a newly deregulated environment, sales effectiveness was described in terms of activity level, not skill.
• In a food production and marketing company wherein the current structure managers had to compete with one another for product, 60% of the descriptions of effectiveness related to conflict management and the use or withholding or information.

Legacy of History

The results of this survey are best regarded as telling you, in detail, about the legacy of the organisation’s history and its effect on how people have learned to behave in order to be seen to be effective. You can then use this as the basis for a consultancy intervention in which you help managers identify the gap between the legacy of the past and the behaviour you want to reward in the future, and help them work through the practical issues involved in changing: issues of organisational systems, of leadership, or training and development, etc.

Addressing Issues of Skills and Behaviour

This is a very powerful consultancy intervention, not least because it addresses issues of skills and behaviour at a time when managers may be relying too much on the structural aspects of change, and because at all times the consultant can show that the information has come from the organisation itself, and not from some externally-imposed framework for change.

Measuring Success Later

This configuration can be used later to measure the success of an organisation change programme, by examining how people’s understanding of effective behaviour has changed and in what direction.

---

Tutorial

A free standing tutorial showing how Repertory Grid fits within the process of developing management competencies as part of a change management programme can be downloaded here.

Eleven Resources on Change Management and Repertory Grid

• Discovering people's attitudes or beliefs. A repertory grid attitude survey designed to establish management training needs commissioned by a successful manufacturing organisation interested in moving from autocratic to more consultative/participative ways of managing.
• Management Competencies
• Determining Organizational Culture
• Free, downloadable Management Competencies Tutorial
• Analysis of Training Needs and Performance Counselling
• The Change Management Toolbook
• Change Management 101: A Primer
• Change Management: The Contribution Of Personal Construct Theory (PCT)
• Surfacing embedded assumptions: Using repertory grid methodology to facilitate organizational change
• Nelarine Cornelius, Suzanne Gagnon (1999) From Ethics 'By Proxy' to Ethics In Action: New Approaches to Understanding HRM and Ethics Business Ethics: A European Review 8 (4) , 225–235 doi:10.1111/1467-8608.00157

• Understanding the relationship between business and IT groups: a personal construct theory approach. International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, Volume 3 , Issue 4 (December 2006). Authors: Senaka Fernando, Mark Lycett, Sergio De Cesare.

  The relationship between business and Information Technology (IT) groups in organisations has consistently ranked as an important concern among business and IT managers. As a result, several researchers have investigated the means of improving the business/IT relationship. They focus on behaviours of business and IT groups and attempt to develop change management programmes as a vehicle for obtaining desired behaviours from business and IT groups in order to improve the 'relationship'. However, research shows that such attempts have a low success rate in attaining an effective 'relationship'. This paper argues that the reason for this is that most researchers tend to focus on behaviours of people without an in-depth understanding of their cognition, which influences those behaviours. Consequently, the paper proposes a cognitive approach and explores the application of Personal Construct Theory (PCT) to understand the 'relationship' and means to improve it.

Suggestions

Search for results from the Enquire Within site.

• Download a free evaluation copy of Enquire Within here
• Twitter: Follow us at @EnquireWithin
• Click here for user comment.
• Post this page to: del.icio.us.
• Email this page to a colleague.
• Want to know more? Join the learners and the experts at the RepGrid User Group.
• Want to keep in touch? Join our mailing list.
• Translate this page to your language? Try Google Toolbar.