5 Reasons Why Change Efforts Fail
The Harvard Business Review puts the success rate of organizational change at a mere 20%. There are many reasons for this huge failure rate and you can get a massive amount of hits on this subject on Google alone. I would like to put my thoughts on this failure in the academic setting as this is where I have been working for the past 25 years. Having worked with or under 4 vice-chancellors, 6 deans and 5 directors of hospitals, I guess I have had a good share of witnessing change efforts and how do they measure up in terms of success and failure. Never mind what the Harvard professors have said but I always believe nothing beats the local context and our own experience when it comes to organizational issues. These are my top 5 reasons why change efforts fail.
1.   The leader lacks credibility
This is so very important in the academic setting. That is the reason why top universities in the world headhunt for the best leaders and researchers, and retain them for as long as they deliver the goods. I am referring to leaders at all levels here including deans, directors and heads of departments. Credibility comes in many ways: experience, track record, networking, visioning, thinking speed, organizational skills, people skills and ability to execute. When it comes to a research leader, people will use a more specific yardstick i.e. whether the leader has truly performed in research. For example, there will no credibility if an academic professor is promoted to a senior professor level (Jusa B or Jusa A scale in the Malaysian setting) with just a track record of 20 indexed publications. We will be mocked by other universities if we do this. There is little excitement too if our leaders talks about research excellence when he/she is not even an accomplished researcher. My take on this is if one is not a credible leader, the best way is to surround oneself with deputies and advisors who have the strongest credentials in the organization and not by yes-men. Credibility counts.
2.   A group of people with some influence do not like the leader
Liking someone is a very personal thing. It is almost impossible for a leader in this century to be liked and loved by 100% of the people. There will always be a group of people who does not like the leader in the organization. Sometimes these people believe that others should have been elected the leader. Sometimes it is due to personal issues or back to the first point above i.e. the leader has no credibility. From my experience, this group of people will matter most if they have influence especially if they have more influence than the leader itself. In an academic setting, leaders are elected for a period of 3 years and then if renewed for another 2 years. If people don’t like you and they have influence over others in the organization, they can derail the change efforts or they will just slow things down until the term of the leader ends. This leader-comes-and-leader-goes attitude is real for some people in any organization. And because they have some influence over others, they matter. Go and seek a dialogue with them and ask them how they can help participate in the change efforts. If they don’t have the influence, they do not matter and the leader can just ignore them.
3.   Failure to be specific and to clearly show the way
Politicians like big words, catchy phrases and emotion-stirring slogans. It may work for them but in the academic world, I believe it works only in the first week of a leader taking the helm. After the first week of honeymoon, the people want to see specifics and a clear direction of where a leader wants to bring the organization to. This cannot be hidden behind big slogans or announcements but a well-phrased statement which states clearly and specifically what the leader wants to do and how to achieve the objectives. Showing the way is the most difficult challenge of them all. That is why a potential leader needs to be trained and exposed to all the leadership and management skills before being thrown to swim in the organizational pond. Take the new CEO of Malaysian Airlines. He was brought in in 2015 to change the fortune of MAS. He has set a target of being profitable in 2018 and he listed the measures which MAS will execute to reach this objective even if it means retrenching so many workers. Just last month MAS announced that for first time is so many years, they have started to bring in the profits. Last year our hospital put an announcement on the digital board that reads it takes more than 4 hours for a patient to be seen at the emergency room. A new CEO or director will want to aim to reduce this to a mere 30 minutes (for those in the health industry, this is the standard for Lean Six Sigma for hospital standards) but he/she must show the way to do this. Without proper training in hospital management and also operations, the leader will not be able to do this unless he/she assemble the right people. People wants to see a clear direction and specific messages which can trickle down to the middle managers and then to the masses. If the masses of people do not understand what the top management wants, change efforts will certainly fail.
4.   Failure to give the right signal and create the sense of urgency
The famous Kotter’s 8-step strategy change principle contains a few key steps. The first one is to create the sense of urgency. If there is no sense of urgency in the organization, they will be no buy-in and change efforts will fail. If our university is languishing at the lowest among the 5 research universities, then we must create that sense of urgency and convince our academic staff how catastrophic it will be if we fail to retain our research university status. If there are 400 academics that are not doing research and publishing for the past 3 years then we must create that sense of urgency among them even it means saying that some of their allowances may have to be taken away if they don’t start doing research. Once the sense of urgency sets in, work with them and show them the way. The signal from the top must be clear. The current components of the audit for the research university MyRA2 instrument are quality and quantity of research and researchers. This is measured by grants and publications hence, this must be the signal given to all levels including promotion based on these main criteria. Rating online casinos: Play and win! Promoting someone who has failed to significantly contribute to this section of the MyRA will give the wrong signal to the masses. Don’t underestimate this kind of move as it will be detrimental. Create a sense of urgency and give the right signal.
5.   Failure to provide the resources
This is almost like a no-brainer. Change efforts need resources. New action plans will need new expertise, new funds and new processes. It is not necessarily expensive. Take the management of the waiting time at the emergency department. What it takes is a group of
people who are familiar with hospital operations and management to sit down with the team in the emergency department and analyse the data and the work processes. This perhaps will take only man hours and perhaps some good refreshments. If the aim is to undertake research grand challenges, then we should identify these challenges and provide resources to the team leader in terms of research funding. Telling the research leader to go out and bring in the money will not excite anyone at all. Remember the need and ability to show the way. We know the economy is rather down at the moment but to tell people to do more with less is not helping at all. Let’s tell ourselves we will work together to row the boat through the rough waters to reach our destination.
Those are my views on why change efforts fail. I have had my share of failures as well and I believe failures make the best teachers. There is no intent to undermine any leader whether in ¼¯ÃÀÂ鶹 or outside, whether current or in the past. I truly believe in giving, receiving and acting upon honest feedback. This is indeed one of the very reasons I joined the academia as I felt this is the least hierarchical of the ecosystems of them all and where we can be enriched by the many diverse opinions of our outstanding academics.
Professor Datuk Dr. A Rahman A. Jamal
ANS, DPNS, PJN, MD, MRCP, PhD, GDHM