3 Practices for Change Management and Proactive Innovation in Your Business

Change is an inevitable force in our dynamic, environment. Don’t fight it. Knowing how to manage change as you grow your business will be a valuable skill that will put you far ahead of your competition. If you are unprepared for change, you could face disastrous business results. Human nature resists change. That’s the first obstacle you must face. Now also consider this, when building a sustainable enterprise, one of your priorities should be to consistently engage in proactive innovation. In other words, you’re causing self imposed change. This greatly increases the change your enterprise will encounter. So how can you survive with this much change surrounding you? First of all, you must adopt the perspective that you will efficiently handle the uncertainty in this dynamic environment while initiating proactive innovation. You can, if you keep a Change Management framework in mind as you move through these circumstances. However, some fundamental elements must be in place. Your Purpose/Mission must be strongly shared throughout your venture. Additionally, your Values must be the principles used to operate everything in your venture. If they are not in place, managing any kind of change will be difficult because you won't have anchors to hold your business together. When you have these fundamental elements, there are three things that should also be in place to help you manage imposed or innovation driven change.

First, you should have well established Systems for every business operation. Small businesses that succeed, develop Systems of operation for almost every function performed. Your Systems are designed to help you achieve each of your major strategic objectives. Business Systems are activities performed in a consistent manner to achieve the organization’s goals. They are performed in several steps and the successful manager documents these steps for easy replication. To most, this will be boring and tedious but once the documents are completed, this will give you time to do what you enjoy doing and enable you to sustain and enlarge the enterprise. This is one of the great secrets of successful business that many small business owners avoid. Creating Systems simply starts with documenting what you do and how you do it. Examples could be a System for your product or service delivery, a marketing System, a financial System or a training System. The documents could be called an operations manual or a Systems manual or some unique name that might come to you; but the object is to document the successful operations that you want to make routine in your business. This will be another important part of your foundation for proactive innovation and change management. You can create simple lists to give you a reference for efficient and effective actions.

Second, you should understand three types of change that can impact your enterprise. According to the Business and Industry Portal of the Queensland Government, Australia, there are three major types of change that may influence your business: developmental change, transitional change and transformational change. Each of these changes can be brought on by proactive innovation, environmental or technical advances.

Developmental Change 

When you designed your Systems they were the most effective operations that you knew of at the time. However, as you move forward, there may be improvements you should make to a System to improve its effectiveness. This is easy when all you have to do is analyze the elements of your existing process and change only certain parts of it. These are mostly, small steps that can be implemented without a lot of effort and your workers and affiliates can see exactly how the change will adjust what they are currently doing. For example, a change in your Marketing System would be a developmental change.

Transitional Change

At some point, you may discover that a System needs to be added or completely replaced. This may result from technology advances, industry changes or your own proactive innovation. This change will probably be very uncomfortable for your workers or affiliates because it will disrupt strongly ingrained and habitual practices. It’s critical that you help everybody understand how this change fits into your business core (purpose,values,vision and systems) and what the potential benefits to the business and employees will be. If innovation is one of your core values, the change will be assimilated with few problems.

Transformational Change

This by far is the hardest type of change to manage. In this situation, you may be required to implement complicated technological changes, change the nature of your service or product, or make severe changes in several Systems because of market competition, a new opportunity or other forces. The Mission and Values will remain static, but a drastic change may involve the changing of your Vision, Management Strategy, Talent requirements or Systems. However, this is also manageable if your Mission/Purpose and Values are solid.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein

Third, understand the importance of the business communications required. Good communications throughout your business is like the water that's essential for life. Every one must know and understand everything that effects your purpose and objectives. Of course, employees should know about anything that effects the particular System they operate in as well as anything else that relates to their role toward the maintenance of your business core. Cultural and generational differences affect our communication styles in today's envronment. The best thing to do, is to get to know your workers and affiliates very well and work to share common Values. This begins with the hiring process and continues in the on boarding, training and coaching processes. In addition to getting acquainted with your people it’s also helpful to regularly check for understanding and clarify your communications in as many ways as possible. Written follow up documents, follow up emails, or one on one discussions are useful. You’ll realize the effort you put into excellent communications practices will pay off in increased efficiency, effectiveness, business core alignment and growth.

Fundamentally…

Proactive innovation and change management will be elements of your operation if you want your enterprise to last through many years. A good business foundation is critical. You’ll need well established business fundamentals such as a strong purpose, values, and systems. This will give you a stable reference for decision making. Understanding the type of change you are implementing or is imposed upon you, helps you determine what parts of your business core will be affected. This gives you information you need for managing it. Sharing your direction with everyone involved in the change using various forms of communication channels and devices will help you become a successful change manager and keep your venture relevant for many years. You can enjoy continuos Proactive Innovation in our dynamic environment.

Read more in: "20 Directives for Small Business Success: Do or Die"