The Change Guide

Diagnose Ihres Veränderungsvorhabens

At the beginning of your change project, you should always have a thorough diagnosis:

• Beginnen Sie am besten mit der Analyse des Veränderungsbedarfs, sowohl quantitativ als auch qualitativ.
• Große Bedeutung hat weiter, welche Vorerfahrungen Ihr Unternehmen mit Veränderung hat, denn dies hat erheblichen Einfluss auf dessen Veränderungsbereitschaft und Veränderungsfähigkeit.

Typologie der Veränderungsprozesse

It is crucial to determine what kind of change you are facing. The typology of change projects helps you to correctly classify your change project and its peculiarities and to precisely align your change strategy.

So entwickeln Sie eine Veränderungsstrategie

Your change strategy builds on the above diagnosis. Here you concretize your change goals and develop a rough draft of the change process.

This involves determining which content solutions should be developed on the one hand, and on the other – crucially – how to ensure that the solutions found are accepted and implemented by the affected employees. It’s also important to clarify which individuals or groups take on which roles and tasks in the change project, and what the time and results planning looks like.

Die Rolle der Geschäftsleitung im Veränderungsprozess

As a rule, it is not advisable for management to take on the operational leadership of change projects themselves. Their most important task lies in overall control. It is crucial that they understand change as a social process that inevitably brings resistance and conflicts. Therefore, it is not enough for management to receive reports in the steering committee and occasionally send signals of favor or impatience.

Rather, they must provide orientation to those involved and uninvolved, encourage project teams in difficulties, and support them in enduring conflicts and overcoming resistance. This requires both sensitivity and persistence – as well as the willingness to enforce decisions against resistance if necessary.

Arbeitsrecht und Mitbestimmung für Change Manager

Change managers don’t need to be experts in labor law. They probably shouldn’t even be, as this would narrow their thinking too much on legal aspects. However, anyone responsible for corporate change processes must have basic knowledge of labor law – at least if they are working in Germany or countries with comparable legal systems. Otherwise, they run the risk of overlooking co-determination rights of the works council and/or triggering one legal booby trap after another with the best intentions.

Das Management der Veränderung oder: Projektmanagement für Fortgeschrittene

To lead a change project to success, it’s not enough to do a technically sound project management with work packages, task distribution, and schedule. The more employees are affected by the changes, the more important it becomes to realize that this job goes far beyond solving factual problems . This starts with the early recognition of the change aspects of the project (“thinking in change”), requires familiarity with the emotional dynamics of change management projects (“climate curve”) and makes it necessary to approach communication with those affected as an essential part of the task.

Erfolgsfaktor Kommunikation

Whether change projects are successful depends
crucially on whether the developed solutions are accepted and implemented
by the affected areas and departments. Therefore, it is the core of failure when
projects focus exclusively on developing
factual solutions and think that communication
would only be in order when results can be presented.

Here you will learn what matters for successful
communication and how to organize the involvement of the affected
individuals and areas.

Methoden der Veränderung

In this “communication toolkit” you will find everything about how to use the most diverse change instruments – from large events to information markets to email newsletters – in a targeted and effective way. Including a short guide for practical implementation.

Umgang mit Widerständen, Konflikten, Krisen

Resistance and conflicts are the normal and inevitable side effects of change processes. This is because confrontation with changes often triggers fears and a feeling of loss of control – the almost reflexive reaction to this is reactance, that is, the need to restore the threatened or lost freedom of action.

If the drivers of change do not give in to this resistance, conflict arises – which in itself is not a bad thing, but merely the meeting of incompatible intentions and expectations. If this conflict is not resolved, it can escalate into a power struggle, or even into a crisis, that is, a situation where those involved no longer know what to do because they don’t have a suitable strategy for action available.

Die häufigsten Krisen und ihre Ursachen

One can learn from crises. It is particularly useful to learn from other people’s crises, instead of trying out every mistake yourself. Here you will learn about some typical crises in change projects and find out how you can overcome them – preferably preventively, if necessary also by firefighting.

Change Controlling

The more complex a change process is, the greater the risk of losing overview. Suddenly hundreds of activities are running at countless construction sites, everyone wants something from you, and in parallel the first questions arise about where the results are and whether all this effort is really necessary. To keep control here, you should set up a set of instruments, especially for larger projects, that gives you an overview of where the individual sub-projects stand and at what point which intermediate goals (“milestones”) should be reached.

Psychologie der Veränderung

“There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” This beautiful sentence by Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947), the founder of modern social psychology, is the program of this chapter of the Change Guide. Those who always get terribly tired at the word “theory” should consider that they are doing nothing else than applying a self-knitted theory. Because with this “vegetative slump” they are ultimately reacting to their own theory that theory is strenuous, bloodless and ultimately useless. In this section, we want to prove the opposite – give us a chance!

Fallstudien und Projektbeispiele zum Change Management

How does change management actually work in practice? What do we do concretely when we are deployed on a project?

This depends, of course, strongly on the task at hand: It looks different for a long-term consulting project than for a single event, different for a turnaround than for a software implementation or a merger, and different for personal change consulting of project managers than for change coaching of an entire project.

Here we describe some exemplary projects; from these, you can see how we approach specific tasks, what our background considerations and strategies are, and what changes our approach has led to or contributed to.