Category: Management

The power-interest grid

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In the previous post I talked about stakeholders – those who have a vested interest in what you do and that can affect or be affected by any decision or change you want to make.

Stakeholders have great importance because of the power they may have to influence your decisions.  For example, your manager might have the power to stop you from doing something, or you might need their support to get something done.

So before you make a change, it’s worth thinking about your stakeholders in terms of:

  • their power to help or hinder the change, and
  • their interest in you and your change.

There is a well-known tool that can help with this called the ‘power-interest’ grid.  It looks like this:

2 x 2 grid with 'power' on vertical axis and 'interest' on horizontal axis

So take your list of stakeholders, and place each one where you think they are on the grid.  This will tell you the strategy you will need to take with them.

  • Low power, low interest – you don’t have to expend any effort for these people. They’re not too bothered, but monitor them in case things change.
  • High interest, low power – these people should be kept informed of what’s going on, but they can’t do much to influence the change.
  • Higher power, low interest – you need to keep these people informed and satisfied, because although they don’t have much interest, they may use their power in an undesirable way.
  • High interest, higher power – these are the people you need to take most care and effort with.  Manage them closely, keep them informed and fully engage with them.

Your grid will start to look like this.  You can add an extra dimension with colour coding (green=’supportive’, amber = ‘neutral’, red = ‘against’). 

example of a semi-complete power-interest grid

Remember this is just a snapshot of where your stakeholders are now.  Things can change so you need to regularly revisit this.  This tool might also tell you if there are any gaps, or whether you need to try and move stakeholders into a different quadrant.  For example, do you need someone with power to sponsor your project?  How can you move that person to the ‘high-power, high interest’ area?

Like any tool, its main use is in getting you thinking and planning.  And the results are only as good as the information you put in.  You might do this based on your own experience with your stakeholders, or you might go out and talk to your stakeholders to get a better understanding of their thinking.

So think carefully about your shareholders the next time you or your team are thinking of embarking on a change and see if it makes a difference.

Watch out for PESTs

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snail sculpture on a roof

I mentioned when talking about the brain that humans are constantly scanning the environment for changes to see whether they might indicate a threat or a reward.

However, on a day-to-day basis we often get on with our habitual routines of daily living, and we may fail to be aware of what’s going on in our wider environment.  In the previous post I explained that things are constantly changing and so there is a need for us to be aware of these ‘big picture’ changes so we can adapt as individuals, teams or organisations.

One well-known tool that can help us is PEST analysis.  PEST enables us to stop and consider in turn what’s happening in the Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural, and Technological aspects of our environment.

Doing a PEST Analysis

To do a PEST analysis, go through each of these areas in turn and brainstorm what’s happening that might be most relevant to you or your organisation.  Doing this will also help you discover where you are lacking information and may need to do some research. 

Here are some questions you might consider:

Political – eg What’s happening with government policy, regulations and laws? How stable is the political environment?  What’s the likelihood of change in the next election?

Economic – eg What’s happening in the economy?  Is it growing or declining? How stable is it?  What is the exchange rate, wage levels, borrowing rate, cost of living, level of unemployment?  How easy is it to access credit?

Socio-cultural – What are current social norms and expectations?  Consider social attitudes, levels of education, health and lifestyle choices. What about demographics? Is the population increasing or decreasing?  What proportion are young/old?

Technological – What new technologies are available?  How is use of technology changing?  (eg for remote working)

You can also go further by increasing PEST to PESTLE, which adds:

Legal – What are potential changes to legislation affecting you or your business?

Environmental – What’s happening with waste/recycling, energy consumption, renewable resources, pollution?

(NB It’s likely that you’ll find some overlap when you try to do this exercise as some items can fit into more than one area.)

So what?

Like any tool, doing this exercise won’t tell us directly what we need to do with the information we find.  That’s the next step.  Once you’ve done your PEST analysis, you should then consider how you might take advantage of any opportunities you discover, as well as overcome or avoid any potential threats.

At an individual level, you might use this to think about your next career move.  What’s on the horizon that might make one job or career more attractive than another?  At the organisational level you might consider what products or services you should develop or remove.  So this helps with strategy and planning, or can be used as input into a SWOT analysis (see an upcoming post).

Of course, this analysis just gives us a snapshot of what’s happening in the environment now. You will need to re-do this regularly to make sure you’re keeping up with all the the constant change.

Further reading:

CIPD (2020), PESTLE analysis [accessed 02/07/20] (requires log-in (free))

The success trap

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a smartphone next to an old fashioned phone

Although people are living longer, it seems companies are not doing so well.  The Boston Consultancy Group reported that the life span of corporations nearly halved over just three decades.  And research from Yale shows that the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has decreased from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years in 2012.

We’ve all seen companies disappear in our lifetimes – remember Woolworths and Blockbuster video?  Kodak?

Several authors have observed that it is often a company’s success that sets it up for failure.  Managers rely too heavily on doing the same thing that made the company successful in the first place.  The success is then used as evidence that they should continue with the same strategy.

Nadler and Shaw (1995, cited in Hayes (2014)) observed that this complacency can be the company’s downfall. As the company grows and becomes more complex, the focus switches away from the external environment and instead to internal issues. This leads to declining performance in the market. But managers think the solution is to do more of the thing which has led to success in the past. As the environment has changed, this doesn’t have the success they expect. Nadler and Shaw describe the organisation as becoming ‘learning disabled’. 

Unless the company changes, it can go into the ‘death spiral’:

diagram representing death spiral
Diagram taken from Hayes (2014) page 73

So it is incredibly important to be aware of what’s happening in the environment and to be willing to adapt and innovate for a successful future.

It’s not just companies. We can think of this happening at the individual level too.  For example, we get promoted but keep working in the same way we did before.  We don’t adapt to the role and learn the new skills required.  We double down, working harder and harder with the same strategy that made us successful before. Eventually, if we don’t learn and adapt, we fail.  In the words of Marshall Goldsmith’s book – what got you here won’t get you there.

Past success doesn’t necessarily mean future success. We all need to continuously learn, adapt and grow.

References

Hayes (2014) The Theory and Practice of Change Management, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 4th ed.

The need to belong

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three giraffes

I mentioned in the previous post that humans are social creatures – belonging to a group was necessary for our survival as a species. And our survival mechanism – the threat and reward response – is therefore also triggered by social interactions.

You may have been taught Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at some point.  It’s usually shown as a pyramid, with basic needs such as food and shelter at the bottom, and higher needs such as esteem nearer the top.  The suggestion is that the lower needs must be satisfied before you can attend to the needs further up the pyramid.

maslow's needs pyramid
©SimplyPsychology.org

In the pyramid, ‘belonging’ and social needs comes half way up, after physiological needs and safety needs.  However, neuroscience is telling us that ‘belonging’ is a fundamental human need.  When people feel excluded, the same activity in the brain is seen as when people experience physical pain.  It hurts. As David Rock (2009) notes:

 “…people who feel betrayed or unrecognized at work — for example, when they are reprimanded, given an assignment that seems unworthy, or told to take a pay cut — experience it as a neural impulse, as powerful and painful as a blow to the head.”

Organisations are social systems – we belong to teams, departments, branches, professions and whole organisations. If your manager thumped you, you’d rightly demand compensation!  Yet, the way we treat each other can also cause pain. (Or, of course, make us feel good.) We need to be more mindful of that. 

References:

Rock, D. (2009) “Managing with the Brain in Mind”, Strategy+Business, Issue 56, Autumn 2009

All change is not created equal

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board game pieces with different facial expressions

In the last post I talked about change load and change fatigue when there’s just too much change in a short period of time. Following on from this, it’s clear that change is experienced at the individual level – a small change might mean a minor adjustment for you but might be overwhelming for someone else.

Britt Andreatta in her book ‘Wired to Resist’ takes up this point.  I love her ideas as she has developed some visual tools to help you really think about the effect of changes on you and your team/organisation. You can listen to her explaining some of her ideas in this 10-minute video:

To start, she states that the effect of the change on any individual depends on four factors:

  • The time it takes for that person to get used to the change
  • The amount of disruption it causes them
  • The total number of changes they’re managing
  • How fast the changes are coming

Bringing the first two factors together gives you the ‘change matrix’.

2x2 matrix

So if the disruption the change causes is small, and the time it takes to get used to the change is small (‘time to acclimation’), then you can consider this to be ‘green’ – the effect will probably be small.

But if disruption is high and it takes a lot of time to get used to the change, the change can be classed as ‘red’.  

Individuals can then place whatever change is planned on this matrix.

mapping changes onto the change matrix

But as Andreatta outlines, there are other factors in play here. You’re going to react differently depending on whether you chose the change and if you want the change. 

And we also have to consider our earlier idea of change load.  When changes come together and start overlapping, their effect changes.  Two ‘orange’ changes may become a darker orange, and eventually a red. If you stack lots of changes on top of each other, you may meet or exceed your limits.

change matrix and max bandwidth

And we need to remember as individuals that organisational change overlaps with life changes. If your employee is going through a big life change at the moment, organisational changes are going to have a bigger effect (and vice versa).

Planning with the effects of change in mind

The book goes on to outline a new model to help managers plan changes in their organisation.  But for now, what I love about this is that it shows managers in the organisation that they have some tools and some control, indeed some responsibility, for managing changes so their staff aren’t overloaded.

In recent years, we have seen high and increasing stress levels at work and the response has often seemed to push the responsibility onto the individual employee – resilience training, yoga classes, meditation classes, and so on.  But companies can be more aware of all the changes across their organisation and track them.  Is someone noticing the fact that a massive IT rollout is happening at the same time as an office move and restructuring for one particular department?  Is an individual manager noticing that a team member is moving house at the same time as her role changes?

Organisations are made up of people. As humans we can adapt, but we also have to work within the limitations of the technology we’re built with – our brains. I’ll talk more about the brain in the next few posts.

References:

Andreatta, B. (2017), Wired to Resist: The Brain Science of Why Change Fails and a New Model for Driving Success

If you’re interested in learning more about the ideas in Britt Andreatta’s book, she is currently offering the ‘Change Quest model’ online course for free until June 30th 2020.

Managing Change

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I teach a module on ‘Managing Change’ at a local university.  I talk about the issues of dealing with change at the individual, team and organisation level. Over the past few months, the Covid19 pandemic has imposed radical changes on all of us:  we’ve had to quickly adapt to new ways of working and living, workloads have massively increased or decreased, and the uncertainty and fear are increasing stress and anxiety levels.

Knowing about change doesn’t necessarily mean I can handle it any better that others, and I’ve certainly had my ups and downs.  But the knowledge does allow me to look back and explain what’s happening, both in myself and in the organisation I’m working in, and perhaps be a bit kinder on myself when I realise that these reactions are perfectly normal and human. 

And it also gives me a good understanding of what’s helpful and what’s not when it comes to working with and managing people in organisations going through change.  I’ve observed people in leadership positions follow best practice and do things really well.  I’ve also seen people show a lack of understanding and empathy, leading to really poor behaviour, making the situation even more difficult and stressful for others.

I find myself getting frustrated.  I really wish more people knew some of this stuff and could put it into practice!  So in the spirit of getting better people managers – those who understand how humans work when going through change – I’m going to write a series of blog posts covering some of the key ideas, research, tools and models that I cover in the module and that might be useful in these times.

Stay safe.