Coaching has reached a crucial point in its evolution. It has sufficiently penetrated the corporate landscape and collective corporate mind for us to witness its demise. The reason? It has widely become considered ‘good.” Things considered “good” become panaceas, panaceas become fads, and fads have a predictable life cycle. Coaching, despite its revolutionary potential, is not the answer to all problems but for reason of it being misunderstood and badly implemented, it is vulnerable to dying out and its impact lost too.

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Organizational changes are planned with optimism and enthusiasm and an eye to benefits that will accrue. Organizational change, however, never happens in a vacuum. It always involves people, and when people are involved, the number of forces at work multiplies geometrically. Merging Glaxo Wellcome with Smith Kline Beecham may have looked good on paper, but making such a merger work required work.

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If you try to pull off a change in company culture, resistance is what you will get.  That said, there are times when selectively violating cultural norms is crucial if improvements are going to occur.  But when the change threatens employees’ ideas of what the company represents, the resistance can be both acute and subversive. 

If you contemplate a change initiative, you’d better have your eyes wide open and you’d better prepare well.

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No one style of leadership is right for all situations, all people, at all times. People are different, and this includes managers and leaders. Good leaders learn to work with their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses while focusing on overall objectives. 

But if the goal is to bring about the highest possible achievement from personnel, what objectives are most important?  Despite differences in people, there is a way to manage that maximizes achievement across the board. It involves what may at first seem to be a contradictory combination of features.

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Accelerating Innovation:  The Human Element in Managing Change

Businesses must adapt in order to merely survive.  To thrive they must do more.  Beyond the widgets, they must invest in the development of their rank and file employees.  Businesses, however, still too often invest resources in technology, systems and hardware related to change efforts, without investing similarly in managing the associated human factors—factors known to increase productivity and maximize individual and organizational achievement. 

This is always a mistake and is always costly. And it can be avoided. 

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