How to a influence and achieve organizational change?

May 28, 2012 9:06 PM

How do you help guide others to recognize, accept, and work towards a unified vision resulting in orgazational change?

In any business, revenue and cash flow are both critical to a company's success. Both are also the result of cooperation from multiple departments such as R&D, production, operations, sales and marketing, shipping, etc.

But often times, each department can lose sight of what is important and "work hard on the wrong things". This results in an internal struggle that cripples an organizations ability to grow.

How can someone, who is not neccessarily an executive, influence each respective department to achieve organizational change - I.e. "work hard on the right things"?

posted by meta.mark to human relations (6 answers total)

Ideally, you would begin by achieving a consensus about what those right things are. Their ideas may be very different from your own.
posted by tyllwin at 9:20 PM on May 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

You first need to convince everyone that you know what "the right things" are. Do you?
posted by twblalock at 9:49 PM on May 28, 2012

An organization which has become so bureaucratized that entire departments no longer know what the organization does or what their roles are within that mission? Without executive power to break up fiefdoms and shake people out of their comfortably pointless duties, nothing can be done.
posted by 1adam12 at 12:39 AM on May 29, 2012

Grab a second-hand copy of this and have a read. It's a very detailed case study of more-or-less what you're describing.
posted by singingfish at 2:02 AM on May 29, 2012

I completely disagree that nothing can be done, but it's important to work out the scale of change needed.

If the change is small-scale, then I suggest reading about this subject. There are a lot of books so I won't recommend, just google/amazon and see what you can find that sounds like it's aiming at what you're aiming at.

If the change is wider, then you have a bigger issue on your plate and, frankly, this is what management/change management consultants are for. Consider either bringing in or at least talking to someone with skills in this area - they do their job for a reason, which is that plenty of organisations need help with it.
posted by greenish at 3:32 AM on May 29, 2012

John Kotter's Leading Change is a good non-jargon filled book about this very question.
posted by eaglehound at 6:33 AM on May 29, 2012