“Personal Change Management” (PCM) Programs

“Personal Change Management” (PCM) programs were developed by The Leadership Alliance Inc. [TLAINC] because, in our experience, successful implementation of organizational change is always significantly dependent on non-rational “people-factors” that are present in the organizations workforce at all levels; however, these “people-factors” are ignored in virtually every change initiative.

These people-factors include personal perceptions, attitudes and feelings that exist below the surface of formal organizational contact, and they are disregarded because organizations largely operate under a cultural cloak of rationality, ignoring or deeply underestimating non-rational realities such as emotion. The result is tragic — workforce energy that could be applied productively becomes a destructive force that undercuts the anticipated change-related performance enhancement. Remember, the people that will resist the change are the very people relied on to implement the change!

Organizations that are serious about successfully implementing change must strike an adequate balance between promoting rationality/technical efficiency and exploring non-rational factors if the anticipated benefits are to be captured. They certainly cannot afford to do otherwise if the planned change is highly disruptive and/or expensive. So how might this be accomplished?

Although an organization may attempt to ensure a successful change initiative by collaboratively developing an exciting vision statement, and satisfying employees’ various basic physiological needs, really significant leverage for successful  change lies in upgrading each individual’s understanding of their own unique personal and inter-personal “people-factors”, and by surfacing them, help the individual deal with them appropriately. To address these needs, TLAINC developed the Personal Change Management (PCM) approach – performance-based programs that facilitate personal identification, understanding, clarification, and resolution of significant non-rational people-factors that may impact the success or failure of a given change initiative, independent of the type of change envisaged.

The PCM approach is based on the notion that to ensure a successful change effort, each individual in the organization must have their own evolving PCM “kitbag”; one that they personally continuously fill and refresh with knowledge about the organizational change envisaged, what it means to them, and how to bring it about at their local level or how to address barriers to implementation. Furthermore, all employees, including managers, must populate their PCM kitbags with understanding and skills related to people-factors. This is achieved using programs that assist managers and staff change local peer-peer and senior-subordinate interactions to enhance authenticity, create emotional openness, and ease the process of “letting go” of the past and making sense of the new context.

The Roger Gaunt Action Learning process is an ideal vehicle to achieve these ends when exploited as part of an intensive workshop and coaching program involving small groups. This style of action learning was pioneered by Roger to help participants deal with their change-related concerns, without delving into any deep-seated emotional issues that are better treated via 1:1 health-professional interventions. This model is favored over the more familiar “project model”, advocated by Professor Reg Revans, because it encourages individuals to define and work with their own areas of interest and emotional concerns, thus building increased capacity for ownership, insight and effective implementation of identified solutions.

Each small group is called a PCM Group (PCMG). In TLAINC’s program PCMG members undergo a process that is enriched with counseling and group-work skills that draw on psycho-dynamic, Gestalt, and client-centric theory. Group members act as collective “counselor” to each “presenter” of an issue, enabling exploration and clarification of her/his situation, plus identification of options, solutions, or “next steps”; at a follow-up meeting the presenter reports to the group her/his progress regarding subsequent “action” taken.

TLAINC supplies highly skilled facilitation for PCMGs to ensure participants develop the discipline to work openly with the group process, and to set aside their own agendas when addressing the concerns of others. The facilitator trains the PCMG in the Gaunt Action Learning techniques, models the skills, and provides a “holding environment” for the group within which challenging and thinking can happen without threat. The aim is to enable a PCMG to become self-facilitating and responsible for its own development.

To explore PCM programs and PCMGs in more detail please contact me at pasmith@tlainc.com – and NO we won’t follow up with you afterward unless agreed with you!