JBK Consultants – Managing Corporate Change©

Managing Corporate Change©

Thousands of individuals have now participated in Managing Corporate Change©. Throughout the United States and internationally this course has provided people at all levels in corporations the skills necessary to cope with the swirl of changes going on in organizations and the world today. Organizations are well aware of the changes necessary to survive in today’s business climate. From rapid growth, to downsizing, to mergers, to changes in work systems, to enterprise wide software implementations, the old contract for how work is done is being changed. The question is will people successfully adjust to these changes or be overwhelmed by them. In the 24 years that we have been offering Managing Corporate Change©, the course has helped individuals and organizations adjust to change in a variety of settings all with impressive results. Procter & Gamble has used Managing Corporate Change in nine different locations training every level in the organization. In every site offered production records were broken while projects came in ahead of schedule.

When Hewlett Packard was faced with a large reorganization, people were resisting all the changes and production goals were not being met. After the employees and managers attended Managing Corporate Change© the individuals became so productive the overall project came in ahead of schedule when that was considered a total impossibility. Quoting from a letter by Peggy Schlosser, the project manager, “The feedback from our employees who attended the Managing Corporate Change© workshop was the best I have seen in over 20 years of HP management experience in an organization that does a great deal of training.” Comments ranged from “the most singularly useful thing I have ever experienced” to “I have no idea the cost of the program but it’s worth every penny.”

Here’s why Managing Corporate Change© works:

1. The first thing that happens to people when they are faced with change is they have an emotional reaction. Most programs on change totally ignore this fact, in spite of participants telling us year after year that this is the hardest part of dealing with change. This is the first thing we address in our course. If people don’t get over their fear, anger, betrayal, anxiety or resentment THEY DON’T HANDLE THE CHANGE WELL no matter how logical and beneficial the change may be. Understanding this emotional component of changes helps managers cope and intervene effectively.

2. Why is change so difficult? Why do people seem to overreact and otherwise reasonable people become completely irrational? In the second part of the course we take a deep look into the psychology of change and why people react the way that they do. Without an understanding of what is going on managers misinterpret the behaviors and actions of employees in very negative ways. Those misinterpretations cause more bad decisions and actually slow the change process down even more. Managers at this point will “re-explain” the need for change making employees feel as though they are being treated as if they are stupid. Further damaging trust and relationships.

3. In the third part of the course we teach participants a disciplined creative thinking process so they can actually turn the change into something useful for themselves. No manager can show every employee how to make the change work for them. In this process individuals can see how they can take responsibility for themselves in the change process.

4. Lastly we teach requesting skills to get them beyond the normal “up by your bootstraps, do it on your own” approach to causing action. The vast majority of people when faced with a change become more self-reliant. It is unconscious and automatic isolating them from the support that is available.

JBK Consultants is a distributorship of Susan Van Vleet Consultants, Inc.