Change

1. Change begins and ends with the business -- not with change.

"While I was at Ameritech," says Bob Knowling, who ran the Ameritech Institute that trained change agents, "our CEO made it clear that this wasn't change for the sake of change. We had to make the business perform. He took that stock from 36 to 92, it split, and when I walked out the door to join U S West, it was back up to 63. That's because the CEO embraced and led change."

There's a reason so many people are cynical of canned change programs and distrustful of the "change weenies" sent to administer them. It's the same reason so many change programs fail: They deserve to. They have nothing to do with what really matters in the business. And they're run by people who don't understand the business. For change to take hold in an organization, it must be linked explicitly and tightly to real performance goals, and it has to be in the hands of people who understand the business first and change second.

That's precisely the model that Maletz designed for SNI: each candidate in the change agent school must have a strong project, clearly linked to one of the company's strategic goals, and supported by a senior executive. In fact, each change agent's project must deliver a minimum return to the company of DM10 million, ten times the cost of participation in the program. Without specific projects and measurable goals, says Maletz, the change agent program would be "a heap of stir and no biscuits."

Change agents who understand how their work connects to the business aren't much different from innovative and energetic managers. "People like that have concrete objectives that they want to accomplish over a set period of time," Maletz says, "and those are the things they hold themselves accountable for. Any agenda for meeting those objectives is going to require change of some sort." The difference is that change agents do more than simply check off their list of accomplishments: they focus on how their accomplishments affect the organization's operation. "It's not just whether you meet your hiring requirements on time," Maletz says. "It's whether the people you've hired will keep driving the company."

2. Change is about people. People will surprise you.

If you read the academic literature, too often change comes across as a remarkably bloodless activity: establish a vision, find a mentor, design the program, paint by the numbers.

We interrupt this program to deliver a dose of reality: it doesn't work that way. In the real world of change, leaders desert you, your staunchest allies cut and run, opposition comes from the places you least expect, and your fiercest opponent can turn out to be your most vital supporter. In other words, when emotions are running high and the stakes are even higher, people act like people.

Here's how Knowling describes the first step of his own transformation from reluctant participant to change agent. Called to a gathering of Ameritech's 70 top executives, Knowling learned that each team member would evaluate the others -- and then the rankings would be shared. "I've never been more afraid in my life," says Knowling. "I felt it was a bad process. It didn't feel right, and I was afraid of the results."

Knowling tried to subvert the process, going to the team leaders and lobbying them to short-circuit the assessment. Before the night was over, he was sure he'd won.

"The next morning," Knowling recalls, "I got a rude awakening. One of the leaders came up to me and said, 'I'm going to ask you to do something for me. Trust this process.' I said, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'We're going to do the assessment.'"

The assessment was even more traumatic than Knowling had expected. "During the process some people lost it," says Knowling. "Some who got great marks felt guilty. People got angry about what others had said about them. I've never had an undressing like that in my life."

But Knowling also found that the assessment process was a great experience. "It built the team far greater than anything we could have done. When I realized that, I took another risk. I stood up in front of the whole group and said, 'I was wrong.'"

Later, when he headed up the Ameritech Institute, Knowling relied on the assessment process he had so vehemently opposed. "I'd explain that the importance of the ranking was to get people used to a culture where you can have differences on teams and learn from those differences." From its biggest opponent, Knowling became its most ardent fan.

Klaus Karl, a change agent in Maletz's SNI program, experienced the flip side of the human surprise factor. Wooed into the program as a way to keep him from leaving SNI, Karl read in the newspaper during his Christmas holiday that the senior executive supporting his project had left the company. A few weeks later, while in the United States as part of his training, he learned that the second executive supporting him had retired. When he returned to Germany and met his third sponsor, he got the distinct impression that the man had little interest in his project. At this point, Karl faced a dilemma: do nothing and coast through his year, or deal directly with the lack of support.