Change management :: Why do we keep acting surprised when top-driven ("distant") change management efforts fail?

I am not an organisational change consultant but a management practitioner directly located at the receiving end of change management initiatives initiated in response to a restructuring or organisational alignment arising from a change in strategy and/or response to environmental changes. I manage employees that are impacted by such change and lie in the impact zone and I have to work actively towards assuaging their fears and concerns (which is a sub-set of management of change!). Change management impacts employee engagement, organisational commitment, job satisfaction and also contributes to office politics, which it itself can be a series of separate blogs!

I am aware that change is the only constant and hence am mature enough to accept that it is here to stay! Every economic down-turn results in the launching of change initiatives by impacted organisations who then ensure that they do not go back to a state of ‘complacency’. Most organisations now set their baselines to a new ‘low’ to ensure that the next wave of change (it is only a matter of time!) does not impact them or they believe they are mitigating against the same by enforcing ‘advance prudence’! As more they initiate more change organisations gain the false impression that they are building capability to absorb change, however, this does not mean that all employees (particularly lower in the hierarchy) are also learning from and adapting to on-going change. Many are suffering from 'change fatigue'!.

With each cycle I sometimes get the feeling that organisations end up adopting a 'ho-hum' attitude towards change i.e. the more change initiated the more likely that the organisation will assume that that the next change effort would be ‘easier’. In simple terms, we have 'cheapened the essence of change'!

The phrase ‘managing change’ is a misnomer. I do not agree that one can ‘manage’ change. You can facilitate it and hope to control its impact. There might be an element of contradiction in this statement but this reflects the reality that the best change agents or facilitators are the employees sitting within the organisation itself! I do realise that change decisions (and not necessarily their repercussions) are owned by senior management in the organisational hierarchy and there is a gap in efficient change management at grass-root levels. I also hold the belief that change management at grass-root levels is made more difficult as major damage has been done to the traditional employer-employee psychological contract due to on-going constant change and restructuring (hence my jibe about constant change actually ‘cheapening change’)!

If change is a constant then where are employees in this mix? Where are we preparing organisational cultures where employees are at the helm of the change rather than senior executives? One fallacy is the assumption that the decision to change is sufficient enough to allow for navigation of the change (and while we are at it lets throw in a management of change function and a ‘change agent’) to ‘manage the event’! There is no event to be managed!


My experience of organisational change is that most organisations place a premium upon 'directive leadership' or ‘telling’ (a style of influencing behaviour identified in the situational leadership model) style as leaders have to enforce specific steps. This change in style by a leader is viewed as temporary or transient (in line with various adaptive/situational leadership models for leadership styles), which I consider as an incorrect and flawed assumption given what we know about on-going waves of change (particularly in the IT industry where I make a 'risky' living!).

Change management is challenging as it typically originates at the top and the wave transmutes itself to the lower echelons. It starts off as a distant unemotional demand from the organisational leadership but as it moves down ranks below it acquires 'emotional momentum'! The same emotional distance at the top is typically diluted at the bottom (of the pyramid!) where 'rubber meets road'. Stanley Milgram outlined that there is an inverse correlation between an individual’s willingness to be cruel to someone else and their proximity to their victim. His theory was straight forward and outlined that it is progressively easier to inflict pain on those where there is distance.

This 'distanciation; (Bauman) and 'dehumanising' occurs as we think of employees as resources and only in quantitative terms. I am curious about research that links ‘distanciation’ with change management failure! I would argue that the greater the distance the easier the difficult change decisions that need to be taken and the more disassociated the nature of the decision-making. Perhaps that is why most change management initiatives fail? 

So why do many managers (myself included) implement change decisions without a fight or negotiation with these 'distant' decision makers? The answer potentially lies in the performance appraisal system implemented in most organisations that ensures that a manager will act on the instruction rather than question or 'fight' as this would be the best way to achieve 'arterial blockage' to one's career.

Maybe there is a need to review change dissonance i.e. how distant the person taking the decision or initiating the change is from the 'impact zone' and whether the greater the 'distanciation' the higher the failure rate of that change initiative? Would appreciate any guidance on insight on this. What do you say?

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