By William Seidman
Sustaining a change to a large organization can be difficult.
At Cerebyte we’ve made great progress in getting the end-user (the sales person, service person, etc.) to buy into and want the change. The problems arise with immediate and second-level supervisors. Without their active support, changes can’t “stick.” So what’s their problem? I see two factors:
1. Managers are so focused on keeping the business running that looking ahead at the several weeks — or, more often, the several months — often required for a substantive change is not something they do. Nearly all of their resources, and most of the resources they supervise, are just about daily survival.
2. They’re usually untrained in balancing the demands of running the business each day with developing their organization for the future.
Change initiatives only rarely survive these persistent obstacles.
