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Regardless of your position in the organization, you will require the support of others to act. Recall from the opening of Chapter III that seventy percent of major change programs fail.
They fail because groups within the organization resist the change. These failures occur even when senior management wants the change to happen. Even the CEO requires support from groups within their organization if they want their actions to take hold.
How do we create that support?
Through bookstores, business schools, and consultants, there are many educational resources discussing issues of leadership and change management. Rather than reiterate those resources, this textbook focuses on the organizational wisdom framework–that is, values, rationality, and power. It views the process of finding allies to support your actions as exercising the power tactic of producing power relations. This section considers the roles that values and rationality play in creating these power relations.
Using Values to Create Allies: Producing Power Relations
As described earlier, people establish organizations to pursue a set of values. For example, Canadian society created healthcare organizations to pursue the terminal value of public interest using instrumental values of altruism, innovation, robustness, sustainability, and dialogue. You will generally find your organization will enable actions consistent with its values and constrain actions that violate them.
Let’s assume you have identified an action your organization needs to take. Perhaps it needs to revise its hiring practices or reduce its carbon footprint, or any other action you may deem necessary.
When planning how you will create this action, one of the first things to reflect on is whether you need the support of any stakeholders within the organization. If your activities are limited in scope, you may be able to implement it by yourself. A teacher in a classroom, for example, may be able to change their teaching strategies without needing support from any other area in the organization.
Often, though, you may need support from other departments to implement a change. For example, you may need funding to buy equipment, or personnel to perform required work, and so on. If that same teacher wanted to reduce the average class size in their school from thirty-five to thirty students, this would require the agreement of many departments to implement.
The remainder of this chapter assumes the need to gain support from other areas in your organization (or beyond).
When attempting to drive action in your organization that requires the support of others, the first thing you must do is identify the organization’s terminal and instrumental values. There are several ways you can achieve this understanding.
- Review the organization’s mission and vision statement along with strategy documents that senior managers have created. Sometimes these documents will explicitly state the organization’s values. Other times,