Managing Change and HRM

Abstract

At the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Analyse the key barriers to change

• Describe the four tasks of managing change

• Examine and analyse the relationship between managing change and HRM practices

• Identify the key competencies needed by an HR practitioner in managing change

Key Questions and Learning Activities

• Question. 1 What are the key challenges in selling the change agenda in a change management initiative?

• Question. 2 Change management is living in the shadow of OD.

• Discuss the above statement and outline any differences that you believe exist between OD and change management as we know of today.

• Question. 3 Building on your knowledge of HR professional competency frameworks wherein change management is identified as a key HR competency, what are the most important task(s) an HR practitioner must deliver a successful change management initiative.

• Learning Activity: Managing Growth

Let’s Grow Tomorrow

• Radhika Subramanian* and Vijayakumar Parameswaran Unnithan**.

* Founder of Glow Worm Consulting, a Learning, Leadership and Organization Development Consulting firm.

** Professor and the Chairperson of the Centre for Social and Organisational Leadership (CSOL) at Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai, India

Key words: Intercultural Development, Millennials, Unconscious Biases, Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, High Context versus Low Context Cultures

• Company Overview

John Bear and Sons (JBS) is an investment banking major, headquartered in New York, USA. An investment bank with a 30-year legacy, JBS now has offices in 14 countries around the world with four businesses – Investment Banking, Global Markets Trading, Wealth Management and Global Research. The company has been doing exceeding well in the last 7 years and has been steadily climbing the league tables to now have the number three ranking across Europe and the Americas. It has a revenue of over USD 3 billion and amongst the highest fees collections in the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) space.

While this growth is a consistent upward trend for JBS, their number one ranked competitor has net revenue of over USD 30 billion, clearly 10 times the number that JBS makes. For JBS, this is a huge gap in its plans to become a worthy competitor in the market and be able to win business over the bigger giants. All of JBS competitors have massive presence in the emerging markets of India, China and Africa, where JBS has none.

• The India Story

The JBS leadership decides to start with India. Key reasons include: the presence of other investment banks, availability of English-speaking world-class talent, and a growing market for M&A and wealth management. Two senior bankers, Allan Blanc from Oil & Gas, a suave New Yorker and Timothy Williams from M&A, a short, stout African-American business wizard; are shipped off to Mumbai for interviews and picking the best talent in the local market for JBS.

Setting up in Mumbai was easy, other than everyone arriving late for the interview, “thanks to the traffic situation in the city”, as they all repeated. Candidates practically spoke English as their first language, came from premier management education institutions with a major in Finance, had an investment banking background from their internships and were perfect hires for JBS. Though they had not heard much about JBS beyond what they found on a Google search, it was a potentially well paying opportunity. These millennial bankers, who had started out with local boutique firms, were thrilled about the opportunity of moving into a multinational firm.

Within 6 months, JBS had a ready team of 17 people in Mumbai vis-à-vis a requirement of 14. Nine of them were bankers. Of these, one was a senior banker, to whom the others reported on a day-to-day basis. Beyond the banking teams, rest were support staff required to keep the machinery running smooth.

• It’s Complicated

The new team in Mumbai reported to Timothy Williams. Tim relocated to Mumbai and was now based out of the JBS Mumbai office. In his first month, he ensured that everyone had targets set for the year. He set up a weekly review with each individual banker so he could monitor progress against these targets.

The India experience was new to him and he wasn’t enjoying it too much. People didn’t seem very friendly outside work and at work, the unprofessional behavior he noticed during the interviews continued with more frequent tea, coffee and smoke breaks, personal conversations at work, coming late and sometimes staying late. It was his worst nightmare. He needed to become more and more prescriptive with the team every day. Until he gave specific instructions on what needed to get done, things never got done the way he wanted them to.

Timothy and the Mumbai team found working together difficult. The team disliked working with Tim and were irritated by “his high-handedness”. They started complaining about the situation in their coffee breaks.

He gets all these fancy expat benefits. It’s easy for him to say, “Be on time, it’s basic professionalism”

Exactly. Like Harlem is the world’s largest slum. And India is a hardship posting? Seriously?!

My point. He lives in a posh company funded accommodation, two lanes down the office and yet, gets a chauffeur driven car. We may be earning 15 lakhs but we live with roommates, 2 hours away from work and use public transport or drive to work ourselves.

I don’t think he even wants to understand, high-handed as he is. I don’t care anymore about what he says. At least the days Allan is here, work is fun

Tim felt his advice was being treated lightly on a regular basis. In meetings with him, the team always joined late and almost always seemed to have a disinterested body language. The team, on the other hand, felt a lot more comfortable with Allan, who not only stayed in touch with them but also had occasion to visit Mumbai a few times over the next two quarters. Tim was upset about Allan stepping into his space and taking over his team. Allan, on the other hand, found that the team was enthusiastic and bright, often coming up with great ideas on what new and better could be done to improve business in the region.

• Early Warning Signs

In a catch-up meeting with his reporting manager, Managing Director William Ross, Tim made his displeasure about Allan known to William. He established that William needed to step in to get things in order. William was taken aback at Tim’s sharp reaction. After all, both Allan and Tim were senior bankers, had worked together several years and had the maturity to work these things out like adults. Though he gave Tim a patient hearing, he went away feeling that this was not something he needed to meddle with. From his discussions with Allan, William also knew that the Mumbai team was rather affronted by Tim’s direct manner and perceived him to be rather aggressive in his approach with them. Allan was doing very well and his association with the Mumbai team was helping them do exceedingly well in the business.

Problems Begin

• One year into the expansion for JBS:

  • Tim had resigned and become the M&A head at a competitor

  • 4 of 9 bankers in the Mumbai office had resigned and the JBS India business was grossly understaffed

  • Allan was pulled in to replace Tim, finding himself stretched thin across his various roles

Discuss in Your Group

• 1. Are these teething troubles of JBS’s expansion plans?

  • a. If yes, should these have been anticipated or planned for?

  • b. If not, discuss what went wrong at JBS?

• 2. What do you think are some of the underlying dynamics at play in this situation?

• 3. What could have been done by whom to prevent key challenges or facilitate key outcomes?

Glossary

Change agent

can be an internal (usually the HR or OD practitioner) or an external (typically an OD consultant) role that focuses on the effective design and implementation of change management initiatives in an organsiation. The agent –internal or external–must successfully carry out the four or similar tasks of change for successful change outcomes.

Organisational change

refers to changes that an organisation wishes to engage in, in response to pressures from its internal and external strategic environments. The nature of such changes can be technical (product or process-related), managerial (process, structural or values) or behavioural (e.g. cultural) and the scale of such changes can be transformational (wide-reaching, fundamental and significant affecting all or most parts of an organsiation) or transactional and incremental (small steps affecting some parts of the organisation) change.

Organisational development

is a long-term strategic planned and systematic behavioural science approach to managing change in an organisation’s individual-, group- and systems-levels for improved performance and overall sustained levels of effectiveness of a business.