Making Change Work. What Managers, Executives and Staff Tell us that Really Matters

The difficulties, even frequent failures, of many strategy implementation and change programmes have been widely acknowledged, and still often not well understood, notwithstanding numerous popular change management models and frameworks. Little empirical research has been published on what is actually going on during these processes at different levels of the organisation. Based on a unique and large number of actual strategy implementation and change programme discussions carried out in a variety of companies over several years, the current study reports on what managers and executives actually are concerned about and what they converge on with regard to key issues in the course of these change programmes and projects. They seem to question some commonly accepted ‘wisdoms’ or assumptions about change management and shed a more in-depth and much richer light on various aspects of successful change management than often accepted. Managers actually seem to be positive about change, wanting to get involved, much less interested in ‘what’s in it for me?’ than often thought, but they are critical of an over-emphasis on high-level leadership and communication. They rather like to see more values and action from their managers and organizational and process support throughout the process and – last but not least – they would like the time, tools and resources to be able to make it happen.While preliminary in nature, the results point to several interesting avenues for further research in this academically rather underdeveloped theme and approach.