Scan through these categories to trigger your thinking about potential barriers to accomplishing your change effort:
- Cultural norms
- Old habits, patterns
- Political barriers: both hierarchical and within the work area where changes need to happen
- Organization structure (formal or informal)
- Communication barriers: vertical and horizontal
- Fears this change will bring- layoffs, change in responsibilities, reporting patterns, fear of the unknown
- Stress: needing to learn to do things differently, uncertainty about the outcome, what will it look like when done
- Trust and confidence in your leadership
- Financial support (time, resources, people)
- Sufficient freedom and committed time to plan, manage and implement the change
- How to fit the change into existing work flow
- Commitment (see Readiness For Change Quiz)
- Capability gaps: personal skills, systems, processes, leadership, management style
Questions
1. What are the major obstacles you will likely face as you try to make this change work?
2. What can you do to resolve some of the critical issues before they undermine your effort?
3. What part of the organization will problems likely come from as you proceed with the roll out of the change?
4. How will unanticipated problems be resolved in real time with as little disruption of ongoing work as possible?
5. What additional internal resources do you feel you need to deal with these problems?