A telling example of the importance of effective change management once presented itself to Michael Chuchmuch from an unlikely source: his 4-year-old daughter.
“I was in my office working, and my daughter came in and said, ‘Daddy, daddy, let’s go play!’” said Chuchmuch, senior consultant and advisor in change leader-ship at Chevron Corp. Occupied by his work tasks, Chuchmuch scanned his office for something to keep the child amused, and he noticed a National Geographic sitting on his desk.
“I opened it and found one page with a picture of a globe,” Chuchmuch recalled. “I ripped it into a bunch of pieces and said to my daughter, ‘We’re going to play puzzle time. Take all these pieces and some Scotch tape. You go away, and when you put this world, this globe together, come back and we’ll play after that.’”
To Chuchmuch’s amazement, his 4-year-old daughter returned 10 minutes later with the perfectly reassembled picture of the globe proudly in hand.
“What? How did you do that?” Chuchmuch asked his daughter. “Your mom helped you, right?”
“Nope, I did it all by myself,” his daughter replied. “On the other side was a picture of some people, so when I got the people right, I got the world right.”
“Out of the mouths of babes, right?” Chuchmuch said, addressing the Advanced Work Packaging Conference 2015 held recently in Houston. “And when it comes to your organization and its opportunities and challenges, when you get the people right, you’ll get the world right.”
Millennials and the big crew change
“When people talk about their worst change experience in the workplace, it’s typically because change has been cascaded upon them,” Chuchmuch continued. “And it’s not necessarily done in a manner that invites their contribution or their voice. It’s something that drastically impacts the way they do things. Consequently, people tend to say ‘I don’t like change.’”
Formally defined, change management is “an approach to shifting or transitioning individuals and teams from a current state to a desired future state,” Chuchmuch explained.
Change management aims to help stakeholders accept and embrace changes in their business environments, with the ultimate goal of maximizing an organization’s benefits while minimizing that change’s negative impacts on employees and clients.
One of the biggest change factors on industry’s horizon, Chuchmuch believes, is the “millennial phenomenon” and its impact on the “big crew change” as thou-sands of experienced workers, coaches and mentors are retiring.
“By the end of 2015, 75 percent of the world’s employees will have been born between the years 1988 and 2000,” he said. “The fact is this will bring new ideas and new values to our culture.”
When thinking about motivating people for change and the coming dominance of millennials in the workforce, it is incumbent upon business leaders to consider the concept of value.
For example, Chuchmuch noted millennials believe as a group the success of a business should be measured not only by its financial performance but also by its positive impact on society. These younger workers — as many as 88 percent, according to a recent study — rated “opportunity to have an impact on the world” as important when choosing an employer.
“Change is upon us,” Chuchmuch reiterated. “But it can be managed in an organization. We can either be bowled over by this wave of change, or we can manage through it.
“It’s not about using a bunch of tools. It’s about understanding how human behavior interfaces with a project’s requirements and deliverables.”
For more information, visit www.awpconference.com or www.chevron.com.
