Page 211 - Managing Change in Organizations

CarnCh12v3.qxd 3/30/07 4:29 PM Page 194

Chapter 12 ■ Diagnosing change
and development of resources (maintaining the internal system or building invis-
ible assets) is the main impulse to effectiveness. Identifying the right strategy is
not enough if we lack the people and the commitment for its implementation.
As Will Rogers once said: ‘You can be on the right track but you’ll get run over if
you just sit there.’
Many organizations are pretty good at the top left-hand quadrant. Information
systems have been developed to provide managers with quantitative information
on various aspects of performance, both objectives and resources. That said, I often
make this point to audiences of managers and then ask: ‘How well is your organi-
zation doing?’ ‘Not well enough’ is one way of summarizing their response! Few
organizations systematically monitor factors in the other quadrants. However,
organizations are increasingly moving in this direction. Some monitor the extent
and scope of training and development. For example, at least one European bank
monitors staff development regularly because it recognizes the challenges that the
bank, and therefore its staff, must meet on the IT front. Training and development
form a central feature of this bank’s strategy in this area.
An international computer company assesses attitudes and satisfaction of staff
to various aspects of the company, the policies, the work setting and so on every
two years (bottom left-hand quadrant) and instructs all employees to appraise the
performance of their own manager every year. This latter, combined with per-
formance appraisal carried out by managers with superiors, provides a regular
input to the bottom right-hand quadrant.

Techniques for assessment

The problems we face are changing and complex. If you cannot measure them you
cannot manage them. This is why we need to develop a balanced set of measures.
We turn now to techniques for monitoring effectiveness. These comprise a
checklist for completing a functional analysis of the organization and a diagnostic
questionnaire. The data to be collected are often expressed quantitatively. However,
these techniques are really focusing on factors within the qualitative end of the

matrix; not all the data obtained are quantitative – at least some qualitative com-
ment is generally either asked for or received when techniques like these are used;
moreover, the limitations of these kinds of data mean that interpretation is always
and ultimately a matter of judgement and experience.
In the next section we present an exercise for assessing organizational effective-
ness with typical data drawn from International Engineering, a large engineering
design and project management company discussed previously (see pages 142–4).
These data were collected by myself as part of a consultancy assignment.

Assessing organizational effectiveness: exercise
This exercise presents an internal analysis of the organization in order to iden-
tify its strengths and weaknesses. In presenting the techniques, I have included
data from International Engineering which we will analyse later in this chapter.
I include the average score on each question derived from 92 managers who

194