Changing organizational culture is tough work. You need to transform how people work and they (don’t) work together. A particularly difficult task in a country where work conditions are ‘extremely difficult’.
One key problem is the differing views of change held by senior management and the rest of the organization. Senior managers view it as an opportunity to strengthen the business, to align strategy and operations and to advance their careers, while other employees often see change as disruptive and intrusive. It upsets the balance.
Management consistently misjudge the effect of this gap on their relationships with subordinates and on the effort required to win acceptance of change. To close the gap, managers at all levels must learn to see things differently. They must put themselves in their employees’ shoes to understand how change looks from that perspective.
The extent to which personal resistance to change is written or oral varies with the organization’s culture and, in many cases, the company’s home country. In Africa, the formal dimension of personal resistance is likely to be implicit. How to address the issue of change management? Build a storyline around motto easily memorized. Choose your champion, the one you want to rely on, and the one who needs to stand up and act as the model and then reinforce, using an iterative way to build mechanisms incentives in line with new behaviour. Finally the capabilities sometimes need to be built to fulfil management requirement.
A change program must overcome tradition, fear, uncertainty, doubt, inertia and both active and passive resistance. Especially in an African mining company. Especially in this state-owned, capital-intensive industry where time perception seems to be dilated. Solution need to be inoculate by detailed action plans, building around the same language and work culture of the client.
When conditions are extreme, you learn how to do your job under constraints. When mid-management is lacking consistency, you learn to manage by teaching.
