Podcast Ep 216: Shane Twomey from Phoenix HR & OD Consulting reveals why some organsiation transformations succeed and others are doomed to failure.
The business of change isn’t easy. Most people don’t like change and at the same time, often deep down they know it’s the right medicine. This is as true in our working lives as it is in our personal lives. And it is particularly true for organisations large and small.
On an individual, career level, there have been countless books on the subject from ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ to ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’.
“You can come up with a great new strategy, a great new product line, you can have a great new system; but ultimately you’re going to have to have people to operate it”
But when it comes to organisations and people, well the old saying “people are hell” can often ring true. But that needn’t be the case.
This is the battle space in which Shane Twomey from Phoenix HR & OD Consulting thrives: Leading organisations through the difficult process of change.
Change for the better, not the worse
Led by John O’Hehir and Shane Twomey, Phoenix HR & OD Consulting is a small group of trusted and experienced consultants all with backgrounds in HR, organisation transformation, general and change management. They work with senior leaders to help them successfully deliver on their strategy by aligning their organisation and their people.
Twomey’s experience shows that where the people and organisation elements are misaligned, it creates tensions that frequently leads a to situation where strategic goals and objectives may be under-achieved or not achieved at all.
This involves working with CEOs and senior management to align the to a North Star and then focus on the actions that the team needs to achieve and the changed ways of working that will bring them safely on their journey to organisational Nirvana.
Phoenix works across a wide range of private and public sector organisations covering the financial services, telco, pharma, manufacturing and services sector.
One example of a change/transformation was that of a business in the pharmaceuticals space that despite decades in operation had a single product line. Having gone through a cycle of imposed cost restructuring during economic downturn, the CEO recognised the need to transform the business to break out of this cycle. However, previous top down processes had left employees “on the floor”, “feeling overwhelmed” and suffering “survivor syndrome.”
Working with the senior leadership team (SLT), Phoenix identified the need for a two-pronged approach. External technical and strategy consultants were brought in to compliment internal expertise. This led to innovation now being at the centre of management thinking resulting in more proactive engagements with parent company on the future of business including additional product lines.
At the organisation level, Phoenix worked to reenergise the workforce. A series of workshops were held with the wider management team (WMT), identifying the challenges facing the business, what was working and what needed to be changed/improved. The WMT identified areas for improvement and what their role was in bringing about these improvements.
Following this, they worked with the SLT to create a shared vision. This was then folded into the WMT reengagement programme to create a common vision but centred on creating plan to deliver on vision.
The process led to an engaged and agile workforce that developed; tested and secured license for new products in record time … now licensed to produce four products. Quite a journey indeed.
Shared vision
For Twomey, most organisational change plans miss a vital ingredient: People.
By failing to take into account people’s feelings and input, change and transformation strategies are doomed to failure. By aligning people with the vision, the strategy can unfold with precision.
“Our specialism is organisational transformation, and we’re not strategy consultants, but what we do is we work with leadership teams on the delivery of their strategy through transformation,” Shane Twomey told the ThinkBusiness Podcast.
“We focus on how you align the people in the organisation and the culture to deliver the strategy.
“There’s a misnomer that people fear change what people don’t like, or people resist change. But what people don’t like is change that’s imposed upon them and change that they don’t understand. So organisations have, historically, a way of looking at change that’s very programmatic: We set out the programme for our transformation; we set out what are our goals and objectives; we set our implementation plan; we set out our key milestones. And then we go to the organisation and we try and implement this.
“What that doesn’t take into account is the fact that that while organisations might move on a chapter by chapter basis through that change plan, that’s not how people change. People change organically. And if you don’t take the organic part of the change into account, then that’s why, as McKinsey say, 70% of transformations fail.”
The key, Twomey said, is to balance out both the programmatic change and organic change to deliver transformation.
“It is about looking at it through the lens of the fact that it is ultimately no matter what organisation you’re in, whether it is a small SME or whether it’s a public sector body, or was it global multinational, it is the people who are going to deliver the change.
“You can come up with a great new strategy, a great new product line, you can have a great new system, but ultimately you’re going to have to have people to operate it. So that’s what we essentially do.
“So we work with leadership teams around how do you successfully not just deliver on the change now, but what we focus on is, how do you actually embed the new ways of working so that the organisation actually can deal with the next change?
“Change is coming faster. We’ve got digital change. We’ve got we’ve got generative AI now, and companies are trying to react to that. We’ve got sustainability. There’s, the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) agenda. So there’s so many different change agendas that are facing organisations that if they don’t actually stop and think about it, they’re going to be overwhelmed.”
I suggest to Twomey that leaders and organisations that thrive are the ones that have made change their friend. They don’t fear change, they embrace it.
“I think that’s kind of true, but I also think people are still creatures of habit. And when it comes down to people and organisations, I think the key is how you sell it to people whose roles may change, or how they see how to view themselves.
“Sometimes change might be about rearranging figures on a balance sheet, but at the end of the day the people who are affected by this are human.
“And you know with people, if it’s sold to them right and they’re inspired by it, they will embrace it. If they find that they’re discomforted by it, or they feel that the world as they know it has been changed, or they feel in any way insulted or offended by this change, they’re going to be a kind of like a spanner in the works, right?
“In any organisation, you’re going to get a span of people and how they deal with and respond to change. You’re going to get the handful of people who are just going to embrace it, because that’s how they’re hardwired. They will embrace the change. It’s new and interesting. I mean, the challenge with that group of people is to basically get them aligned and that their energy is going in the right direction. But they’ll embrace it. They’re the believers.
“You’ll get the unbelievers, the group of people that no matter what, they will resist the change because they’re also hardwired that way. The job with that group, the unbelievers, is to a manage them and make sure that they don’t disrupt the rest of the organisation.
“And in between, you have what I call the agnostics, and they’re the people who can be persuaded either way.”
Twomey says this is where the job of the leadership team is to lead.
“You have to go beyond that. If you’re saying ‘change is my friend’, what do you need to do with that? Because otherwise it just becomes a slogan. And in my experience, that group in the middle, part of the reason that they can go either way is, first of all, they don’t understand the implications of the change. The horizon is too far away, and they can’t see themselves over the horizon.”
This is where organisations need to listen and give those impacted by change a voice and allow them to be part of the discussion and feel involved in shaping the direction.
“Having a voice is not saying that you get to dictate what the change is, but having a voice is actually being involved in some way in shaping well, how does this play out, and what does that mean, and what does this look like?”
And therein lies the secret to successful organisational change.
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