Organizational Change and Consultancy Skills - Coursework Example

Running Head: ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND CONSULTANCY SKILLS Organizational Change and Consultancy Skills [Writer’s Name] [Institution’s Name] Organizational Change and Consultancy Skills Let us start with another definition: consultancy is a process involving a consultant who is invited to help a client with a work-related issue. The client can be an individual, a group, or an organization. The essential issue is one of responsibility for the process, and this may help to clarify the difference between consultancy and other activities, such as supervision, therapy, teaching, and management. The responsibility for fulfilling the task of the organization in the consultancy process lies with the client, whereas the responsibility for the consultancy process lies with the consultant. The consultant uses his or her skills and knowledge about the process of change to enter into a mutual exploration towards an understanding of the meaning of the problem for the organization as a whole. The consultant's position within the system offers a different perspective from that of the client. From this perspective, the consultant can offer new ideas that may create a new set of meanings in the organization and allow the problem to be seen in a different way, leading to new behaviours and new relationships. These may allow the organization to move forward in its development (Miller 2007). The consultant may work with many different kinds of problem, from working with nurses on how to manage bereavement to helping a community care team to develop an operational policy. The consultant may act in different roles at various stages of the process -- for example, as teacher, advisor, facilitator, researcher, trouble-shooter, salesperson -- without letting go of the locus of responsibility. As well as being able to take on a variety of roles to suit the overall task, the consultant needs to be able to move quickly between them, whilst maintaining a bird's eye view of both the primary task to be accomplished and the whole system involved in the project. The consultant working within a systemic framework will use specific techniques such as hypothesizing, circular questioning, and the use of feedback and reflective discussion. The aim is to create a context in which new ideas can be owned -- in the sense of feeling a commitment towards -- by the client, whose responsibility it is to implement any resulting actions. External and Internal Consultancy External consultancy involves consultancy to individuals, groups, or organizations outside the organization of which the consultant is a member. Internal consultancy, on the other hand, involves consultancy to individuals, groups, or the whole organization of which the consultant is also a member. Requests for consultancy from one's own organization are likely to become increasingly common in the public sector of the 1990s. For some professionals in the public sector, this kind of work is already an integral part of the job. What the internal consultant can offer is local knowledge and "coming in at the ground floor". This means the possibility of spotting the need for consultancy early on. This can allow the consultant to facilitate the growth of a broad base of support for change, which in turn can help the organization own the consequences of a change effort. Many attempts at external consultancy fail at this implementation stage, when the organization needs to own an intervention sufficiently to be able to put it into daily practice. Could it be that the act of hiring an external consultant is a way for the organization to distance itself from the need to change? Certainly, it seems that the fact that public sector organizations now allow and encourage staff to offer internal consultancy services suggests an ownership of the need for the organization to change itself rather than a reliance on others to do it from outside. This can be said to be one of the distinctiveness of the healthy organization. In any case, where the consultancy is conducted from within, the implementation of any changes has a better chance of succeeding as the need for change has been owned by the organization from the start by employing an internal consultant and requesting help from that person. Another advantage for the internal consultant is that the work costs less, and this is very important in today's cost-conscious environment. There are many recent examples of expensive mistakes made with external consultants. Therefore, public sector organizations are now looking within for help with organizational problems (Golembiewski 1976). Internal consultancy, however, presents specific dilemmas which need careful consideration before accepting requests for help. That the internal consultant may have far more knowledge and access to internal resources, power figures, history, and so on. These apparent benefits may, however, work to the internal consultant's disadvantage in that the consultant may not find it so easy to develop new ideas to deal with stuck situations. Use of Feed Back The use of feedback is essential at all stages of consultancy to give meaning to the process as it evolves. The task of evolving outcome measure would therefore seem to involve creating some formal mechanisms for measuring change within the feedback process. The essence of this approach would be that what is seen as "good practice" would be generated by the participants in the process. The definition of these outcome measures could be part of the initial context-marking dialogue around consultancy. This might involve asking certain questions of the client and of oneself as consultant. For example: • What changes do you expect to see if the consultancy is effective? A. at individual level -- staff and users; B. at group level -- staff and users; c. At system or service level -- e.g. user numbers seen, speed of administration, money saving, pupil achievements. • How can these changes be operationally defined? • How will you measure these changes and when? A. informal discussion; B. interview or questionnaire; C. formal tests -- e.g. patient depression level. • What will you do if the consultancy does not bring about these changes? • Which aspects of the consultancy process were most helpful and unhelpful; challenging; etc.? Observing System of Consultancy The observing system involving an internal consultant may imply different meanings from that involving an external consultant. The exploration of the expectations of the consultancy as a whole is very important as, without it, there may be confusion created by the overlapping meanings of the internal/external dimension. Neutrality In an organization negotiating change, individuals and the organization as a whole will be dealing with challenges to accepted beliefs, associated behaviours, and relationships. In the public sector, the new organizational culture may lead people to feel themselves under threat of losing their jobs. At times such as these, a consultant may be brought in with the aim of binding the consultant to the view of the problem held by the client, perhaps to prevent loss of influence, keeping the system in standstill. The client may, however, believe that, in consulting someone outside the situation (even if not completely external), this person can be impartial or more objective than those immediately involved. This may, in the NHS setting, fit with beliefs about impartiality being a necessary component of good clinical practice. Consultancy Process The beginning stages of the consultancy process are thus vital to being able to negotiate a position from which one can bring about change. As in the example above, a request can be presented in a form that feels too constraining to allow the exploration of differences: one may feel that one is being forced to accept a role that fits with the view that the person making the request has about the organization, but which may not allow change to occur. One needs to be highly attentive to the way an initial request is framed, in that it indicates how the person making the request wants to organize the consultant so as to fit his or her "story". It is our experience also that the consultant can often feel rushed into a commitment to act before having time to think. We think that time taken at this stage to external consultants for help with managing change. Managing Change Organizations used to turn to external consultants for help with managing change, they appear to be becoming sceptical about the value of commercial consultancies, many of whom do not understand the public sector and offer expensive, packaged solutions with which the organization cannot engage. They seem to be turning to consultants from within the organization to provide ongoing help in the management of change. There are many tasks arising from the cultural and structural changes in the public sector with which the internal consultant could help: for example, with the creation of user groups, quality circles, models for inter-agency working, and new multi-disciplinary teams; helping to shape policy and decision-making processes for purchasers: helping with the creation of preventative services; and many other examples of indirect facilitative work via teachers, nurses, social workers, and others. Hence there is a great need for professionals within public sector organizations to consolidate and develop consultancy skills, as well as to market these effectively within the new organizational culture (Nevis 1987). The internal consultant's view of the problem will, however, inevitably is affected by the conflicts about change being shared at that time by everyone in the organization; whether, for example, the changes in question are a "good" or "bad" thing. This will include the beliefs in the organization about the process of change which legitimized the consultant undertaking pieces of consultancy work. For example, there may be a belief that parts of the organization need not be responsible for sorting out their own organizational problems but should seek the help of the consultant to the organization; or that the consultant needs to be given work to make sure the "real" work of management is not impeded; or that the organization gets on best if it is in a state of internal competition, and help from a consultant is needed only if the competition spills over into serious conflict (Kotter 1979). There are many other possible hypotheses that need to be developed at the stage of receiving a request for consultancy to try to understand the meaning of the problem for the organization. It may be relevant to consider whether the person making the request (the client or referrer) had a choice of approaching an external or internal consultant, and how the decision was made to approach an internal consultant (see Diagram 4). It may be important to think about the relationship in the organizational structure between the referrer and the consultant. In Diagram 4, the Manager of Team 3 in Organization 1 is approaching a consultant who is also a member of Team 2. It may be that the referrer expected to be more able to bind the consultant to his or her point of view because of their shared membership of the same organization and hierarchy; both are also accountable to the same Unit Manager. The referrer in the diagram, who is also a manager, may assume, because this position is superior in the hierarchy to the consultant, that the consultant is more likely to agree with the referrer's point of view. Other people in the organization -- for example, members of Teams 1, 2, and 3 and depending on whether or not they are the subjects of the consultancy -- will interpret the actions of the consultant in a similar way; that is, they may assume that the internal consultant has been brought in to support the positions and policies of those who created the post of internal consultant (e.g. the Unit Manager), or those who referred the problem (Manager of Team 3). Anyone involved with the internal consultant will wonder: "Whose Side is this person on?" "Are this person's views sanctioned at a higher level in the organization?" "On whose behalf is this person acting?" "What will happen if I go along with this person, or if I refuse?" What is being challenged here is the consultant's neutrality, both in its original sense of being able to conduct an investigation in such a way that the subjects will feel that the consultant has no favourites ( Selvini-Palazzoli, 1980); Both are potentially compromised for the internal consultant in the sense that the consultant's own position in the organization will mean that he or she may not automatically have access to everyone in the organization who is involved in the problem, nor might the members of the organization feel that they have equal access to the consultant. Secondly, attempts to develop a different view from the "realities" of the situation being forced upon the consultant from all quarters may be very difficult (Davidson, 1994). The only clues of having departed from a systemic view may be if the consultant becomes involved in specifying change, giving advice, blaming people, or being judgemental. These would all be indications of the consultant being pushed to identify more with some parts of the organization than with others, thus losing a meta-perspective. The struggle to remain Meta may be most difficult in consulting to the members of one's own team. In Diagram 4, this would mean a situation in which members of Team 2 approached the consultant, also based in Team 2, for help with a problem within the same team. One is then dealing with the conflicting contexts of belonging to a team, which means sharing a common view of the "realities", and having different views which might perturb the system into change. This could lead to potential conflicts of loyalty, which might threaten the legitimacy of the role of consultant, of team member, and of the task of consultancy itself. It may be that the feedback loop is too small to allow differences to be explored. Perhaps the best clue to whether it is possible is how curious one feels as a consultant. Looking at Diagram 4, the consultant could consult to Team 1 or 3, but it is not clear whether it would be possible to do so for Team 2. The curiosity factor may or may not be present. If it is not and it is not possible to negotiate to a different consultancy task that will engage the consultant and the client, a consultant more external to the team may be needed. However, the culture in the public sector is changing from a relatively poor relationship with the outside world to one in which it is essential to be able to react to consumer need and choice in order to survive: the consumer, rather than the manager, rules! Employee participation, together with management commitment and support, has been shown to be associated with successful large scale organizational change undertaken by internal consultants (Pace & Argona 1989) It is clear that the client may often request the help of the internal consultant in order to defend against loss or to maintain the drift of behaviour in a desired direction. For example, a head teacher may request consultancy for a staff group in the belief that this may stem rebellion and challenges to his or her authority. The request may be made in a way that places constraints on the behaviour of the consultant and makes it an impossible task to perform (Davenport 1993). For example, a consultant was invited to assist a personnel section in a Social Services department in a project aimed at "selection or de-selection" of staff for a particular project. This request seemed to imply the use of a consultant's expertise to facilitate others to exert control within the organization. It might have been possible to enter into an exploration of the reasons for this particular request and the confused contexts implied by it. A new understanding of the organizational conflicts represented by the request might have emerged and, from this, an alternative strategy for solving the problem (Coch 1976). For example, the consultant might have been able to reframe the task as facilitating managers with staff development -- and out of this might have come the beginnings of an appraisal scheme from which it would be possible to see which staff needed and wanted opportunities to work in new projects. However, this proved impossible; the consultant was constrained about which people could be interviewed and in which combinations, the questions that could be asked, and the kinds of recommendations that would be acceptable at the end of the process. The constraints placed upon the autonomy of the internal consultant in this situation meant that the consultant stood little chance of making a difference, and the request was therefore turned down. In fact, most internal consultants find themselves refusing some requests, for this or similar reasons (Stacey 1996). However, the internal consultant may find that, when it is not possible to be involved as a consultant, the context that emerges may be a different one in which it is possible to function effectively, for example in one's own discipline role or as a manager. With the above reframe, a consultant in role as a manager could start discussion of an appraisal scheme with members of his or her staff group. This might have a ripple effect on other groups, which could eventually lead to change in the organization as a whole. References Coch L and French J R P (1948) Overcoming Resistance to Change, Human Relations 1 512-532 Davenport T H (1993) Process Innovation: Re-engineering Work through Information Technology Boston: Harvard Business School Press Davidson, J, O’C. (1994) The sources and limits of resistance in a privatized utility in J. M Jermier, D. Knights, W. R. Nord Resistance and power in organizations London: Routledge. Golembiewski, R. T., Billingsley, K., and Yeager, S. (1976) Measuring Change and Persistence in Human Affairs: Types of Generated Designs Journal of Applied Behavioural Science 12:133-157 Kotter J P and Schlesinger (1979) Choosing Strategy for Change, Harvard Business Review March/April Miller Eric 2007; Journal Organisational and Social Dynamics: An International Journal of Psychoanalytic, Systemic and Group Relations Perspectives Publisher Karnac Books Ltd. Nevis EC (1987), Organizational Consulting: A Gestalt Approach Gestalt Institute of Cleveland Press Pace L. A., & Argona D. R. (1989). Participatory action research: a view from Xerox. American Behavioural Scientist, 32 (5) (May-June): 552-565 Selvini-Palazzoli M. (1980). "The problem of the referring person." Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 6 (1): 3-9. Stacey R D (1996) Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics (second edition) London: Pitman Publishing Appendix To develop understanding and capability for both consultant and client in the initial stages of creating the consultant/client relationship and the significance of a good start for the consultancy process. To introduce some of the key features of diagnosis as a core activity in consulting - developing a shared understanding of the issues and problems. To introduce tools that can be used by the consultant, or which the consultant can develop with the client, in order to undertake and then present the diagnosis. To develop an understanding of the consultant’s activities in developing an appropriate intervention, and in leaving the consultancy project. To explore a key element of the consultant’s work – helping individuals, teams and organisations to learn. To understand both the tasks and interpersonal processes involved in carrying out a consultancy project it is helpful to consider it as consisting of a sequence of steps or phases. The process has been summarised as “getting in, doing the work and getting out This unit explores the whole of the consultancy process from 'getting in, doing the work and getting out' within the framework of the 'CONSULT' model. Although the model has defined phases it should not be taken as suggesting that consultancy is a linear process - the presence of feedback loops is highly significant as 'revision' is always an enduring possibility within the life of a consultancy project. However, having defined phases can be helpful to the consultant as it enables them to have some grasp on what is going on in the consultancy. 'CONSULT' is a useful acronym for remembering all of the developmental phases of consultancy projects. The model can be used by 'line' or 'specialist' managers when looking at change issues as :- external consultants, internal advisers working with external consultants, internal consultants working with line managers or with departmental staff on particular issues, process managers of change. Connect With an Issue, a Problem – The First Phase of the Consultancy Process Although many managers feel they have an adequate knowledge of their own systems, it is beneficial to test that assumption. The consultant can help this process at the pre-contract phase. This phase involves potential client and consultant in a passive diagnosis of the situation to size up the costs and benefits of intervention. The key task is to find the entry points for initiating change, choice of an incorrect entry point may doom an attempted improvement to failure - Kolb refers to this as 'scouting' Open the Doors - Second Phase of the Consultancy In this phase the consultant negotiates a "contract" through the client representative(s) that will define if and how the succeeding stages of the planned change process will be carried out. Emphasis is on a continuing process of sharing the expectations of the consultant and client system and the development of understanding of the continuing process of contract renegotiation. The main issue around which the negotiation process centres is the perceived power of the client and the perceived power of the consultant. Read More