By Todd Klein
Company founders would seem to be a natural fit for change-management programs. They are persuaders and visionaries who perceive opportunities and seize them quickly.
Unfortunately, when founders attempt to apply these skills to their own organizations, they usually aren’t as successful: Characteristics that are necessary to lead an organization through significant transitions—traits such as patience, consensus building and adherence to strict processes—don’t always come naturally to the best entrepreneurs.
In every case I’ve observed, the mix of founder personality traits and the power asymmetry between leaders and their employees is nearly insurmountable. Without these, I believe change management is impossible.
So how do founders achieve the results they’re seeking if they aren’t the lead resource impacting their companies? The answer is: They can’t. Moreover, even if they could, they shouldn’t. If founders are serious about change management they must let someone else, preferably an outsider, facilitate it.
I have heard every founder objection to the idea that they should hand over such an important process to a stranger. The most common is, “No one understands our business as well as I do, so how could a newcomer help transform it?”
This objection conflates a company’s unique competitive traits with the organizational capabilities necessary for reimagining the enterprise. Change-management experts may not know the nuances of a given industry, but they offer transformation-minded founders four proficiencies that are more valuable:
- Establishing objectivity. Few senior executives recognize their unwillingness to adopt new ideas and creative problem solving, and, as a result, personal itineraries often complicate the transformation process.
- Maintaining process integrity. An accomplished facilitator enforces rules and ensures that the team tracks toward its original purpose. They’re especially adept at this because, unlike an employee of the company, the facilitator has only one job: to run the process.
- Executing proven conflict resolution protocols. If conflicting positions emerge during a meeting, all forward progress will cease. A qualified facilitator is trained to handle these situations and move past them. The average founder is not.
- Guaranteeing follow-up, implementation and accountability. A single person with no stake in a specific outcome is an essential resource to capture the learnings from each step in a change-management process.
Todd Klein is a partner at the venture-capital firm Revolution.