Managing Change In Small Businesses How Business Owners Can Cope With The Impact Of Change

Writen by Adrian Pepper

Working with the owners of small businesses, I find that their companies have problems with change for two reasons:

• Most change is imposed on them from outside and
• All change appears chaotic to them so they cannot understand it.

As I worked with my client called Joey, I gave him a conceptual model comprising seven words beginning with S.

As he understood what change could cost him, he found that he could control its impact. I aimed to coach Joey to avoid being a victim of change, to learn to survive its surprises and then to find he could thrive on change!

My three Hard factors
Strategy Starting with the harder factors, I asked Joey about his business Strategy "What business goals do you want to achieve?" and "What sort of market are you in?".

This led to a review of Joey's Business Plan, noting the changes that had happened (or were about to happen) since he last updated his plan. As we noted each change, I kept asking questions to encourage Joey to find ways of working with the changes not against them. Joey spotted that a plan which does not respond to market, customer and supplier changes is a waste of space.

Structure Next I got Joey to review his company Structure, asking him "How does your organisation support each goal?"

Of course with a medium-sized company, we would have looked at this department by department. In Joey's case, he had one team to meet all his business goals. This led to a discussion: "What is the right size and shape for your company? Do you need to expand or shrink some parts of your team in response to these changes?"

At a more detailed level, we reviewed significant parts of the business process: "How do you choose whether to buy or make your materials? How do you apportion the work between full or part timers, associates, affiliates and agents? How do you decide the route by which products reach your customers (in return for money)?" My coaching helped Joey to nip and tuck the structure so that the business could address the goals better.

Systems Then we tailored Joey's Systems to explore "What processes and procedures are effective?" - noting that effectiveness is about doing the right thing (whereas efficiency is about doing the thing right).

At a detailed level, I coached Joey to discuss "Do you need newer technology? How could your team work better? What can you do to simplify your communication within your team, with your suppliers and with your customers? Where can your team streamline their paperwork?"

My four Soft factors
Staff Moving to the softer factors, I encouraged Joey to talk to his Staff about the changes he expected and to listen to their ideas. Then I asked him: "What do your team think and feel about these changes?" This led into a collation of the suggestions they had in each area of change and some neat ideas that Joey could take forward.

Style Already in the coaching work that we had done, I could see that Joey had a more open and hands-on leadership style, so I encouraged him to review his Style and explore "What leadership behaviours are required?" He chose to delegate much of the leadership out to his staff, picking out someone to lead each of the areas of change that he had in mind.

Skills That naturally led in us onto Skills, asking "What skills mix do you and your team need?" and "How do you want to develop your team?" - with Joey choosing a mix of training his current staff, recruiting to fill gap and grow his team and retiring old skills.

Initially, Joey shrank from the word retiring because he needed everyone in his team. With further discussion, he recognised that his team were doing some activities quite poorly at so he decided to stop those jobs and to contract in suitable expertise when he needed those jobs to be done.

Share Finally, I asked Joey: "What shared values do you and your team have?" Since his business is small, he was not particularly aware of his values so this took me some effort to help him express them - good customer service, telling the truth to customers and suppliers, giving good value, finding what the customers really want, not allowing overdue invoices, giving helpful ideas, etc.

A difficult question for Joey was: "How should your values change to meet your goals?" This developed into a team discussion before they got agreement - move quicker than their competitors, design their product lines for easy upgrade, challenge current processes with improvements, etc.

Joey's own summary of our work together was "Either small companies learn to be agile and 'keep ahead of the steamroller' or we get squashed by forces outside our control!" So all I can add is "If you welcome change, you can take control and thrive".

Adrian Pepper coaches people through business and personal difficulties, helping companies figure out what to do, how to move forward and what to get organised. You can contact him through Help4You Ltd, through his website at http://www.help4you.ltd.uk or by phone +44-7773-380133. At http://feeds.feedburner.com/help4you, you can listen to his podcast for small businesses.

medical health hospital