Managing Transitions

by William Bridges

  Rule 4: Celebrate the Success

  Finally, take time to celebrate arriving in the Promised Land. Just as you marked the endings at the start of transition, you need to mark the beginning at the finish of transition. The timing may seem a little arbitrary because there are always loose ends to be tied up. But when you feel that the majority of your people are emerging from the wilderness and that a new purpose, a new system, and a new sense of identity have been established, you’ll do well to take time to celebrate that the transition is over. It may be something as small as a get-together on Friday afternoon or something as big as tickets to a game. In either case, it should be fun and a break from the routine.

  It’s not a bad idea to let people take away something from this celebration too, a memento of the transition process that is now behind them. The idea is not unlike giving people a piece of the past, as mentioned in Chapter 3. In this case it may be a T-shirt with “I Survived the Merger” across the front or a certificate of thanks for their participation in the Transition Monitoring Team. Serious or humorous, the memento further acknowledges and winds up a difficult time in the organization’s history and the person’s career.

  In 2011, the University of Tennessee appointed Joe DiPietro president. He quickly gained a reputation as an accessible, hands-on leader who brought people together and who actively requested feedback from a wide range of university personnel.

  When he joined the university, it was highly decentralized with four campuses operating independently, each with a chancellor who managed his own campus. Sensing that decentralization wasn’t serving the university, or the state, DiPietro began an initiative to find ways to centralize these non-aligned campuses. His aim was to unite around common strengths and reduce inefficiencies.

  He brought together different members of the university, and created steering committees that included high-level advocates and influencers, students and senior administrators to discuss what traditions the university wanted to keep, and what it needed to let go of as it moved into the future.

  There was resistance from the chancellors who feared the loss of their independence and assumed that the new structure would impose authority from above and interfere with their day-to-day operations.

  But, before long, the committees and teams found synergies and common purpose between the campus functions. These discoveries created excitement and enthusiasm because everyone could see how they would fit within the new structure. New roles started to emerge. They understood that their turf wasn’t going to be taken from them. They felt safe.

  They set up ways to voice their fears, complaints, and concerns. Everyone felt acknowledged, and, even better, they were included in defining their own future. Throughout the process, the president remained highly visible and available. People trusted him, and with the trust came the buy-in.

  Today, the individual campuses manage their own initiatives while supporting statewide efforts that will help the entire university system. Even after the transition was complete, the president identified people—known as “champions”—who were among the original transition team. These champions were assigned to monitor progress, to listen and to gather feedback, while ensuring that what was supposed to happen actually keeps happening.

  CONCLUSION

  Behind all of these tactics is the basic idea with which we began, an idea that is more important than any of the tactics themselves: things start when the plan says they will, but the new beginning takes place much more slowly. If transition is mishandled or if it is overlooked completely, beginnings often fail to take place. In such cases, we say that “the change didn’t work,” or that it “fell short of our expectations.” What we ought to say is that we got the people out of Egypt, but they’re still wandering somewhere in the wilderness.

  FINAL QUESTIONS

  What actions could you take to help people deal more successfully with the new beginnings they must make if your change effort is to succeed? What could you do today to get started on this aspect of transition management? (Write yourself a memo in the space below.)4

  1. Some are ready to, and if they happen to be the organization’s leaders, they are unlikely to realize that other people do not respond to ideas as viscerally as they do. They may put out the idea and then wonder why people are holding back. They need to see that ideas alone only galvanize idea-minded people. Others need one or more of the other three Ps: pictures, plans, and a part to play.

  2. As I use the term, “picture” has a lot in common with what today is called an organizational “vision.” But I use “picture” because “vision” has become associated with “visionary” and is often used in an almost mystical way to refer to something that has the power—almost by itself—to revitalize an organization and to realign its people. I don’t buy that. Too many visions are pure fantasy that simply alienate leaders from their more down-to-earth followers. Just as relatively few people can be swept up and moved to action by an idea alone, so it is with only a vision to go on.

  In the typological categories created by Carl Jung, thinking types can be activated by an idea and intuitive types can be activated by a vision. But sensate types need a plan, and feeling types need everyone to have a part in the undertaking.

  3. See Chapter 6 for specific ways to deal with continuous change.

  4. Note that you may not be far enough into the process of transition to find many of these tactics timely yet. Don’t worry. Just utilize the ones that are appropriate to your situation, and use the rest as a checklist for future action. Build them into your transition-management plan.

  CHAPTER

  6

  People, products, markets, even societies, have life cycles—birth, growth, maturity, old age, and death. At every life cycle passage a typical pattern of behavior emerges.

  . . . As the organization passes from one phase of its life to the next, different roles are emphasized and the different role combinations that result produce different organizational behaviors. . . . The [life cycle] model enables an organization to foresee the problems it will face as it grows over time. Furthermore, it . . . presents a framework for prescribing the treatments most likely to be effective depending on the life cycle stage of the organization.

  —ICHAK ADIZES, “ORGANIZATIONAL PASSAGES”1

  Transition, Development, and Renewal

  The idea that organizations and societies have life cycles has been around a long time. When we say that General Motors is “older” than Google, we mean more than that it was established longer ago. We talk about Europe as the Old World and America as the New World, and again, we mean more than chronology. A biotech start-up exists in the part of the organizational lifetime that we think of as its “childhood”; we talk about an organization or a society going through an “adolescent” phase; and everyone has a good idea what we mean when we talk about a “mature” business or one that is approaching “the end of its life.”

  The organizational life cycle also provides an important way to understand some of the larger significance of many specific transitions. An ending that launches a transition may be traumatic, not just because of the particular set of circumstances surrounding it, but because it winds up an important chapter of the organization’s life. And the difficulty that an organization has launching a new beginning may come less from the new situation that has to be managed than from the fact that the new beginning represents a whole new life stage for the organization and a new and unfamiliar identity.

  Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

  ANAÏS NIN, AMERICAN DIARIST

  To understand transition from this perspective, it is helpful to have a map of the organization’s life cycle that is comparable to the human development theories that clarify the path an individual follows through human childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Without such a map, a teenager’s life would look like
a crazy set of purely personal problems that just happened to occur at the end of childhood. The term “adolescence” helps us understand what is really going on in a young person’s life. Likewise, the different segments of the organizational life cycle can help organizational development (OD) specialists, and the leaders with whom they consult, understand not only why the organization is encountering certain kinds of problems when it does, but also what they need to do about them.

  I have a great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.

  SEPTIMA POINSETTE CLARK, AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST

  OD professionals focus on the organization’s movement through this life cycle. Creating more open communication, wider participation in decision-making, and leadership development are typical OD goals, and these are developmental issues. OD professionals focus on human and transformative processes by which an organization—or a part of it, anything from a project team to an international division—becomes more complex and better adapted to its environment.

  SEVEN STAGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE

  Shakespeare wrote about the “Seven Ages of Man.” Here are seven comparable stages of organizational life.2

  The point is not that these seven stages and their names are predestined realities that represent fixed times in an organization’s life. You could come up with a list of six or twelve stages and give them very different names, and you might have just as useful a map. We have used this particular one for more than thirty-five years and find it very helpful in working with organizations in transition. Try it out in your own work, and see if it doesn’t clarify things.

  Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often in a succession of jerks.

  JEAN RHYS, BRITISH NOVELIST

  Figure 6.1 The organizational life cycle.

  1. Dreaming the Dream

  The first stage is the time of conceptualizing and planning, when the organization is little more than an idea in the mind of the founders. This is the time when the main activities are articulating the Dream and trying to get people to join in bringing it into physical existence and to invest money to realize it. A lot of time is spent sitting around people’s offices and living rooms, brainstorming and arguing. There may or may not be a demonstrable “product” yet, for the organization itself is “in utero.” The Dream lasts until it is given up—and many dreams never grow beyond this first phase—or until it is born as a Venture.

  2. Launching the Venture

  This time is the organization’s infancy and childhood. Birth has taken place, the Venture is “out there,” people may even be starting to buy the products. If they are, the Venture will be growing—perhaps very rapidly. Some ventures end up serving large numbers of customers, even before they move on to their next phase. They may be raking in money. What makes them “ventures” is not that they are not yet successful, but that they are doing whatever they are doing by the seat of their pants at this stage. There are no formal systems yet—no hiring policies or pay scales, no formal ways of doing things. The organization may actually be little more than a bunch of people sharing a website. The people who thrive in this phase of the organization’s life cycle are good at improvising. Many of those people subsequently look back on these days with affection—“Wasn’t that fun, back when we all did everything, and no one knew what the rules were?” People may have titles for the sake of the business cards, but the titles mean little, and they may still be living off their savings while they try to attract enough capital to take off.

  Some Ventures do really take off (Apple was a $1 billion per year company before it left the Venture phase), while others move forward much more slowly. In either case, you can go only so far by “making it up as you go” before the database is a mess, the website is crashing, and customers are frustrated because delivery and quality are inconsistent. Before these problems sink you, you need to Get Organized.

  3. Getting Organized

  To some people this stage feels like a step backward since many of the ways to bring order to a chaotic situation force you to slow down and do things in some standardized way. They may decide it’s time to install a sales management system. The company has come to the point where the natural energy of the founders is no longer enough to ensure continued good results. The frantic efforts of a handful of people need to be replaced by a more structured set of activities by a growing number of people.

  This is the time when roles start to become more specialized and defined. It is the time when financial controls are established, when employment policies are spelled out, when marketing materials become more sophisticated. New kinds of people are hired—people who have actually already done what you’re asking them to do now. The hiring process changes, as experience starts to become more important—though the original team may feel that it will no longer have the excitement, intensity, and close, personal connections that characterized the early days of a Venture. Getting Organized isn’t easy, and a few companies and institutions run aground in the process. But most of them survive and come out of this phase with the new structures, practices, systems, agreements, and habits that they need to take their places in the world of “grown-up” organizations. When that happens, the organization enters the next phase of its life.

  4. Making It

  This is the point when the organization’s “adulthood” begins. From this point on, the organization has what it needs to be a significant factor in its market. An organization that is successfully Making It can expand and grow more complex for a very long time without ever leaving this stage. But this is the point at which it begins to reap the rewards of its successful early development in the form of financial success, workforce growth, an expanding product line, and an increasing reputation for whatever it does. It may face serious (even daunting) competition, but it is now established in its market. It has a solid foothold and the basis for continuing expansion. There can be many subchapters to this time in the organization’s life, as growth may lead to problems, which necessitate changes, which lead to further growth. But through it all, the organization’s fundamental nature continues.

  Or it continues until the kinds of successes that it achieves begin to seem less attractive for its leaders than does the intangible “institutional” quality that some of its older competitors or the famous organizations in other fields have. People start to feel that these other, more mature organizations have “something that we don’t.” They have more significance, more importance, and more class. Often this feeling of lack gets attached to tangible things: “An organization of our importance needs a headquarters building that represents the company image, access to a leased jet . . . or a logo with a more ‘innovative’ look.”3 This dissatisfaction is not like the earlier signals that it was time to move to the next phase. That is, it does not signify that the old way has reached the limit of its usefulness or that it’s no longer working. The dissatisfaction is more a matter of style than of substance, but it is no less compelling for that. It is a feeling that it is time for the organization to take its place as not just a successful organization in its field but as a company that cannot be ignored—as an Institution.

  5. Becoming an Institution

  This shift is subtle but profound: the emphasis moves from doing to being, from the results that the organization achieves to the external impression that it makes. The organizational imperative shifts from that of taking and staking out territory to occupying it. People talk more and more about how things ought to be done in “an organization like this” and about what is appropriate to an organization that occupies a place like this one. Reputation is something that the organization has—it is no longer being earned. People forget that, until very recently, they were struggling to establish themselves.

  Whoever in middle age attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its ow
n desires.

  WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, GERMAN PHILOSOPHER

  Before long, there comes to be a timeless quality to this phase, a sense of having arrived and a loss of concern about moving on. Like the Making It phase, this phase can last a very long time. And during most of that time there is little talk about further development. A few organizations succeed in launching a renewal effort from this phase, and others try to do so. But if nothing is done to deflect the natural course of development, the Institution starts to close in on itself and lose its vital connection with the world.

  6. Closing In

  This phase often grows almost imperceptibly out of the self-satisfaction that so often marks institutional life. In an earlier time, when external competition was not as sharp in some fields as it is today (banking, for instance), this inward turning could produce a rather attractive “aristocratic” stylization of effort. The professional cultures of some fields—medicine and education are examples—serve as built-in justifications for Closing In when the organization gets to this point in its life cycle. If the organization is a governmental body that doesn’t need to achieve success in the marketplace, the result is likely to be an increasingly unresponsive bureaucracy. If its market is competitive, however—and what markets are not competitive today?—the result is difficult to sustain. Employees forget the customers and focus on internal matters in a way that can seem almost perverse; they argue about rules and status while the whole operation is slowly collapsing. Whatever the external situation is and however quickly the organization is undermined, the Closing In phase marks the loss of the vital tension between the organization and its environment. Although it can be kept alive for some time by a “life-support system” of extraordinary assets or a monopolistic position, the natural and final outcome of closing in is—