Many reports indicate that more than 75% of consulting engagements fail to deliver the results.

Results can be sustained only if there is a culture change in the company. The Culture for any organization is SET by the Leader of the company. All the other employees mimic/follow their bosses (in most cases) or adjust their behaviour to suit the boss’s behaviour.

So whenever there is a consulting engagement/change management program, it is very essential to involve the Top management as it is an essential part of the culture change.

Sadly, most of the change management programs exclude the top person and focus on the next levels. Top mgmt only conducts reviews (in many cases, even reviews won’t happen regularly). This obviously will have no effect in the culture (after a few days of the program, things will be back to normal).

Why do Coaches and Trainers exclude the Top Management from Change Management?

Some of my thoughts are…

1. Business Owners are too busy for the Change Management Program. They just participate in the reviews.

2. Very hard to transform them, as they have a very high Ego (that comes from their success / power / authority / money)

3. Trainers & Coaches have a deep-inside fear to try and transform the top person (fearing the consequences – the top mgmt hired us for the consulting work, why to take the risk of transforming them?)

4. No one have tried it earlier, why to take the risk of going against the top person?

5. Let’s just work on the scope given to us. i.e. work with the middle management. Only the reviews would be done by the top management.

In my view, Change Management is primarily required for Top Management only. It is very easy to transform the middle and Junior management.

In our programs we focus on the transformation of the business owners, working closely with them on transforming them and only in those companies we were able to produce sustained results.

What are your opinions on this? If you are a consultant, please share your thoughts in the comments.

You read the article on LinkedIn here

Cheers,

Ananth