People Do Change
How to Turn Reluctance into Confidence Using Human-Centric Change Management
People Do Change is a cohesive leadership guide to creating an adaptable workplace in which employees thrive and profits flow.
“The benefits of adopting a Human-Centric Change Management approach are numerous and far-reaching,” says Elisabeth White’s insightful leadership guide People Do Change, a book about leading teams thoughtfully in order to boost the bottom line.
Proposing managing in a way that keeps people’s needs in mind, the book encourages developing a workplace culture that eschews rigid adherence to rules in favor of flexible leadership. While many people resist change, it acknowledges, static workplaces have their perils. Tracing organizational change management from 1950 into the present, it highlights such problems with clarity, from inefficiency to the loss of a competitive edge.
Companies that failed to adapt to marketplace disruptions are held up as examples, though some are quite familiar. The book also illustrates ways of helping reluctant employees embrace new approaches and pursue new strategic goals. It models good communication, effective management roles, and ways of taking first steps well.
Building upon but not bound by previous approaches, the book emphasizes nimbleness and empathy over systems of the past, noting that change has a human side and cannot be disconnected from the daily work of the frontline employees who are tasked with carrying it out. When focusing on employee psychology, it makes clear arguments about why top-down change management often fails, breeding feelings of disempowerment and resentment in workers and causing them to lose motivation and a sense of organizational purpose. Fears of the unknown, failure, or the loss of comfort are handled with clarity.
At times, the book’s guidance is quite general, as when it champions values like adaptability and incorporating employee feedback. But its credible citations and case studies help support its points, and it does an able job of showing how its ideas might be put to work at the corporate level. Outside management concepts like kanban, daily meetings, and Chip and Dan Heath’s model of taking both rational and emotional needs into consideration are pointed to as effective means of improving planning and increasing value too. Its synthesis of a wide array of organizational knowledge makes it a practical resource for learning how to engage one’s employees with iterative processes and frequent feedback loops, all of which supports its goals of organizational transformation.
An insightful and empathetic management guide, People Do Change is about instilling new patterns of behavior to get the most out of one’s team.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
