Managing Change

1. Driving Change

Managing change means taking active control of any move from A to B, to achieve maximum advantage for your business.

1.1 Identify any need for change early on.

• Think ahead to where your business needs to be in one, three and five years' time. What do you need to do to get there?
• Monitor what your competitors are doing. Consider benchmarking your performance in key areas, such as customer loyalty and cost per sale. (See Benchmarking.)
• Look at parallels in other sectors. For example, if selling over the Internet works for other businesses, could it work for you, too?

1.2 Recognise that a key determinant of business success or failure is the quality of your employees, and especially your management team. (See Recruitment.)

• Continuous training and development will make sure you get the most out of your team.
• As a last resort, you may need to replace ineffective individuals (see Dismissing employees).

1.3 Try to get the impetus for change to come from your employees.

• Employees at the 'sharp end' are often the first to become aware of or experience problems.
• Encourage employees to offer suggestions that might improve working practices.
• Employees are more likely to accept a proposed change if it was suggested by them in the first place.