Archives#change Archives — C. Lynn Northrup, CPA, CPIM
The Challenge of Change
The challenge of change is the challenge of dealing with uncertainty. What’s going to happen if we make a change? The reality of what’s going to happen is that you don’t know until you make the change. This is part of life and living. Creating success means that you will have to bite the bullet and embrace the challenge of what can happen and then learn to deal with it.
Some thoughts on making changes is to assess the current situation and follow this 5-Step Process:
- Understand your strengths
- Where is improvement needed?
- What’s working?
- What isn’t working?
- Create a plan to fix what’s not working
Here are some ideas on how to fix what’s not working.
Improve your effectiveness by doing the right things. After you settle on what are the right things, it is essential to focus on them and set priorities. Do what’s most important first that will make you more effective.
Once you understand where improvement is needed, you should become more efficient by doing the right things right. Review and understand the procedures for getting the right things done and the standards for how they should be done and then make the necessary improvements. This enables you to become more efficient and solve problems.
Becoming more efficient enables improvement and means you should be doing things better. Take the time to think carefully about what you’re doing and find ways to make improvements. Listen to suggestions and sort through these ideas and implement the ones having the greatest impact.
Making changes means doing away with things. This is a great opportunity to simplify and stop doing what isn’t important or doesn’t matter. This is a process of endlessly asking “why” and then following through with new ideas and concepts. Keep refocusing to continuously come up with improvements.
The fifth point of “creating a plan to fix what’s not working” is critical to successfully making changes. Spell out what’s not working and what will be eliminated together with any new steps to be implemented. These actions sound simple and easy but they will require determination and persistence to put in place. This is where focus and refocus is essential.
