Cross-posted from Harvard Business Online
Barack Obama began his presidency with one of the most ambitious programs of change in history -- with major initiatives in defense, foreign affairs, economic recovery, health care, the environment, and more. Now that the administration has completed its first year, politicians and pundits are assessing what the President has accomplished. It may be equally important, however, to look at how well the Obama team has gone about managing its change agenda.
A number of years ago, a team of top academics and consultants worked with GE to identify the key ingredients to effective change management -- a simple framework that has since been used in numerous other firms. Let's look at how the President has done in regard to four of these ingredients:
Make the case for change: The starting point for change management is to generate energy for change by making it clear why the current situation cannot continue. Since this element of the change management framework was the essence of Obama's entire presidential campaign, he clearly knows how to do it well. The President also was helped (if you rightly can call it help) in this area by a number of inherited crises that made it obvious that change was needed.
Create a vision of what will be different: Once people are open to the idea of change, they then need to know what things will look like when a particular change has been accomplished. In this category, it appears that President Obama has had mixed effectiveness. With Iraq and Afghanistan, he was reasonably clear about the end game and the timing, although he left open the possibility of modifications. With the economic recovery plans and climate treaty, his vision was broad and lacked specificity. And with health care reform, the vision was complicated and constantly shifting depending on political considerations.
Mobilize commitment to change: The next ingredient is to identify the key stakeholders and build a coalition of support. In this area the President was surprisingly weak, failing to build the bipartisan support that he promised during his campaign. Furthermore, Obama seemed to miss the opportunity to re-mobilize and engage the millions of supporters that had been energized by his campaign and to redirect them towards specific initiatives. Instead, he seemed to focus his efforts on traditional political forms of influence, with the unintended consequence of even greater polarization than there was at the beginning of his term.
Generate early successes that build momentum and learning: Most change doesn't happen with the flip of a switch. Very large change efforts in particular need to be constructed out of a series of rapidly executed smaller changes, each of which creates confidence for the next stage and insights about how to do it better. While the President seemed to take this approach in military matters, he struggled with early successes for most other initiatives, opting instead for big efforts with long-term payoffs. For example, the stimulus program has been slow to demonstrate clear examples of job creation and health care reform missed the opportunity to quickly implement a few things that both Republicans and Democrats agreed upon (such as ensuring coverage for pre-existing conditions).
Clearly, there's room for improvement in the President's change management approach. Let's hope that he learns from the experience of the first year and -- like the best senior executives -- gets better at managing change over time.
Based on your experience with change management, what would you suggest the President do differently?