CONNECTING CHANGE AND PERFORMANCE

ROSE A. CANLAS

As far as human beings are concerned, there is no such thing as instantaneous transformation. As a result, asking an organization to change (or telling the people in the organization to change) without giving them resources to do so is a fool’s errand.

“Turning the organization on a dime” or “pulling the organization through a knothole” are metaphors that do no justice to the process of change. Worse, such wrenching procedures can create cynical attitudes among employees. In our respective practices, we have not known of a single person who on one day could drop a set of behaviors that served customers or added value and on the next day could perform perfectly a new set of value-adding behaviors.

Change involves time and the opportunity to learn, and learning is often inefficient. So don’t expect performance improvement too quickly. Maintains that employees, given good guidance, opportunity to practice the new behaviors required for organization change There is a big difference between “freedom from” constraints and what you do with “freedom to” once you get it. This idea of “freedom to” has a long history, What people try to do first— because we all want “freedom from”; we want to not be imposed upon— is to get rid of constraints.

So accountability is a big constraint. How do we reduce that? How do we reduce testing? Educators work to get rid of a whole bunch of constraints. If you work on those things and you’re successful, there’s an inclination to declare victory. We got rid of the constraints! But what people realize once that happens is, now that they have the freedom to change to provide educators with individual and small-group autonomy connected to collaboration. — oOo— The author is Administrative Assistant II of DepEd Division of City of San Fernando (P)