"Agents of Change: Transformation is Their Game."

By LAURIE SUE BROCKWAY
Staff Reporter of WOMEN'S NEWS

Rumbles of change are reverberating all around us as we speed to a new millennium. Nowhere is change more evident in daily life than in the work place. Old style corporate life has gone the way of the typewriter and the Betamax-it's over. Enter the new and coming age of change. The question is, are you prepared to greet change when it arrives?

While it is human nature to fear change and to cling hopefully to the way things used to be, at no time in history has change been more imperative. It's a simple fact: corporations - new and old, newly merged and diversified, have had to become more competitive in all areas in order to stay in business.

A new breed of entrepreneurial woman is helping to reconstruct the corporate culture from A to Z by developing, overseeing and ushering in transformation. These visionaries are orderly, professional thinkers with the ability to work with people and lead them through transition. They are agents of change. They are magicians who change hats as they move through corporations, working with people to accept the inevitable change happening around them. They act as therapists, advisors, accountants, communicators, strategists and diplomats to help make corporate life run smoothly. It is definitely a new age profession.

More Than Management Consultants

Invited as guides into corporations, agents of change may enter a company for two days, two weeks, two years or more to accomplish shifts in the revamping a small system to reinventing the entire organization. Improving one area is one way to begin with follow-up in other departments where change is needed or already has occurred. A change agent will be there to meet the change on arrival and help staff to adjust and negotiate through it. Some agents are hired to oversee an overhaul on a long-term basis.

Essentially change agents are free agents who do not appear on the regular payroll. Like doctors, they may perform major surgery on a particular company and then be asked to give it a checkup every few months to make sure all systems are still go! "Essentially, change management means critically engaging a company in looking at where it is at, where it needs to be in order to be more competitive and how it's going to get there," says Judith Glaser, president of Benchmark Communications, Inc. "This often means radical changes. I'll take a company through whatever the company is going through," adds Glaser, whose clients have included Clairol, Emery Worldwide, Citibank, Chase-Chemical and the Donna Karan Company. Glaser who takes a holistic view of a company and remains "in the loop" of the entire organization she is working with, says that one of her first tasks in a company is to access what is missing and then begin to put it in place. While each client has different needs, she says the intention is to help build strong companies and strong leaders within the company.

Empowering People To Embrace Change

A change management consultant can design and implement a restructuring plan that insiders may not be able to carry out for a number of reasons.

"It can be that you can take an operation of 300 people and find a way that it can be done with three people," says Glaser. "There's often a scare. People fear they will lose their jobs. And some will. Sometimes more people will be added or placed somewhere else.

"In the change management world there is a hierarchy, an organizational chart of who reports to whom. You can see how things happen across divisions and look for ways to synergize them and create cross-functional teams that cross divisions or cross functions." This means that more than one person understands how the job is done and how people and departments are able to help each other.

"It requires hand-holding because it can be a traumatic and dramatic thing for people," Glaser explains. A Temple University graduate who majored in psychology, Glaser finds that her studies in linguistics, anthropology and epistemology (the study of how people think) invaluable. "I think the biggest challenge on a day-to-day level is the fear response. Sometimes I have to be the organizational psychologist. I think what it boils down to is that I really manage the language."

And the language of change can make all the difference in empowering people to embrace something new. Some companies require more motivation, or cheerleading, if you will. To achieve this, Glaser designs and conducts workshops for employees to open up discussion, dialogue and creating new models. "Companies have to get to a place where they develop a voracious appetite for competitive information and that's what I'm trying to do," she says, "That sometimes means poking holes in people's current reality. There are often beliefs and assumptions that 'it can't happen here', or 'we don't do that'."