I continue to clip articles to comment on and share on this blog. Many times I find these articles while sitting on an airplane and rummaging through the papers I habitually pick up at newsstands. Because I am usually less distracted while sitting on a plane, I seem to enjoy them more. The rush of getting through the paper or the Internet news during the weeks I am in town require as much attention but my mind gets interrupted easily by all the visual stimuli, immediate work demands and inability to concentrate beyond 15 minutes.
Stefan Stern writes for the Business Life of the Financial Times. I met him while visiting London several months ago on the rainiest day I ever remember. It was monsoon-like weather in London. However we had a great conversation about my work on reputation-building and reputation recovery, my book and I had the chance to tell him how much I enjoyed his columns. I cut out (or should I say teared apart) one column from June 10 about change management. Stern described two change management programs which interested me greatly because of my own recent experiences. One was with high speed passenger train Eurostar and the second with Heathrow’s newest terminal – T5.
My Eurostar experience was spectacular. The rain from Geneva (I think) to London arrived on time and the service was impeccable. The arrival hall was historically noble and beautiful in an “everyone is important and going somewhere important” way. Stern said that when Eurostar moved from Waterloo Station to St. Pancras, 97 percent of the trains were on time on day one. Eurostar had moved everything overnight before that momentous opening. How is it possible that Eurostar performed so well compared to the disastrous opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in March.
Both organizations prepared. Stern wrote that Eurostar ran an 18 month change program and parent company BA ran a three year program (Fit for 5) to prepare for the massive changes at their respective sites. As you know, Heathrow’s T5 opening was chaotic with misplaced baggage, damaged conveyor belts and frozen screens. [Traveling through Heathrow always requires lots of patience and luck which I did not have on my last stopover in London. I missed my flight to New York by one minute due to a delayed inbound flight and I could not get anyone to call ahead although I tried.]
To manage the change program at Eurostar, Stern says that the organization’s leaders brought in psychologists to help with the emotional as well as physical relocation. They anticipated the problems and considered their employees’ concerns. As for BA, apparently baggage handlers tried to forewarn their leaders that there were problems but they were ignored. One problem Stern mentioned was that the lockers were not large enough to hold all their clothes and other personal belongings. Also parking spaces were too far from the terminal. All of this added up to BIG trouble and – calamity! T5’s grand entry was delayed several months. If only management had listened, Heathrow’s and BA’s reputations would not have suffered the damage they did. Same goes for BA’s CEO Willie Walsh who had to apologize profusely and lost credibility.
Change management requires strict attention to employees’ comments since they are the ones changing. Reputations need not lose face if someone is listening intently. It is never the big things that do companies in but the small ones such as locker sizes and parking spaces…..AMEN
