Change = get involved - get ownership.

Over dinner in Denmark with 20 marketing managers from SmithKline Beecham (SB), the pharmaceutical multinational, I recently witnessed a significant conversation between two brand managers. One Russian manager said passionately: "It's not even that it has made my life easier, it's the heart of how I work." A Dutch manager responded: "That's it! I'm the same. It's just the way we work."

The subject they were discussing is the Marketing Leadership Programme (MLP), a long-running initiative within SB to improve its marketing processes, covering many areas such as advertising development, market research and brand planning.

What is remarkable about this exchange is not that two culturally different managers could share similar working experiences, but that both could hold such strong, and even emotional, beliefs about something as often unwelcome as yet another organisational change programme.

So why would two managers feel so intensely about an SB drive to introduce better working approaches in 80 countries? The answer is not simply that MLP contains terrific media, content and workshops, but that more than 1,000 SB people feel powerful levels of ownership, commitment and attachment to their new processes. Why? Because they created them.

In all, since 1994, more than 300 SB marketing staff (a third of SB's consumer marketing population) have been involved in developing each of the three annual waves of MLP modules. Each year, more than 100 people from about 20 countries have contributed to what has become a regular cycle of involvement and joint development. By the time "launches" of new modules take place, a significant number of SB marketers (covering all major countries) have already shared in the development. Achieving "ownership" is not a problem; it's already happened.

The SB experience is just one example of how far approaches to bringing organisational change to life have moved ahead in the '90s - often at a frantic pace within leading companies. Gone are the days when introducing corporate change meant well-fashioned efforts to achieve "employee buy-in." We are now in an era when nothing less than absolute ownership of change is required, through new levels of employee involvement. That means joint development of change initiatives with the people who will make the change live or die.

Take the case of Levi Strauss - faced in the past five years with a need to re-shape how the company works to meet challenges from new and faster entrants into its markets, it began a company-wide change without a "polished" strategy for success. Instead, it cleared an entire floor of its headquarters building and brought together more than 100 people drawn from across its businesses. Their task was to transform Levi. People owned the change because it was their efforts that created it. Their involvement produced similar levels of participation amongst their colleagues.

Such approaches contrast sharply with those put forward in an article in the April/May 1997 issue of Communication World where Kevin Thomson argued that most major organisational change fails because of a lack of "buy in." The article said that a "marketing" approach is what is needed to make management initiatives work. While "internal marketing" (applying external marketing techniques to employees) was progress, far more potent involvement and ownership approaches are now being Used with powerful bottom-line results.

The problem with gaining buy-in is that if I "buy in" to the change (be it process, customer service, new structure, etc.), then I can also subsequently "buy out." If, on the other hand, as the SB and Levi's stories demonstrate, I am involved directly in creating and developing the change, then I cannot help but make it work because it is mine.

As can be seen from the table below, what has taken place in organisations over the past 40 years has been a gradual (and more recently, an accelerated) shift along a scale of employee involvement and ownership. Such tables simplify the picture, but broadly speaking, in the '50s, '60s and '70s, was the phase of "tell" when management told you what was happening, followed by the time of "sell" when management "sold" benefits to people.

On the road to real ownership

Method            Tell
Message           - You will!

Method            Sell
Message           - This will be really good!

Method            Buy-In
Message           - Look what you'll get out of this!

Method            Consult
Message           - What do you really need?

Method            Co-develop
Message           - What should we build together?

This gave way in the '80s to "buy-in" when companies "marketed" change to people as they did to their external consumers. If we "target" you, then you will "buy" the change. Now leading organisations are, at a minimum, consulting their people when change is required. Or, they are exploring the exciting and rewarding phase of joint creation when the change is embedded in people's day-to-day life through a process of joint development.

Recently SB started tracking the success of MLP. To their delight, they found a direct link between MLP and local market profitability. SB currently is reflecting on the effect of this information. Martin Dreger, director of MLP (formerly SB's Over the Counter (OTC) medicine's general manager for Germany) is certain the development process, while time consuming and resource intensive, is essential, if any significant change is to become part of daily work.

"We have printed on every new MLP module a list of 200 to 300 people who have contributed to that module via a series of feedback questionnaires on early drafts, development workshops, pilot sessions, approval groups and ad hoc reviews. When we launch, people know from their own experience that the module belongs to them - not us," says Dreger.

However, it is not only the way that the change initiative is developed that produces success, but also the way that people are then supported in implementing that change. For example, when United Distillers (UD), the world's largest spirits company, wanted to embed a far stronger objective setting system, The Empowerment Group introduced a series of short interactive "SMART" guides to all UD managers.

These short guides enabled all managers to work in a collaborative way with their people to set objectives clearly and easily. The ownership of the objective setting process came from the fact that every UD manager was actively involved in (and enjoyed) using the SMART guides. A year after introduction, UD surveyed their business to discover that objective setting was cited by people as UD's best performing area.

The fact is that what we are passionate and care about in our lives are things that we hold dear; things that we create and own. For people to bring their hearts and minds to the organisations they work for, what once seemed adventurous communication approaches are no longer enough. Organisations want and need genuine commitment and ownership of change. To achieve this, they need to see their people not as "consumers" to be "marketed to," but as partners in joint creation.

Paul Miller is the managing director of The Empowerment Group, a U.K.-based communication management consultancy firm that specializes in organisational change. [C] Paul Miller 1997