Change management practitioners who participated in the online survey for the State of Change Management in the UN System possess impressive experience and skills related to change management and are versed in a wide range of change management functions.
However, among those skills and functions targeted by the UN 2.0 Quintet of Change, they display noticeable gaps. While their experience in types of transformation predictably matches the most prevalent transformations being conducted across UN entities at the time of the survey, it ranks surprisingly low for the type “UN Reform”.
Change management isn’t a full-time job for everyone and respondents play different roles. Forty per cent of change management practitioners surveyed are in a change management leadership role. The majority spend less than half their time on change management activities.
Regardless of grade, forty per cent of respondents lead a change management or transformation unit, project or other unit involved in change or transformation:
The job functions of the remaining 60 per cent are varied. They either work in the central change management function but not as its lead, elsewhere in the organization but with part-time responsibilities in the central change management function, or elsewhere in the organization with part-time responsibilities outside the central change management function.
We don’t currently know how many change managers exist within the UN system; nor do we know how many personnel have change management functions within their terms of reference or how many are guiding or driving change management outside their terms of reference. Their function is not always visible. They are spread across different teams, ranging from human resources, executive offices, strategy to business transformation and change teams.
The first edition of the State of Change Management in the UN System was not a census. But 122 people engaged in the survey and 104 respondents completed enough for their data to be included in our analysis. We also know, thanks to some of these respondents’ answers, that there are many more change management practitioners across the UN family – not all of whom are identifiable by job title (see above) or self-identify as such. Subsequent editions of the State of Change Management in the UN System will aim to reach even more practitioners and analyze their perspectives. It is worth noting that UN organizations recognize the role of leaders and managers in change, and hence agreed to feature change management as a topic in the leadership and management programmes delivered by UNSSC for them.
They are versed in a range of skills, expectedly ranking project management and change management as their top-level skills. Unexpectedly, however, 43 per cent of all participants report little or no skills in coaching. A large majority of respondents indicate not being skilled or having few skills in organizational psychology (73 per cent) and behavioural science (66 per cent). The latter was a skills area identified as “an important catalyst to better serve people and planet” by the Quintet of Change in the UN 2.0 internal transformation effort.
Organizations with more than 5,000 personnel house a higher percentage of change management practitioners with little or no skills in these areas. These two skills are also absent from the range of team skills reported by leads of central change management functions, confirming a systemic gap in this area.
Notably, 64 per cent of participants report having little or no experience in the type ‘UN Reform’, 58 per cent indicate the same for workforce performance, and 44 per cent for organizational alignment. Moreover, 39 per cent of participants report little or no experience in culture change. This proportion goes up to 45 per cent in organizations of more than 5,000 personnel.
In contrast, 46 per cent of participants have advanced or expert experience in business transformation, and 40 per cent in new ways of working.