Eliminating Disparities & Reducing Disproportionality:
The Role of Change Management

As agencies continuously improve their effectiveness in managing change, they will, as a matter of course, experience opportunities for improvements in eliminating disparity and addressing disproportionality. This is because the underlying factors that support effective change management and effectiveness in general positively impact the root causes of disparity. While agencies may identify opportunities for improvement through discovery, they must follow up with action. Here are some primary examples of how effective change management supports the elimination of disparate treatment:

Agency leaders who are effective change agents establish specific plans and techniques for setting strategy and driving high-level changes. They model values that are spelled out to staff and embedded in performance management and other agency programs. From the top of the agency through front line practice, these leaders promote relationships that are strengths-based, solution-focused, collaborative and empowering. They establish a shared purpose and meaning for the agency’s work based on a clearly articulated vision and direction that exist outside of them as an individual leader. This approach to leadership is the opposite of highly idiosyncratic leadership, a form of leadership that typically creates dynamics within the agency that are highly personalized and subjective, mainly based on winning favor with those in power and therefore likely to result in favoritism and unfair treatment.

Agencies that become more adept at understanding and improving their cultures find that the healthiest culture is one that balances various cultural priorities with the mission to best serve children, youth and families. For example, a cultural priority to “treat staff right” is effectively realized when staff are engaged in constructive and collaborative problem-solving, empowered within specific boundaries to perform at a high level, held accountable in a reasonable and consistent manner, and developed in alignment with strategic priorities. Achieving this cultural effectiveness requires a balanced and nuanced approach, avoiding a culture where staff members are happy and comfortable but clients are no better served or even served poorly. In a balanced and nuanced approach to culture, staff members are by definition engaged more constructively, collaboratively, developmentally, reasonably and consistently.

Every agency has a set of “unspoken rules” by which its members learn how to get things done and reasonably fit in. In an environment where change management is effectively practiced, these rules are designed to fill in the gaps where written rules -- policies, formal goals, objectives and measures, specific guidance conveyed in memos or formal training programs -- cannot and should not be fully comprehensive. An example of such unwritten rules would be those that anchor an agency’s principles and values in daily practice, or those coming from the constructive coaching of a dedicated and experienced supervisor. In an environment where disparate treatment is most likely, unwritten rules typically serve as codes and passwords by which the “in crowd” maintains its control. These unspoken rules are experienced as land mines and stigmatizing factors for those not “in the in crowd.”

Effective change management approaches serve to improve situations where a particular department of function within the organization has felt inequitably treated. Well-planned road maps for change, broad-based projects driven by systematic continuous improvement techniques, and a culture where collaboration and teamwork is a major priority all result in breaking down departmental and functional silos and reinforcing the value that each role, function and perspective brings to the table. In the absence of such effectiveness, departments and functions that are treated as “second class” typically react by either withdrawing and reducing their value to the whole, or by attacking the status quo in non-constructive and cynical ways. As a parallel process, this is also what typically happens when individuals and typecast groups are treated as second class.

Finally, the ultimate aim of effective change management practices is to create a “learning organization,” one that not only performs well today in the service of its clients but also acquires new information, knowledge, insight and innovation each step of the way. Learning by doing at the strategic, major project and daily operating levels of the agency leads to a continuous reshaping of perception and perspective along a developmental, evolutionary path. Learning is arguably the opposite of disparate treatment, as disparity is based on perceptions and perspectives that are too static -- narrowly typing situations and others in a simplistic, black and white, and close-minded fashion. While an overly static orientation to unfolding experiences tends to best serve the short-term interests of those “in the in crowd,” a learning orientation will more likely serve long-term interests of the community as a whole.