How To Stop Struggling With Organizational Change
How Are You Handling Organizational Change?
Does your organization miss some of your strategic objectives each year? Do you have goals that are recycled from last year, with new names? Do departments struggle to see how they fit into the overall business strategy? Is your team tackling new projects while struggling to get the existing ones on track?
You are not alone.
Over 85% of surveyed leaders answer YES to each of these questions. As a result, they put their heads down, create plans in earnest to push forward, and hope that as the year unfolds progress will be made. Too often progress is plagued by delays, cost overruns, missed deliverables, and grumbling from leaders. Unbelievably, Gartner, Forrester, and PMI still report that over 70% of projects fail to meet all their objectives.
Does it feel like you are swimming in a riptide, struggling to keep your head above water while another urgent initiative lands on your plate? It could be the latest reorganization, an acquisition, cost-cutting on the latest new system. Suddenly you’re underwater again, frantically emailing late into the evening, working weekends, pressuring overworked teams to do the same.
Occasionally, you look up, see more change coming and you wonder how to get it all done. It is immense. Overwhelming. Change is accelerating and becoming more and more disruptive. The last ten years have not prepared us for this. The latest HBR article talks about change, but it provides little advice when the riptide means that ‘to do’ lists and time management tools don’t work. How can you prioritize 50 things that are all all ‘critical’?
You Need A Plan
Over three decades, we have learned that a key factor to ensure the success of a business strategy is the ability of leaders and organizations to adapt to and sustain momentum through change. This skill is typically not taught, but instead, learned in the trenches by necessity. Sometimes, Human Resources has a few folks who are change experts, but they are assigned to the ‘big’ projects and too often seem to slow things down.
We have lived in your shoes. We have been executives, not just consultants. We’ve endured those endless meetings when all we wanted to do was get things done. We know the itch of waste. Time. Resources. Potential.
Leaders need a simple, pragmatic, and scalable approach to driving sustainable change. Change management is ‘anticipating and supporting the transitions required to drive sustainable change.’ The degree to which you effectively anticipate and support those transitions is directly proportional to how well a change is sustained. That’s it.
You Need The Right Tools
The LeaderShift ® Transitions Toolkit was created from over twenty years of experience trying just about every change tool and model we could find. They were tested on all sizes of projects in nearly every industry and consistently came up short. The gap was a huge need for a toolkit that was:
- Simple – didn’t require lots of steps or decisions regarding which tools to use
- Integrated – a logical sequence that could be housed all in one place
- Unobtrusive – easily embedded existing work vs. requiring an entire ‘change’ workstream on a project
Too often, we see companies building ‘change teams.’ Either centralized centers of excellence or dedicated project workstreams. The LeaderShift Transitions Toolkit was created to eliminate the need for “change” as separate work and use existing project resources to drive change. After all, projects (all of them) exist to drive change.
This streamlined toolkit enables leaders to strategically build and execute a complete, actionable change plan that ‘gets it right the first time’ and integrates driving change into the existing project work. The plan helps clarify what’s changing and who is impacted, anticipate the transitions they will go through, and capture actions to support them through the transitions required to drive and sustain change.
The LeaderShift® Transitions Toolkit provides a framework to organize information about a change in a simple, usable format that can be leveraged through the life of a project. It enables the team to prepare stakeholders to accept, embrace, and adopt the future state.
At LeaderShift Insights™ we help leaders and teams create alignment to thrive in the face of rapid, disruptive change, so they can deliver more results with what they already have. Our clients include State Bank, Mayo Clinic, SantaFe HealthCare, Anthem, Johnson & Johnson, Home Depot, J.M. Huber, Ingredion, and many more. Need help getting your leaders and teams aligned in the face of rapid, disruptive change? Call us. It’s what we do!