First published on LinkedIn September 28, 2016
People often think transformational change is all about aligning your organisational structure with your strategy and improving the efficiency of your business processes.
They are partly right.
Your organisation is a system with three basic levers – strategy, business process and people. Transformational change most commonly addresses the issue of aligning strategy to business processes through restructuring. But unless you also engage your people in your strategy and nurture the right team culture to deliver it, your organisation will look good on paper, but will fail to live up to your expectations.
The role of leaders in making change stick
There is another lever that determines your overall chances of success, and that is your leadership capability to hold these disparate yet connected elements of the organisation in alignment.
The problem with many transformations is that they overplay the rational and structured elements of that system (strategy, organisation and business process), underplay the emotional connections (people, engagement and team culture), and often do not assess leadership capability at all.
So, how effective is your approach at making transformational change stick? How have you engaged your people in the new strategy and nurtured the right team culture to deliver it? And how as leaders will you hold it all together?
Take part in my research project
I am undertaking some research into the factors that make organisational change stick, which considers this systems-thinking view and other factors that promote or inhibit change. I’d be very grateful for your opinion. The survey will only take a few minutes.
You can take the survey here
Please share with your network
Many thanks
Jeremy J Lewis
@growthepig