In today’s climate, organizations are facing unprecedented challenges. Challenges that require a transformation from the historical paradigms of working to an innovative approach to the work environment and organizational success. Transformation, a word that in recent years has been popularized as the next thing. Organizations are engaging in massive change initiatives often derailed 6 to 12 months into an organizational transformation strategy. Why, you say, because many organizations fail to understand the root of organizational transformational success. Seeing many organizations start and fail repeatedly, I feel it necessary to help organizations understand the three key aspects to successful transformation. Successful transformation is achieved through understanding, implementing, and evaluating the three aspects of aligning leadership, understanding people, and speaking in process.
The coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has made organizations acutely aware of how significant and challenging change is to organizational success in a time of crisis. During this crisis, leaders and employees are trying to understand, document, and manage the day to day, while also navigating changing business paradigms.
To help these organizations, we must all keep the following in mind to work toward successful transformation through implementing change:
Align leadership
The first aspect is that all leaders must allow for failure. The transformation of an organization only continues when people are allowed and encouraged to fail. Allowing the space for processes to fail and teams to learn through continual experimentation allows for increased capability, capacity, and competence. Teams that are allowed to own processes and are empowered by transparent leadership communication thrive. Communication allows experiential learning to develop competence further and lead to successful continual change through continuous improvement. Leaders provide direction while also empowering frontline staff to enact changes that improve day-to-day operations. Alignment of leadership and a changing culture that allows for continual growth will help employees feel motivated and continue overall organizational growth.
Understand People
The second aspect is understanding the most crucial organizational resource, people. The key to understanding people is understanding a person’s motivation. By establishing a relationship and building a report with others, we start to communicate our values and what drives us to work. It is said that culture eats strategy; however, in truth, without a robust strategy, culture can deteriorate at an exponential rate. Once leadership has been aligned with the direction through transparent communication. Leaders must then encourage our people to make changes that can drive better outcomes. In the pursuit of empowerment, providing an environment and culture where employees can define more robust processes, fail, and implement changes is essential for organizations to implement successful transformations. People will naturally work toward more essential processes that will allow the organization to regularly achieve excellent outcomes when valued and appreciated for their contributions.
Speak in Process
The third aspect is that robust processes enable teams to achieve excellence regularly.
W. Edward Deming once said, “If you cannot describe what you are doing as a process, you do not know what you are doing.” There is truth in that statement. We define what we do and the success of our jobs based on performance. Creating an environment where people are empowered to own, innovate, and implement process changes toward standardization and efficiency encourages a culture of change.
By providing an environment for individuals and teams to innovate processes, continually redefining success, leaders drive change and overall transformation. We can achieve this type of environment by focusing on the overall process rather than executing. Taking the people out of the process ensures the teams can talk about what they do. When individuals can do this to a standard, transformation on an organizational level can genuinely be successful.
Keeping these three aspects of successful transformation, organizations can become more effective at implementing successful transformation in a post-pandemic era.
