Research consistently shows only about 30% of change efforts succeed. So why increase your chances of failure? Most top executives know intuitively that managing change is important. But in working with college presidents, manufacturing CEOs and health care leaders, I’m continually surprised by the lack of understanding about the fundamental dynamics of successful organizational change. Here are three of the most common mistakes I see leaders making when trying to implement major strategic initiatives. Are you falling into these traps?
Inability to Address “The Vision Thing”
The president of a well-known college knows she has to dramatically shift the school’s business model to survive against unsustainable competition. (No, not Sweet Briar College, which recently announced it was closing.) She launches a series of strategic initiatives but with only minimal input from her team.
Major organizational changes inevitably require serious behavioral and structural changes. This won’t happen unless your key stakeholders are emotionally engaged in achieving a new outcome. The president’s failure to take time to get input from her executive team about what the future of the organization should look like, as well as ideas about potential solutions, meant the senior staff wasn’t emotionally committed to making change happen. This greatly increased the risk of major resistance later on.
One way to jump-start this “buy in” process is with a visioning workshop, which I often run for clients. These half-day sessions can include a broad range of stakeholders who are asked to share their aspirations and ideas about how the organization should address current challenges. These emotionally charged events, focused on creating a positive future for the organization, go a long way to creating buy in for major initiatives.
Unwilling to Create & Sustain Urgency
The head of North American operations for a major steel company knows that poor succession planning is a serious threat to the firm’s future. Recruiting and developing the next generation of leaders is a real challenge in this traditional industry. The problem is well recognized in the company, but this executive has not created enough urgency to generate meaningful change in succession processes.
Change guru John Kotter says failure to create a sense of urgency is “the number one problem” where critical organizational change is needed, but not being implemented effectively. Many top managers today confess to me that their succession planning is inadequate, but the forces undermining urgency in addressing this are insidious because they’re hard to recognize.
Complacency is particularly problematic because even chief executives who feel a sense of urgency about inadequate succession planning may not recognize their executive team is actually okay with the existing situation. Creating urgency is a tricky practice.
One practical step is to focus colleagues on the future levels of performance they are committed to (e.g. specific revenues & growth targets). Then emphasize the quality of capabilities, such as experienced leadership, needed to deliver on those objectives. Getting colleagues to recognize gaps between the organization’s stated goals and capabilities that will be available to deliver on them is an important step in sustaining urgency and focus on changes needed.
Failure to Integrate or Coordinate Initiatives
The provost of a top West Coast research university wants to reinvent how the school provides career development resources to its liberal arts students who are struggling in the changing job market. But an array of new projects he launches seem uncoordinated and unconnected to a coherent strategy.
Leaders at all levels need change management skills, but responsibility for integration or coordination is reserved primarily for top managers. Senior leaders often fail to understand this responsibility when implementing strategic initiatives that involve multiple projects. One of the first steps is to clarify whether the objective is improved integration or coordination. These terms are often used interchangeably, but they imply different objectives and perspectives. It’s important to be clear.
For example, sometimes a higher ed leader’s objective may be to integrate different elements, activities or processes to form a larger subsystem or process supporting students. This may mean combining a diverse set of advising and internship programs into one seamless career development system to eliminate redundancies and improve synergies among different programs.
Alternatively, a president or provost may want to improve coordination between different parts of a university system. In this case, the leader might be trying to tighten the linkages between elements in the student life cycle, such as improving the relationship between academic advising and the school’s career center. Whether the goal is improved integration or coordination, the key skill is thinking more holistically or systemically about implementing strategic changes.
Managing organizational change is more important than ever for leaders. But, given all the demands on executives today, it’s easy to lose track of essential steps in the change process. The cost of doing so can be enormous – in lost time and resources.
What’s your experience with the three steps I’ve identified? Let me know if you think there are others I’ve missed. Contact me if you want to explore ways I can help accelerate the implementation of your change initiative.