Do your Leaders say they support a transformational change, but then don’t have the time to participate in critical meetings? Is it like pulling teeth to get Leaders to make a decision? Is your organization plagued by infighting and politics between Leaders?
After over 30 years of change management consulting, Don Harrison, President of IMA, has a lot to say about implementing transformational change. In IMA's recent webinar on The Human Side of Transformational Change, Don shared his tips on how to improve execution success of these big, complex changes. He touched on topics such as:
What happens when change overload confronts transformational change? Too much going on, with resources diffused across too many projects-- if this sounds like your organization, you are not alone! The result is that in the rush to "get it done," the project team becomes focused primarily on meeting milestones and technical objectives, with pressure to not add resources that could affect given budget constraints.
Transformational change is by definition, highly disruptive. It involves significant changes to processes, structure, and technology-- and ultimately produces changes in how people do their jobs on a daily basis. Change Agents who are assigned to implement transformational change are usually charged with building readiness. Often, though, there is no comprehensive change strategy-- it's a shotgun approach mostly focused on training end users.
A common barrier to success for organizations seeking transformation is that there is inherent risk-aversion which becomes a cultural barrier to transformational change. If you are seeking to truly transform you just can’t do it if people are fearful of making decisions and taking some level of risk. One of the most common pathologies we see in organizations today is that risk-aversion has slowed down decision-making and progress to a virtual crawl.
Remember that famous line from the classic movie "Cool Hand Luke?" "What we have here is a failure to communicate." Well, when it comes to transformational change, what we have here is a failure to inspire. If "transformational change" becomes nothing more than a cover for downsizing, it will be extremely difficult to get the demonstrated commitment you need to implement transformationally different processes, systems, and structures.
External market forces are having a huge impact on global organizations. The question this raises from a change management perspective is whether your current change management methodology is sufficiently robust and scalable to fully address the impact of these forces on your organization.
So many organizations are investing in some level of business transformation--healthcare transformation, HR transformation, IT transformation, one company solutions. These are complex changes that have many moving parts, just from the technical implementation perspective.
There is likely no more important Change Agent activity than getting Sponsors to provide the visible commitment you need for transformational change success. We use the term "contracting" to describe these meetings because the most effective meetings involve an exchange of needs and offers.
There may be no industry undergoing more significant and rapid change than healthcare. Transformational changes abound, whether it is in healthcare delivery (clinical redesign and transformation) or on the support side with changes created by electronic medical records or ICD 10.
