Adaptability Key to Corporate Change (7/15)

Adaptability Key to Corporate Change

Any combination of six common, yet potentially fatal, leadership errors can cause the failure of a major corporate change initiative, says Doug Wesley, president and founder of Florida-based ChangeCraft Corporation, a company specializing in corporate culture transformation. The errors are vision blindness, not knowing when to start, not knowing your place, playing by old rules, never being satisfied and not knowing when to quit.

"Some leaders become so deeply committed to advancing their values and ideals that they lose their peripheral vision of today's realities," says Wesley. He refers to this as vision blindness -- being so sure that your vision for the future is right that you fail to take into account critical factors, either internal or external.

Not knowing when to start can be just as fatal to a change effort. "An organization can wait so long to accept an inevitable change that it may be impossible to catch up with those who invested earlier in the new skills and systems," says Wesley. "When a company is behind the curve like this, it finds itself losing contests to recruit talented people; it may also become a burial ground for other companies' employees who were unable, or unwilling, to accept the change."

Since successful organizational change is a collaborative effort, not knowing your place can put a company at a disadvantage from the get-go. And playing by the old rules, says Wesley, won't even get you off the starting block. "Implementing organizational change is an offensive activity designed to create a new -- and desired -- reality. Transformational change disrupts familiar patterns. When the leaders of a company set a new direction, it is evident that people who produce, sell, and deliver products or services must change the ways they work," he explains.

Never being satisfied and not knowing when to quit can lead a company to continue changing, even when it's no longer necessary, or even healthy, for a company's growth. Wesley says company leaders can avoid these errors by weaving the visions of others into their strategic direction and by identifying change sponsors and change agents, who are responsible for endorsing and implementing the necessary change processes within the organization.

"Large, complex organizations must adapt systematically and successfully to change," says Stephan Haeckel, director of strategic studies at IBM's Advanced Business Institute and author of "Adaptive Enterprise." Haeckel is the creator of a new strategic model he calls sense-and-respond, which makes it possible for large companies to execute the kind of flexible, close-to-the-customer strategies newcomers have used against them. "The only kind of strategy that makes sense in the face of unpredictable change is to become adaptive," says Haeckel.

To overcome employee resistance, three behaviors are needed, adds Don Harrison, president of Implementation Management Associates in Brighton, Colorado. "Many managers focus on the easiest and least effective behavior, expressing commitment, and on the second most effective behavior -- modeling commitment. But what's most important is reinforcing commitment with planned resource allocation and formal and informal rewards or punishments."