How to Make a Difference
No viable company is standing still in today’s volatile business climate.  Every organization must develop the ability to transform dramatically and quickly in response to market demands and opportunities, and every organization faces leadership changes, strategic reorganizations, and any number of challenges that require focused transformation efforts.

Executives struggling with how to confront these challenges often designate key staff areas, like human resources, merger and acquisition groups, strategic planning, organization development, or marketing to manage the task.  Other organizations create ad hoc transition teams or task forces comprised of representatives from different departments.

However formulated, these staff groups and teams often welcome having an avenue to full strategic partnership at the upper levels of the organization.  Simultaneously, they are daunted by the demands the new role places on them.  They sense that they may be in over their heads.  Self-doubt undermines their confidence and eagerness.

To complicate matters, these transformation teams often have to work within an intricate organization construct that may not easily accept the changes that are necessary, for example, when numerous independent business units must learn to engage together.  And, the complexity of the task often results in the team underestimating the volume of work and the time and resources required.  Finally, the team may feel enormous pressure to deliver the benefits the company has calculated.

To maximize the return a company gets from its transformation efforts, it must invest in the development of its transformation resources. Typically, these groups need help with three things:

• Internal Alignment. At the very beginning of the project, teams need help discerning the complexity of their challenge. They must understand the scope of their role, define their objectives, formulate plans and strategies, and identify and obtain needed resources. They often need help finding the best ways to work together. This clarity, provided at the outset of the project, jump starts the team into the charge-driven high gear that these projects require. Even when a group is accustomed to working with one another, the complexity that accompanies transformations introduces new rules of the road. Every transformation team needs some support at the start, yet it can be easily overlooked.
  
  
• Models, Frameworks, and Tools. Once there is internal alignment to the strategic objective, the transformation team needs to be equipped with the mental models, frameworks, and tools that will bring out their best thinking and judgment. They probably need, for example, a much more robust management toolkit than they have needed for their regular jobs. They likely need diagnostic tools (work process analysis, culture surveys, risk assessment), modeling tools (financial, cultural, behavioral), planning tools (strategic, change management), and execution tools (measurement scorecards, communications, reinforcement tools).
  
  
• “Transforming” Competencies. Finally, team members often find that their new role requires them to demonstrate behaviors and skills that drive transformation in a different way than they have in the past, for example, the ability to get work done through influence rather than control. In addition, the scope and complexity of the task may require more holistic and integrated thinking than has been required of the team members in the past.

<< Back to Insights  |  go to page 2 >>