Decoding Business Changes!

About 70% of change management fails. Let’s reflect on why!

I have always been an advocate of change. There is always a need to evolve in such a crowded market. Most organisation in the last 10 years have accepted the need to manage change associated with entrepreneurial growth.

Despite some successes, change remains difficult to pull off, initiatives like technology, automation, re-shaping job roles and changing corporate culture had low success rates. People are involved in these transformational projects, creating a level of emotional disruption in a business.

Studies show that often the reason for most of these failures is the Rush to Change the organisation, the culture. Leaders and managers end up immersing themselves in an endless list of ideas! Thus losing the focus why the change was needed in the first place.

Usually, the ideas usually are divided into two categories.

1) The change method based on economic value, which is the “hard approach” to change based on redundancies, downsizing, and restructuring to maximise a ROI or increase a shareholder value as the only legitimate measure of corporate success. Often this is accompanied by an endless turnaround of change management, where employees are disengaged and HR will start to implement a company culture to bring engagement in a business whose employees have already lost confidence.

2) The change method is based on a “soft approach” to change, based on developing corporate culture, through employees’ behaviour, attitude, capability, and commitment. This has definitely a strong lasting commitment based on psychological contract with their employees, but this will not be enough to bring a fast economic value to shareholders.

Success is often in the balance of the two methods, where restructuring is not just downsizing jobs, but also understanding the contribution of the workforce and what people can provide to an organisation, rather than just a list of skills set in a job description.

Success is also managing contradictions at times along the way during a change, but it requires great will, united leadership, skill, and wisdom.

Often the pressure of fast economic results may lose the focus on the end result and how many times did you find that a big restructure has never achieved his economic reduction on cost?

I have witnessed many situations and I have now advised business owners that it is time to reflect on a different strategy to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in the market.

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