Six mistakes can derail your company's attempts to change, according to the spotlight article in the January-February 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review: "Accelerating Corporate Transformations (Don't Lose Your Nerve!)" by Robert H. Miles. Here are the six problems that can slow your corporate transformation to a crawl (the author suggests you attack them sequentially):
- Cautious management culture. Compel all executives to confront reality and agree on ground rules for working together.
- Business-as-usual management process. Run a no-slack launch on a parallel track with regular systems; make sure there are early, visible victories.
- Initiative gridlock. Limit the company to three or four initiatives.
- Recalcitrant executives. Compress launch to quickly engage key executives and to identify those not on board.
- Disengaged employees. Rapidly cascade the changes to all employees to boost engagement.
- Loss of focus during execution. Anticipate and defuse postlaunch blues, midcourse overconfidence, and the presumption of perpetual motion.
This is an excellent article for any executive or senior team planning to launch major organizational change or transformation and we highly recommend it. We do however have a different take on a key point of the article - that transformation launches must be "bold and rapid". The article opens with the author's reflection on 25 years of research and working with CEOs responsible for transformations. The common CEO lament is "we should have - and could have - moved faster. Such executives have a long list of regrets: They wish they had unified the leadership team right away. They wish they had engaged employees sooner, and quickly drummed up support for the new vision. They wished they hadn't waited so long to test their assumptions and refine their key initiaitves..."
Is anyone asking the question - why the delay in each of these areas? After all, we're talking about highly successful CEOs and executive teams here. Hint: it might have something to to do with the order of 6 mistakes above - certain ones are far more critical than others, more difficult to address, and easier to avoid. And they can't be solved with boldness, speed, and "rapid all employee cascades"...
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