How many times have you said to yourself, “I know we could be even better…” but not known what to do to achieve those results? The problem for most people isn’t recognizing that there is a better way to do things. It’s figuring out exactly what to do and moving from “even better” to “even better if…”!
We’re currently in the midst of tremendous uncertainty and economic turmoil throughout the country and around the world. As a result, companies are under even more pressure than usual to streamline operations and improve organizational performance. At times like this, traditional approaches to organizational change won’t deliver the kinds of transformational results anyone wants – or needs – to achieve their intended results.
For example, you might see an opportunity for improvement in one particular area of the business and leverage your core strengths to change the way that work group functions. Or maybe you do some external benchmarking and decide to implement an industry “best practice” approach with that work group. These changes may help for awhile, but they probably won’t have the lasting impact you want them to have. More importantly, these changes are likely to create new problems in other areas of the business.
Why is that? Why does a change in one group cause problems somewhere else in the organization? Well, imagine a high-performance bicycle wheel with four spokes. The spokes of the wheel represent your company’s strategy, processes, systems and people. Now imagine that you change one of the spokes to be bigger or longer than the other three in an attempt to make that one spoke “even better”. How well will that wheel roll now that one of the spokes has improved strength and durability?
Each of these key elements in your organization is related to each other. That means when you change one thing in isolation, you impact everything else. Each part of the organization, including its divisions, departments, functions, and work groups are sub-systems within the overall company. Therefore, changes in one area of the business have significant implications for other areas too.
This common approach to implement organizational changes in isolation is a major reason why as little as 20% of all large-scale change efforts achieve their intended business results. To be effective, we need a more integrated approach. If we don’t look at our organizations as complete systems, we may achieve incremental gains in certain areas, but we surely won’t be effective in creating sustainable change across the entire organization.
At Plus Delta Consulting, we have shown numerous business leaders the systematic steps to take to realign their efforts and increase their team’s effectiveness. Rather than take a myopic view of any organization, we use a more integrated approach and focus our efforts on all four of the following performance factors that are critical to the success of creating sustainable change across an organization:
- Business Strategy – An organization’s business strategy clearly articulates the vision and longer-term objectives for that organization.
- Operating Processes – Defined business processes operationalize the strategic direction within separate but complementary work functions. If the strategy dictates “what” an organization will do, these processes demonstrate “how” they will get there.
- Technology Systems – Whether they are manual or leverage more advanced technologies, an organization’s operating systems enable the tactical execution of their core business processes to occur.
- People & Culture – Last but not least, people use the established systems to perform the actual process tasks that help the organization achieve its key business objectives.
When we use this integrated approach with our clients, we typically start with a Quick Pulse assessment to quickly determine what’s working well as well as what may need to be changed within each performance area. Through this disciplined diagnostic approach, we conduct executive interviews, facilitate employee feedback sessions, perform high-level process analyses, and oftentimes administer an organizational climate survey to get a full picture of the organization’s strategy, process, systems and people. We then use this information to make specific recommendations to improve performance and prepare a suggested roadmap for change.
At the end of this process, our goal is for our clients to complete the statement, “We would be even better if…” As we said before, most people know there is a better way. They just don’t know exactly what to do. So we partner with our clients to prioritize any number of possible actions and then implement those changes to get the organization to the next level. And our commitment is to complete the initial Quick Pulse assessment in 30 days or less so that they can more quickly take that next step towards achieving their intended results.
Can Plus Delta help you create sustainable changes and produce “even better” results? To learn more about our integrated change approach, give us a call at +1 (310) 589-4600 or send an email to [email protected]. You can also visit the Quick Pulse page of our website for more information.
Note: This feature was originally published and distributed in Plus Delta Consulting’s e-newsletter in November 2008.
