Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Change Management as a Journey of a Thousand Steps

It’s important to determine what the future needs to look like, and what the transformation must look like. 

Change is never for its own sake, it’s about business improvement or innovation. Change Management has to make an objective assessment of whether change efforts achieve the expected business results or not, The purpose of the large scale transformative change is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business results and unlocking the full business potential. It is critical to understand that digital transformation is multifaceted and needs to be done with a “big picture”; and it is a journey of a thousand steps..

Provide strong leadership: Being a digital leader is a thorny journey with many ups and downs on the way. The strong leadership competency can differentiate a real transformational leader from many transactional managers; they are quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging digital transformation initiatives.

With an unprecedented level of uncertainty, hyperconnectivity, interdependence, and fierce competition, today’s digital leaders need to become the thoughtful and creative multi-dimensional thinker, have self-awareness to understand their inner self, talent, and limitations. What keeps leaders successful is their intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be open to learning and applying these learning as they move forward. They demonstrate adaptability, consistency, profundity, and empathy to master business dynamic and keep improving their leadership maturity.

Communicate extensively: Digital means the increasing speed of changes. Regarding communication of change and new initiatives, it's very important to remember that change occurs on a continuum. You need to help your audience to wrap their brains around what will change, what the timeline is, what the benefits are and what the desired outcomes of the change are. Thus, communication needs to be continuous, creative, and consistent.

Today’s workforce is multigenerational, multicultural and multi-devicing, creative communicators can connect the heterogeneous audience. You need to tailor what you say when you say it, and how to say it to the audience. Respect your audience's cognitive diversity. Instead of how you want to communicate, it would be better to understand what method or means or mode of communication will make the receiver comfortable, and try to send the message which appeals to them. Build stronger teams and make effective cross-functional communication.

Apply the high level of digital culture, energy, and morale: Building a culture of learning and creating accountability in the ever-expanding workplace is a multi-layered and multi-dimensional management issue in today’s environment. If your culture embraces the future, inspires others, being a customer fanatic, and then it forms the dynamic digital environment and create business synergy.

When having the conversations about culture, keep in mind that it is the policies, procedures, rewards, and retributions that drive and groom advanced mind, good behavior and it is the employee behavior that expresses "culture." In order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, apply the level of digital culture, energy and morale and build collective confidence. Culture adoption happening is like a wave, keep fresh ideas flow, derive profitable actions, and make a positive influence. The right culture is the invisible but critical success factor to lead the business ecosystem running smoothly with the goal to build a digital-savvy organization.

Deliver tangible & visible business benefits: Change is never for its own sake, it’s about improvement or innovation to achieve high performance results. Strategy management, change management, and performance management are often not silo management disciplines, but a holistic management approach which needs to connect many relevant dots to involve development, enablement, and enhancement.

When the strategic goals further cascade down to operational objectives, it becomes more traceable and measurable. There’s no doubt that the well-defined measures and KPIs are important factors to manage performance and keep track of Change Management results clearly. It’s their own benefit for the organization to communicate and collaborate, build the “horizontal” organizational interdependence and vertical accountability to explore and expand, synchronize change at the right pace, to achieve visible business benefit and tangible business results.

Manage risks effectively: With the exponential growth of information and high velocity of changes, in business, every day is a risk, but when a company embarks on a growth strategy, the risk curve will always be greater than a business as usual approaches. Risk management needs to lift up from risk control or mitigation to risk intelligence which can identify the potential business growth opportunities. As long as risks have been identified and agreed with stakeholders as per business needs, you can take place a risk models which effectively predict, optimize, and consider a continual and sustainable approach with multi-faceted perspectives, and specific threshold for justifying opportunities and business outcome.

Assuming that in any risk management program, all the known and potential risks would have been covered and managed, and over a period of time, the enterprise risk management would be making continuous improvement based on the feedback from the risk management processes and improve business resilience, adaptability, and differentiated competency.

Going digital is a journey with a thousand steps. It’s important to determine what the future needs to look like, and what the transformation must look like. Successful businesses are the ones that have learned how to strike the delicate balance and implement change time after time and build it as a solid ongoing business competency.

Ultimately, organizations can reach the healthy business cycle with the right balance of fluidity and stability, innovation and standardization, transaction and transformation, and ultimately reach the next level of organizational maturity.

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