3 essential actions to transform your business
Instead of concentrating on becoming very good at doing one thing, companies should concentrate on becoming very good at learning to do new things.
Business transformation can no longer be a standalone project. Today’s world is full of rapid change making one-time efforts no longer sufficient. What works today will no longer work in the near future.
Understanding how today’s evolutions affect tomorrow’s business and deciding how to act on it, has become nothing less than a skill to be learnt.
Therefore we must become fast and effective in transforming our business whenever it is required. The competitive advantage, and ultimately the survival of a business depend heavily on this capability.
Here are 3 essential actions that should be on top of the checklist of any company that wants to achieve just that.
1. Distinguish between adaptive and technical challenges
“Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.”- Max McKeown
The fundamental difference
Technical challenges are those that are already within our problem solving expertise. The required procedures, norms, systems and methods are already known and well tested. An expert can handle a technical problem. No meetings, consultations or learning is required.
Adaptive challenges are all around in today’s fast moving business environment. They cannot be solved by a technical expert. We are facing challenges that require us to learn new ways, change our behavior, achieve new understandings and see the world through new filters.
Being able to distinguish between adaptive and technical challenges and to separate a problem into its adaptive and its technical components is a critical change management and leadership skill.
As a manager and consultant I have seen that HR issues are mostly correctly divided into adaptive and technical components. But all other topics are often considered solely as functional matters belonging to specific departments (sales, marketing, operations, service etc), who try to solve them with their specific technical expertise.
How to treat adaptive challenges
Meetings, participatory leadership, research and the development of new paradigms are necessary to solve adaptive issues. The problem is within the people, the processes and the organization.
Handling adaptive issues takes time and it requires a lot of collaboration. But I have seen success stories when companies organize, inspire and empower cross-functional teams capable of applying creative problem solving techniques.
2. Avoid complacency
“The moment you start reducing expectations, you risk introducing complacency.”- Peter Mandelson
Diluted strategical plans
Companies face new challenges and they develop strategical plans to cope with them.
But when this new vision arrives at the desk of the middle management it already seems to be diluted from the original strong need for change. Managers can become complacent when they elaborate and execute the strategical plan.
As a result we risk to find solutions that are far too little disruptive from the old way of conducting our business:
- Commercial plans include few innovative ideas and rely too much on organic growth.
- Operational improvement plans seem to include a lot of wishful thinking, and few concrete and actionable overhaul activities.
- Product development is based on variations of existing products, rather than on real innovation.
- Only symbolical attention is dedicated to the development of new skills and leadership models.
Complacency must be avoided at all costs if we want to get a plan that really changes the course of our business.
How to prevent complacency
This is what we can do to challenge everyone:
- Raise the urgency level by openly communicating the problems the company is facing and the reason why something must be done about it.
- Treat business transformation as a leadership issue, not as a managerial topic. John P. Kotter states in his book Leading Change that Management produces a degree of predictability, whereas Leadership produces real change.
3. Engage your people
“Customers will never love your company until the employees love it first”-Simon Sinek
Understanding employee engagement
Employee engagement starts with recognizing the following 3 basic psychological needs that people have:
- Autonomy: to feel we have a choice and we are the source of our actions
- Relatedness: to have meaningful relations and a sense of purpose
- Competence: to grow and learn every day, and to feel we can cope with everything that happens to us.
Becoming aware of these psychological needs means helping people find their autonomy, relatedness and competence. As a consequence, the newly acquired employee engagement will give a fundamental boost to the transformation of our business.
A clear win-win situation between employees and the company.
Engagement in business transformation
This is how our business transformation project can stimulate employee engagement:
- Communicate a clear vision and mission. It gives purpose to the work of every employee.
- Let all people participate in improvements projects. This increases the autonomyof the people.
- Rely heavily on teamwork. It stimulates constructive work relations.
- Train people in emotional intelligence and other soft skills. It helps them not only in solving adaptive business problems but also in their personal growth.
Conclusion
Instead of concentrating on becoming very good at doing one thing, companies should concentrate on becoming very good at learning to do new things.
It creates a very strong competitive advantage. Furthermore it is a lasting advantage because an adaptive organization will always be one step ahead of its competitors.
Do you want to find out more?
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