In today’s ever-changing business landscape, companies need to understand their ability to change. There are currently systems that rate companies on 9 common characteristics and skills. These ratings highlight strengths and weaknesses – and help companies determine their overall readiness for change.
The power of change is a major indicator of performance. High-scoring companies are more profitable, have a stronger capacity for growth, offer better returns on investment to their shareholders, unite higher-rated leaders and corporate cultures, and have more engaged employees.
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In an ever-changing world, businesses cannot hope to thrive without understanding their own ability to change.
What type of business are you in?
To better understand your company’s change archetype, ask yourself these questions:
| In search of refocusing | Stucked and Skeptical | Aligned but constrained | Struggling to hold |
|---|---|---|---|
| – Does your team have doubts about the direction your business is taking? – Are there continual debates about the direction to follow? – Do the efforts made seem disjointed? | – Do the emerging ideas remain blocked where they are emitted? – Do the employees within the company seem disconnected? – Are the results taking longer than necessary to occur? | – Do you feel like you are walking on muddy ground? – Are you worried about not having the right talent to achieve your goals? – Do you have to struggle to get around everything that happens? | – Are your teams suffering from burnout? – Do you have the feeling of spending your energy for nothing? Are you slow to make decisions and adapt your approach when conditions change? |
In search of refocusing
The strength of these companies lies in their energy. They have had many successes. They are constantly innovating and their employees are able to accomplish a lot. However, like young children playing football, all employees want the ball. This group clearly has weaknesses in direction and connection purpose.
To address this, leaders in this group should focus on the big picture, connecting business activities to mission and strategy. They must define an ambitious plan and then tell the story again of how the people of the company can turn this ambition into reality. It can also be useful to identify key initiatives and assign them to agile teams, able to connect different disciplines, functions and departments of the company.
Stucked and skeptical
Companies recognize in this archetype have good ideas and have achieved many successes in the past, but a significant part of their change is confined to the local level. They tend to underestimate the full scope of what they have undertaken. They are generally weak when it comes to action, scaling, and connection. Innovations seem delayed and do not spread within the company. This makes employees demotivated because they wonder why all the efforts made produce such a low impact. No leader can get out of this situation alone. Success can only emerge if leaders rekindle the enthusiasm of employees, starting to tell a new story and convince them that they can achieve it.
Aligned but constrained
In companies in this situation, employees perform as a unit, unite together and are all looking in the same direction. Early success has raised their expectations and they now face strong constraints. These companies do not really have the necessary profiles to embody key positions in the management of the increasing changes and the numerous ruptures that this implies.
To solve these problems, these companies must identify and address the bottlenecks in their capacities. They may need to rearrange their priorities and add resources when necessary. This involves closing skills gaps within the business, bringing in new talent and helping existing talent develop new skills.
Struggling to hold
In this case, the teams are in a grueling race. Every day, participants must adapt to changing, unpredictable terrain and the strategies of their competitors. Companies in this category must better anticipate what awaits them around the corner and learn to adjust their strategies accordingly. To trigger this transformation, they must first take stock. Is their strategic direction still relevant? If not, they need to set new priorities and allocate their resources differently.
Today, more than ever, companies must measure, understand and boost their capacity for change. These are unprecedented times and the challenge for any leader is to build and maintain businesses that will thrive in a world that is constantly accelerating and subject to unpredictable change. In order to boost the power of change, here are 3 key steps:
1. Rely on facts
Identify precisely what you can and must improve. Small changes today are better than big changes later i.e. test, learn and repeat
2. Disrupt the way of working
Address current and future changes not according to separate projects but by reasoning in terms of organizational change.
3. Mobilize managers and leaders
Transformations are the best training ground for the next generation of leaders. In order to disrupt old patterns, it is important to adopt a new approach and decisively improve its capacity for change.