Innovation and Dedication: Developing Your Organisation’s Change Capabilities Is an Ongoing Journey
True innovation doesn’t always require genius. Instead, the organisations that succeed at transforming themselves, their products and their strategies for the better have structure, intent and dedication at their core. While the average person doesn’t always realise the importance of proper management in adopting significant change, what they are concerned about is how a company, a financial institution or government is capable of serving their ever-changing needs.
In a world where change is the only constant, Change Capability is at a premium, and the companies that fail to realise this are already at a severe disadvantage. When an organisation must implement change – from new processes to staff restructuring to entering new markets (or all of these together) – a lack of proper oversight can be devastating. Developing the capability to manage the major developments in an organisation properly requires significant investment of time, human resources, strategy and, of course, a budget. But the ROI is good – financial, social and reputational.
Research shows that the majority of changes fail, often due to a lack of care taken in the change management process – usually a result of low change capability. Drivers of this capability include how leaders show up in change, what governance we apply to the people side of projects, how we build change management competency, the structures we put in place to support change management throughout the organisation, and processes that support change management.
At and Change, our mandate is to help organisations build change capability and create, train, and monitor networks of change agents to manage their future transitions.
When it comes to developing these capabilities, the speed at which this happens varies across entities. Governmental organisations, for example, usually require broad consensus from a variety of stakeholders, but once these footholds are secured, the processes to create valuable networks of change managers are the same.
Choosing the right people to become involved in these long, mid and short-term goals is essential. From a strategic perspective, one has to rely on a leader coalition that will continue to uphold the spirit of the change and help express why it is so necessary from a high-level perspective. These Sponsors are usually at the highest level of the organisation and can allocate resources for the planned change capability deployment project.
You can have a fundamentally brilliant strategy. However, you could fail entirely if you cannot find the right people in middle and first-line management to explain the processes and how it can potentially benefit the team. These People Leaders are critical to making sure the change is adopted, coach people on what they can expect, and keep an eye on emerging issues.
One might think that a single person per unit or segment of the business is enough to manage these changes, but employees and leadership come and go, which is why a network of change agents who have all been upskilled is so necessary.
Having a network of people who can manage change effectively means that there are always opportunities to upskill, to train other colleagues and ready themselves for the next exciting part of your organisation’s evolution.
These change agents will be central to facilitating ongoing assessments of what your business requires to continue to develop – because being able to measure the impact of a chance effectively, and address it, is a sign of flourishing Change Capability.
Organisational leaders often forget that change isn’t temporary. But rather than a project, managing change is an ongoing journey, and one that is successful requires a mchnage aturity that comes with planning, experience and forward-thinking.