Jessica Kriegel, our chief scientist of workplace culture, recently held an online coffee chat to discuss change management approaches, their downsides, and a better way to tackle change. Here are the highlights.
Many business leaders look at change management as episodic—something that goes from A to B. To make the change to B, you have to understand what’s different between A and B. There may be new job roles and skills required, along with the need to train everyone around B to the extent it applies to them. And if some don’t get on board with the change, then you need to reconfigure and right-size teams. Once you’ve implemented change related to B, you can start the process over again as you move to C, D, and so on.
This approach leaves leaders constantly trying to figure out what the next change should be and rolling it out through what can become a cumbersome effort. Instead, you need to build a muscle for change, so you’re able to architect your entire company as a change company.
Organizations can build the muscle for and achieve positive results from change by continually aligning purpose, strategy, and culture. In research we did with Stanford, we found that organizations exhibiting this alignment had more adaptive cultures and experienced significantly greater revenue growth. In other words, they were better positioned to drive results.
Using a framework like The Results Pyramid® gives leaders a way to achieve this continuous alignment—so they can shift from being a project-to-project company to an adaptive company.
Watch Jessica’s coffee chat to learn more about this framework and other tools that can promote greater change management success.
