Change management needs to change – Build an adaptability advantage

Keeping up with the pace of change

Any business in today’s fast-moving environment that is looking for the pace of change to slow is likely to be sorely disappointed!

Leaders are confronted with an increasing rate of change and complexity and need to find ways to deal with it.

As a recognized discipline, change management has been in existence for over half a century. Yet despite the huge investment that companies have made in tools, training and thousands of books, most studies still show a 60-70% failure rate for organisational change projects – a statistic that has stayed constant from the 1970’s to the present.

Organizations were never built to be adaptable

The problem is, organizations were never built to be adaptable.

Those early management pioneers set out to build companies that were disciplined, not resilient. They understood that efficiency comes from routinizing the non-routine.

Adaptability, on the other hand, requires a willingness to occasionally abandon those routines – and in most organizations there are precious few incentives to do that.

Rethink change management – Build an adaptability advantage

Don’t view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business

Will change readiness be the new change management?: the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance:

• Change awareness is a company’s ability to redefine itself as necessary
• Change agility represents a company’s ability to engage people in pending changes
• Change reaction is the ability to appropriately analyze problems, assess risks, and manage the reactions of employees
• Change mechanisms should encourage clear goal alignment across functions, the ability to integrate a change into existing systems, accountability for results, and reward systems that reinforce desired change behaviors.

A company that is adept at managing change remains agile and can continuously generate sustainable competitive advantage. Organizational change capability will be a competitive advantage.

Why change management needs to change

Leading a company through change has become different from how it was ten to twenty years ago. Mobilizing employees, engaging them successfully, motivating them, informing them, using the talent and potential of people and teams, it all is crucial.

Everyone agrees that change management is important. Making it happen effectively, however, needs to be a core competence of managers and not something that they can pass off to others.

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Change management needs to change – Build an adaptability advantage — https://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/gdq
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