Solving organisational lag

Have you ever started a change or transformation project and then realised months later, that the progress is behind what you expected? In your mind you the organisation to be working on the next things, but it still has not finished the last? Maybe you are experiencing organisational lag. Would you like some ideas how to solve it?

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Is your organization going through organizational structural or process changes at the moment, and it's not moving as fast as you would like it to. Maybe you keep realizing that things are just not progressing at the speed they could be. And in your mind, you're already five steps ahead. I want to be working on the next great things. However, the organization isn't coming as quickly as you'd need it to be, this is what we call organizational lack. If you'd like some main tips to find out where that comes from, and also what you can do to speed up the process. Please stay I'm James, a management consultant with over 15 years of experience in the field of leadership training and leading corporate change. And today we talk about organizational lack. So what it's

Speaker 2: 0:58

Organizational lack. It's the phenomena that's after communicating a decision to change processes, change organizational structures, change ways of working, or maybe switch from a more feature oriented company to a product oriented company. And initially the next management level is bought in and plans are made to drive it forward. Then however months later, maybe two, maybe three, maybe nine, we find out there very little has happened. And that frustration is large within both managers and the teams we realize it's going to slow. And that's, even though we did a great job, we put a lot of thought into the decision, found out the best possible ways of doing it. Maybe even had a structural organizational consultant on board to help communicated it effectively and did our best to follow up with the next level of leadership and still in the teams. Not much or very little as happened. I had a case in the company I was asked to come and support and exactly this situation. They communicated a structural change in sales and product areas. It should have taken about three months to execute and nine months later still the progress was far behind. So the first thing I did was a questionnaire with all the involved employees. We wanted to find out what's going on and next to many other results, we found out three, rather worrying ones. 84% of the employees had lost their trust in management. 75% of employees believe the change will not work. And a whopping 78% of employees still didn't understand why the change was really needed. Despite best efforts of top leadership, to explain why intensively in a different department of the same company, we ran a change to gain the lead principals to see the difference. The difference was instantly measurable. The low trust in management went down to 17% employees not understanding the change went down to 9% and the employees believing the change will not work, went down to 13%. So basically 180 degree to taking those factors and others into account. We calculated that for the first department with the less moderated change, there was a 28% loss of productivity due to the change versus the department with very well managed change was only a 5% loss of productivity. That's added up to an additional 15 people, 15 FTE per year productivity with the well-managed change, the amount of projects they were able to complete was considerably higher. I'd now like to introduce you to three key success factors that can make change more effective and reduce organizational lack. Number one is transparency in the first department, the one where change just was not progressing. There was a real clear problem that there was very little transparency. People might have known what they were doing in regards to the change, but they definitely didn't know what other teams or the departments were doing and have an overview of the progress. Actually, in most cases, they didn't even know what they should really be doing. In regards to the change in the test department, we built a Kanban system right from the start, which worked at all levels, both senior management, middle management team leads, and all the teams had a clear camera on board. They defined all of their tasks and had continuous overview of who was responsible for what and which parts of the chains were in which progress and what stages, what was working, what was lacking. This overview really helped control the change program. And also because many teams were progressing really well, helped motivate those teams that might have been a little bit slower, uh, pull in their weights as well and get moving quickly. Transparency is an absolute key to making sure that change can work because if not people tend to get lost and especially get lost in their daily business, which brings me to point number two, overload changing takes time. Changing ways of working takes time. It's very obvious. We all know it's the question at hand is how well is that time plant? Hmm. In my experience, very few organizations plan in time to actually conduct organizational changes. So that leads to people having to do the work on top of their normal daily work. And as it needs to be done on top of the normal daily work and daily business, maybe that's coding programming, project management, product ownership, sales, it usually gets done well in the quickest, possible ways. And the focus of course always switches back to what's the right at hand serving customers and making sure systems are working, which means that when a person needs to prioritize, what am I going to do? Work on the change or work on the customer's right in front of me, they're very likely to decide to the customers and the situations that are right in front of them, which delays the change. And the final points we need to discuss is communication and interaction. Now, naturally, if you're sat there and you find out 2, 3, 4, 6 months after a change initiative has started that it's not progressing as desired. And is in fact maybe further behind than you would ever have expected. It's very understandable to get frustrated. And a default behavior, many top leaders go for is to try and apply pressure, okay. Maybe first try and find out what's going on. And then usually pressure gets applied. And when we apply pressure, that makes a very clear signal towards the teams. It makes a clear signal that we don't trust that they're doing their best. And that's very dangerous because then you have teams of maybe a hundred, maybe 200, maybe 300 people, or maybe just 30. And because pressure is applied to them, they feel that you don't trust they've done their best. However, in the meantime, over the past month, they've been doing the best for the customers, for development, for the systems, trying to implement the change as well on top of a normal workload, potentially working extra hours and you know, doing their best once pressure is applied the recognition for all of that effort disappears, and it shows them that you don't trust them at least once what they perceive, even if you don't mean it, that's what gets perceived. And as soon as someone has the feeling that they are not trusted, that quickly turns into their trust in leadership, demolishing and diminishing. And that can then be the trigger for a lot of further delay and a greater organizational lack. So what is required in regards to communication? Well, we need to communicate that we'd like to understand the situation, look at where it is. Be prepared to press a restart button, be prepared to introduce transparency, be prepared, to introduce time, to be able to conduct the change to slow down a little bit. So then at the end of the day, speed up considerably and achieve the growth rather than becoming one of those 70% of change initiatives that stay way behind the original plan. There's never a better time to reorganize a change than the time that we realized it needs reorganizing. On that note we finished

Speaker 1: 9:19

For today, please visit us at gain the lead dot D E or finders on LinkedIn on our business page or under the hashtag GT L podcast. We can meet here again in two weeks time to discuss together the topic of ownership and how can we raise a sense of ownership throughout all levels in a remote working environment.