Large-Scale Change
Overcoming obstacles, minimizing disruptions
Constant change is a given in most organizations today, but that doesn’t make it any easier to manage. As each wave of change begins, uncertainty, ambiguity, and lack of information fuel anxiety and diminish performance. As a leader, you may find the management levers you count on suddenly stop working, leaving you with the uncomfortable feeling you’ve lost control.
We can work with you to:
- Understand the true scope of required change
- Design and implement a comprehensive change plan and process
- Shape political dynamics to generate support and alignment of the leadership team and board around a vision for the future
- Motivate constructive behavior and provide ways for people to participate in planning their future
- Use communication in ways that enable and sustain change
- Develop leaders who are aligned with and capable of executing the change
- Measure and monitor progress in order to make refinements or mid-course corrections
- Mapping the future through collaboration
You know that the best strategy in the world is worth little if it’s not implemented successfully. And you know that the key to successful implementation is to have the strategy built and “owned” by the leaders you’re counting on to deliver. But experience has taught you how time-consuming and frustrating it can be to get a team of strong-willed executives to agree and then deliver on a plan.
We will work with you to structure a disciplined and collaborative approach to strategic planning and implementation that engages the key players in a productive way to deliver results quickly:
- It starts by developing a shared view about where your company is today—an assessment of the business the organization is in, its strengths and weaknesses, the external environment in which it plays, and its opportunities
- It encourages leaders to explore a broad range of alternate scenarios, expand thinking, and ensure multiple possibilities are on the table
- It builds alignment through a rigorous assessment of strategic options against established criteria
- It engages the board while keeping the process management-driven, which helps ensure that board support can be obtained quickly and implementation can begin immediately
- It recognizes that the business doesn’t grind to a halt to allow strategic planning to happen—that you must simultaneously keep up the momentum on multiple current strategic initiatives while mapping the future
- It defines a detailed roadmap – the implementation plan, including transition
Using assessment to sustain change
In many organizations, there’s a lot of measuring going on, but it’s happening in a vacuum – disconnected from the change or business strategy. We will work with you to help you build capacity to make organizational assessment and change measurement a fundamental part of how you lead by:
- Choosing the right method of data collection for the desired result—determining your employees’ readiness for change, gaps between your culture and that of a company you’re acquiring, how well a team is functioning, or what you need to address in your development
- Designing the tools and processes that will ensure high-quality data
- Interpreting and deriving meaning from the results by increasing your capacity to untangle symptoms from root causes, translate data into valuable insights about organizational and people issues, and make effective decisions
Securing stakeholder commitment
We help CEOs and senior leaders navigate change and improve performance by strategically using communication and engagement. This will enable you to:
- Make executive team communication effective: Clarifying the key ideas you want to convey and translating abstract ideas into simple and compelling messages
- Align leadership: Articulating a meaningful vision and strategy, and building commitment among senior leaders
- Increase the pace of change by engaging internal and external constituencies: Gathering and analyzing stakeholder input, and planning and implementing integrated communication and engagement efforts
- Build communication capability: Designing effective communication functions, teams, processes, and tools
- Reduce risk: Maintaining company reputation through periods of fundamental change
- Measure success: Creating meaningful measures of the value of communication and engagement actions to monitor and track progress
