Are you joining the 80% of strategy and change attempts that fail?
In this article I share four questions you can use to assess the risk that your organisation’s approach to strategy and change will result in you joining the estimated 80% of strategy and change that fails.
Tick the item if the description applies to your organisation. The more ticks you get, the more likely you are heading for membership of the 80% club – a club that wastes a lot of time, money, and effort, not to mention people’s lives.
The 80% club checklist:
1. There is no people and culture advocate in your top executive team
How often have you heard that statement from CEO’s – “People are our most important asset”. When I hear this, the first place I look is at the roles that report to the CEO. If there is no Head of People there, I’m highly sceptical. People and culture issues are so critical to successful strategy and change in most businesses that if they are not directly represented in the top team, this flags a major risk. It says that people issues are not highly valued or seen as critical to the success of the business and to its strategy and major change.
So if you ticked this item, the right mindset and capability for strategy to succeed is probably absent from your top team – unless people are not key to the success of your business.
Good strategy is often thought to be about analysis of facts and options and rational decision-making by bright people and top leaders. But for strategy to work, it needs impacted people at all levels to do things differently. And one of the underlying realities of change affecting people is that the complexity of how things work in the real world, especially during change, requires people’s support and creative problem solving and the engagement of their hearts as well as their minds. This is where the influence of a capable People and Culture function should be making the difference from the top, down.
Even though it is messier, more time consuming up front, and involves conversations and listening to people (something some people would rather avoid) – it is likely to significantly improve the quality and do-ability of your strategy and change, if people and their feelings are respected and included from the beginning. Listening to the input of impacted people can save a lot of effort and loss of credibility in the fruitless task of trying to convince people that bad strategy and change is good.
Involving people from the beginning and tapping into the hidden wealth of the knowledge, energy and problem solving ability of impacted staff would be a far safer approach - if you are interested in results.
2. Change is outsourced to projects, and leaders can’t explain what is happening or why
I know change is complicated and sometimes upsetting when it involves people, and it is tempting to leave the responsibility to people in project teams. Unfortunately, if you are a manager of people – change is your job. Successful strategy and change needs to be leader-led and understood by leaders at all levels so there is some hope of it working.
Research reported in the Harvard Business Review (Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, by Sull, Homkes, and Sull, HBR March 2015) found that despite lots of “communication” about strategy, business priorities and change, very little understanding of strategy and change actually permeates through an organisation. In fact, the researchers found the problem starts at the top where almost 50% of all top executive team members say they do not have a clear sense of how major priorities and initiatives fit together.
There is little hope for effective implementation of plans and change if staff at all levels don’t even understand what it means for them individually and leaders can’t integrate expected changes into their normal operating rhythm.
3. Culture is something you’ll think about after the change is done
Scary situations (like change that could affect people’s jobs and security) are the most influential times for shaping the culture of an organisation. So whether you plan it or not, how major change is handled creates deep, lasting impressions in the minds of all staff. It tells them about what is important around here and how people are valued – or not.
In one organisation I worked in, the prevailing stories amongst the organisation’s blue collar staff were about how major industrial conflict had been handled twenty years earlier. The mistrust and hurt was still raw for many people and was influencing the current culture.
So if you are planning to put off thinking about the kind of culture you want, don’t kid yourself that culture will wait for you to be ready. It’s being formed in how you go about changes now.
4. You know that staff engagement is important, so you have organised communication sessions to tell staff what is happening
You are certainly right about engagement being important, but it sounds like these sessions are telling, not engaging, staff. That research I mentioned before found how ineffective most communication like this is. They found:
Only 55% of the middle managers could name even one of their company’s top five priorities. In other words, when the leaders charged with explaining strategy to the troops are given five chances to list their company’s strategic objectives, nearly half fail to get even one right.
There is often no consistent and understood story about why change needs to happen, what is going to happen, and what opportunity people will have to influence change that affects them. Communication usually means telling or token listening, not meaningful conversations, listening and giving people the chance to influence outcomes that affect them. True engagement allows people to make sense of change and help shape something that will work.
People’s positive engagement with change is profoundly influenced by whether they believe there has been a fair process before decisions are made. A fair process involves clear understanding of the need for change, having the opportunity to influence change that affects them, and seeing their input has been listened to and taken into account when decisions were made.
The more of these four items you ticked, the more likely you are to be joining the 80% of change that fails. But you may still have time to do something about it. So if you want some help, give me a call.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan helps design and implement people-centred strategy, transformation and performance improvement. Her work involves challenging mind-sets, shifting culture, and engaging people to improve service delivery and performance. Her approach taps into the enormous unused potential of people in organisations to deliver exponentially better results with the right leadership, engagement and strategy.
Tick the item if the description applies to your organisation. The more ticks you get, the more likely you are heading for membership of the 80% club – a club that wastes a lot of time, money, and effort, not to mention people’s lives.
The 80% club checklist:
1. There is no people and culture advocate in your top executive team
How often have you heard that statement from CEO’s – “People are our most important asset”. When I hear this, the first place I look is at the roles that report to the CEO. If there is no Head of People there, I’m highly sceptical. People and culture issues are so critical to successful strategy and change in most businesses that if they are not directly represented in the top team, this flags a major risk. It says that people issues are not highly valued or seen as critical to the success of the business and to its strategy and major change.
So if you ticked this item, the right mindset and capability for strategy to succeed is probably absent from your top team – unless people are not key to the success of your business.
Good strategy is often thought to be about analysis of facts and options and rational decision-making by bright people and top leaders. But for strategy to work, it needs impacted people at all levels to do things differently. And one of the underlying realities of change affecting people is that the complexity of how things work in the real world, especially during change, requires people’s support and creative problem solving and the engagement of their hearts as well as their minds. This is where the influence of a capable People and Culture function should be making the difference from the top, down.
Even though it is messier, more time consuming up front, and involves conversations and listening to people (something some people would rather avoid) – it is likely to significantly improve the quality and do-ability of your strategy and change, if people and their feelings are respected and included from the beginning. Listening to the input of impacted people can save a lot of effort and loss of credibility in the fruitless task of trying to convince people that bad strategy and change is good.
Involving people from the beginning and tapping into the hidden wealth of the knowledge, energy and problem solving ability of impacted staff would be a far safer approach - if you are interested in results.
2. Change is outsourced to projects, and leaders can’t explain what is happening or why
I know change is complicated and sometimes upsetting when it involves people, and it is tempting to leave the responsibility to people in project teams. Unfortunately, if you are a manager of people – change is your job. Successful strategy and change needs to be leader-led and understood by leaders at all levels so there is some hope of it working.
Research reported in the Harvard Business Review (Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, by Sull, Homkes, and Sull, HBR March 2015) found that despite lots of “communication” about strategy, business priorities and change, very little understanding of strategy and change actually permeates through an organisation. In fact, the researchers found the problem starts at the top where almost 50% of all top executive team members say they do not have a clear sense of how major priorities and initiatives fit together.
There is little hope for effective implementation of plans and change if staff at all levels don’t even understand what it means for them individually and leaders can’t integrate expected changes into their normal operating rhythm.
3. Culture is something you’ll think about after the change is done
Scary situations (like change that could affect people’s jobs and security) are the most influential times for shaping the culture of an organisation. So whether you plan it or not, how major change is handled creates deep, lasting impressions in the minds of all staff. It tells them about what is important around here and how people are valued – or not.
In one organisation I worked in, the prevailing stories amongst the organisation’s blue collar staff were about how major industrial conflict had been handled twenty years earlier. The mistrust and hurt was still raw for many people and was influencing the current culture.
So if you are planning to put off thinking about the kind of culture you want, don’t kid yourself that culture will wait for you to be ready. It’s being formed in how you go about changes now.
4. You know that staff engagement is important, so you have organised communication sessions to tell staff what is happening
You are certainly right about engagement being important, but it sounds like these sessions are telling, not engaging, staff. That research I mentioned before found how ineffective most communication like this is. They found:
Only 55% of the middle managers could name even one of their company’s top five priorities. In other words, when the leaders charged with explaining strategy to the troops are given five chances to list their company’s strategic objectives, nearly half fail to get even one right.
There is often no consistent and understood story about why change needs to happen, what is going to happen, and what opportunity people will have to influence change that affects them. Communication usually means telling or token listening, not meaningful conversations, listening and giving people the chance to influence outcomes that affect them. True engagement allows people to make sense of change and help shape something that will work.
People’s positive engagement with change is profoundly influenced by whether they believe there has been a fair process before decisions are made. A fair process involves clear understanding of the need for change, having the opportunity to influence change that affects them, and seeing their input has been listened to and taken into account when decisions were made.
The more of these four items you ticked, the more likely you are to be joining the 80% of change that fails. But you may still have time to do something about it. So if you want some help, give me a call.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan helps design and implement people-centred strategy, transformation and performance improvement. Her work involves challenging mind-sets, shifting culture, and engaging people to improve service delivery and performance. Her approach taps into the enormous unused potential of people in organisations to deliver exponentially better results with the right leadership, engagement and strategy.