5 Foundations of sustainable change

How often have you experienced when an organisation introduces change with high expectations of improving performance? The driver could be financial, technological or strategic. When the change fails to take root and embed, the leadership group may quickly pivot to a “new strategy.” These too, often fail. Then starts a cycle of high expectation, followed by frustration and scepticism. Usually there are several reasons for why this cycle occurs. In this article I focus on the 5 foundations that all organisations need to embed sustainable change.

All around the World, organisations have one thing in common. People. I’ll put it another way, organisations are people. Keep this front of mind as you work through these foundations and think about the changes you want to achieve.

1. Alignment

Imagine sitting around a board room table, you are hearing a great pitch for a new strategy. Everyone is so enthused about the new big idea. They all leave the room with smiles and high five’s all around. You go on to explain this new strategy to colleagues. It’s the best thing for the business you assure them. They pay attention but have heard these stories before, it quickly becomes low priority and the interest wanes. No one follows up and nothing changes.

Having alignment is my number one. For two reasons, you can’t do it alone and because alignment within your business and with your major stakeholders will put you miles ahead of the competition. A 2014 McKinsey paper by Thierry Nautin put it so eloquently “achieving real alignment, where strategy, goals, and meaningful purpose reinforce one another, gives an organisation a major advantage because it has a clearer sense of what to do at any given time, and it can trust people to move in the right direction. The result is an organisation that can focus less on deciding what to do - and more on simply doing.”

Such a simple concept, alignment means you can get just get on with it. However in a complex, multi-layered organisation this is a big challenge. A few quick wins to improve alignment are:

• Get clear on your organisation’s purpose, this acts as your compass in every decision.

• Define success and the goals, transparency means your team knows the why and the what of the priorities. Using metrics to help set and manage progress, such as KPI's.

• Start from the top, the leadership team must be speaking the same party line, to be connecting what the team is doing to the strategy.

• Delegate accountability, having a system for keeping everyone on the same page. Performance check-ins are a sure fire way to drive focus.

2. Communication

I mentioned above the benefit of the party line. Whether you be politically minded or not, the party line occurs within political parties to ensure that all the members speak in a way that supports the same party line position. Within your leadership group and team (as the message is rolled out), being consistent and clear on the message is vital.

In planning or rolling out change, you will never win the communication battle. Some will say there was too little, others too much. You will only know if the communication was right if the change sticks. Firstly ask yourself these questions:

1. Are our people motivated to change?

2. Are our people equipped with the ability to change?

Side note, being equipped includes having both the tools and the personal attributes to enable change.

When preparing your communication plan, tailor it to your teams and individual needs being cognisant of the two questions above. Use a combination of electronic, in person, visual and written means. Build up the emotional and rationale case to answer what is in it for them.

• Why a change is needed (purpose makes an appearance here again)

• What is happening? What will be different for the individual?

• How the change is happening?

• When it is happening? When will the results or change be felt?

• Who is accountable? Who to go to for information.

Then it’s a case of structured communications before, during and after. Seeking feedback along the way to pivot and adapt your communications.

If in doubt, communicate.

3. Structure

How your organisation and team is structured underpins your business goals and what you are trying to achieve. In Australia, I feel that the traditional hierarchical model is most effective. Purely because culturally it is well known and accepted. Whilst there are other new kids on the block, the hierarchical model has stood the test of time. There really is no perfect structure model to any business, but in one paper I read, all structures have three dimensions; power, coordination, and control[1]. Sounds like fun. But in reality it is true, how about I propose a more palatable alternative?

The structure of your business needs to reflect your specific activities that take place within your organisation to achieve your goals. You want the structure to guarantee that people behave in a certain way to achieve the goals.

Your structure will need to reflect the flow of activities. This is delegation at its best (power). It must also enable the transferring of information and skills to people (coordination). Then you will need to monitor to make sure the activities are completed and goals realised (control).

4. Governance

Governance, it could be rolled into structure but I think it deserves its own time in the spotlight. It is the practical element of control to set the tone, the systems and processes to manage the organisation.

Unless you are in the business of governance, it’s hard to get really juiced up about the value it brings. No disrespect to my internal audit friends. Often it can be seen as a cumbersome beast or completely invisible to the individual employee. Whether you are part of a small family business to a large organisation, good governance will support change being implemented and sustained.

Governance leads the accountability of performance and conformance. It will lead to better business outcomes and longer terms growth. Signs of poor governance include:

• Leadership (Management and Board) focusing on operations and not strategy, like being in the weeds of detail.

• No accountability or performance measures of leadership, such as not setting targets of KPI's or monitoring the metrics.

• Limited policies and procedures, leading to rogue behaviours.

• Risk are ignored or not managed, warning bells should be sounding!

• Poor organisational culture, disengaged staff, high absenteeism and so on.

For further reading, check out this article on the top 10 steps to improving corporate governance by Effective Governance.

5. People Capability

Capability is often interchanged with competence. I tend to believe that people are competent. In my view capability is the how adaptable people are.

When a change doesn’t embed, sometimes managers can be quick to jump to “people problems”. Remember the introduction point about organisations are people? Well it is unlikely that a change fails purely because of the people. It usually more complex and often a combination of all five foundations of this article.

However there is a lot you can do in preparation of any change to ensure your people and organisation adapts to change.

Firstly, look at the pivotal roles in the leadership and the roles impacted by the change. Are they held by talented operators whose roles fits the individual’s nature? Who is most influential and will be your “champion” for change? Many employees may feel that the change is being done “to” them. In leveraging your internal structure and networks is your key to accessing the informal organisation. These are the peer-to-peer conversations which can help build momentum.

Then consider all the constraints that may impede the change, are there personal contexts relevant to specific employees or teams? Depending on your change, the skills or resources accessible need to be thought out. In the Communication foundation, questioning “are our people equipped with the ability to change?” drills into what is missing. Structured exercises may be useful, such as workload assessment or skills analysis.

To enhance capability, the human resources elements help. Leveraging performance management, learning and development, and recruitment of identified skills and attributes, are key enablers.

In summary, these 5 organsational foundations need to be strong for sustainable change. Being weak in one area will undermine the others. Taking the time to do underpin your foundations will identify weaknesses and where efforts need to be directed. No change process is easy, but don’t make it harder for yourself!

Thanks for reading, if you are interested in more ways to Think Ascend, subscribe to my mailing list to learn more about delivering sustainable change.

Please contact me direct if you would like to share the challenges your are facing to implement change.

[1] Grossi, D., Royakkers, L. and Dignum, F., 2007. Organizational structure and responsibility. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 15(3), pp.223-249.