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Change has always been hard. But now, change has become a constant. Market disruptions, shifting consumer preferences, and technological advancements are pushing companies to evolve and adapt faster than ever before. This means the ability to lead your employees through change is paramount to success.
Any change occurring within your organization, whether it involves deploying new technology, implementing new processes, or restructuring, will impact your people. Human resources (HR) leaders’ focus is all about people management, ensuring employees are supported, engaged, and equipped to adapt to organizational change.
Throughout my years working in higher education, I have been fortunate to be a part of several graduation ceremonies. I love the celebration, joy, and especially hearing the journeys that students have experienced in achieving this milestone. Stories that are filled with unique and transformational experiences, with challenges and obstacles overcome, making plans, and then rewriting those plans, often several times over. In short, they are stories of triumph. With my background in student success, I pay particularly close attention to the support systems students mention, the guidance and advice they received, the planning entailed, and how they navigated their journey.
Organizations worldwide are executing aggressive business strategies to leverage technological advances to integrate and simplify business processes, move crucial data to more secure cloud-based solutions, upgrade digital capabilities, and unify transactions across their digital footprint. These large-scale transformations often require significant resources and as such, often attract the attention of the media, public, community activists, and watchdog groups.
Who’s heard of Danny Meyer?
No, he is not an organizational change management (OCM) scholar or world-class practitioner. He is a restauranteur, responsible for top restaurants such as Gramercy Tavern and nationwide favorite, Shake Shack.
As a change leader, you understand the importance of communicating early and often and collecting feedback from stakeholders. But after collecting this data, then what? It is just as important to leverage the data you collect to analyze how ready your organization is for change and measuring the impact of change activities.
Have you ever looked at that thing directly in front of you and just exhaled the word “Ugh” with a big sigh? I know I have, and I am pretty sure we all have at some point.
In December, I approached a friend about doing the 75 Hard challenge with me. I wanted to do a personal reset and knew that I needed an accountability partner if I was going to have even the slightest chance of being successful. She agreed and on January 2, we started our 75 Hard journeys.
Change is everywhere. The average organization today has undertaken five large-scale changes in the past three years, with expectations of multiplying this number in coming years. Big or small, many of these changes are either directly driven by technology or have a strong technological component. Digital transformation efforts average a failure rate of nearly 70 percent, despite the right intentions.
In 1964, 60 years ago, Gilligan’s Island premiered on television. It told a tale of a fateful three-hour boat tour that did not go as planned, despite having an experienced skipper, a first mate, a professor, a millionaire, as well as other passengers with unique talents. It was not until the shipwrecked passengers were able to grab the attention of the Coast Guard that they were rescued. The sitcom gave us funny moments and still serves as a reminder of the importance of planning, leadership, collaboration, innovation, and using all the tools necessary to successfully navigate the (ocean) current.
As the age old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. I, for one, would like to admire the picture rather than listen to the one-thousand-word description!