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Blog
Pam Marmon
3 Ways to Prepare Your Organization for Change
What to Do Before You Launch a Change Initiative
Your executive leadership team devotes months of diligent work to create the company vision. After multiple rounds of revisions and word choice selections, the vision is finally complete. Now what?
How do you ensure your people execute your strategy and achieve the desired results? Before the vision can come to fruition, you must lay the foundation so that the change initiatives can flourish.
The challenge that I see in companies today is that enthusiastic leaders plunge into implementing the vision through various change initiatives, yet they miss the opportunity to effectively prepare their organization for success.
I once consulted for an IT division of a consulting company that had initiated a significant IT transformation. Tasked with improving performance, the leaders eagerly launched change efforts, yet the cultural transformation they desired made little progress. Their reputation was at stake and future revenue-generating opportunities were delayed due to slow moving change efforts. Competing organizational priorities cluttered the communication messages and instead of achieving alignment, opposition among departments had surfaced.
What I’ve learned since I started working with companies to help them transform is that in order for change to stick and be effective, leaders must prepare the foundation for change initiatives by communicating the vision, optimizing internal alignment, and engaging impacted stakeholders.
Communicate the Vision daily.
1. Communicate the vision daily. Strategy documents that stay hidden get no results. If you want your team to execute the vision, you must share it daily. Communicating the vision once at a Town Hall meeting or in an email will lead to unrealistic expectations. It’s an illusion to presume people will follow that which they do not understand. Your team must hear and see you live out the vision through your daily choices and actions.
Action: Consider a communication strategy that stages the vision in three waves: 1) awareness that the vision exists; 2) desire to fulfill the vision’s objectives; and 3) explanation of how to apply practical action to achieve the vision. When you curate a step-by-step story about the vision, you enable your team to willingly come along on the journey towards your desired results.
Create organizational alignment.
2. Create organizational alignment. As a leader of your company, the daily pursuit of alignment prevents potential mishaps between departments. Each department must understand its own function and the function of other departments, as well as their dependencies, which support the life of the organization.
Action: Ask what does success look like for each department within your organization? Once you know what is important to other leaders, create the space and time to help other leaders achieve success. The desire to help other leaders succeed can be reciprocated back to you through greater collaboration and goodwill among employees.
Include your team in the decision-making process.
3. Include your team in the decision-making process. This may appear difficult if you are aiming for speed, yet it is the only logical way to go fast. When people have a voice in solving the challenge, organizations experience an increase in engagement. Higher engagement leads to greater ownership of the solution. Ownership is the most effective way to ensure accountability.
Action: Before you launch a significant change in your organization, provide opportunities for your team to participate. People who are committed to the path towards a solution will persevere and champion the change.
Preparing your organization for change requires intentionality. Orchestrating how the vision will enable your people to thrive and achieve new organizational heights requires you as a leader to effectively communicate, align with other leaders in your organization, and invite your people to participate in the solution. You are the architect who designs the plans, and it is the builders who interpret the requirements to make the vision a reality.
Are you ready to launch an organizational change?
Let us help you. Learn how: https://marmonconsulting.com