How to Create Sustainable and Change Resilient Organisations
What is the most practical way to tackle the building of organisational sustainability? This is a monumental task with no one-size-that-fits-all solution. Personally, I would adopt the structured, tried and tested discipline of using “Change Management”. Anything to do with changing the culture of an organisation is a big deal. Making it sustainable being another objective means this is going to take a long time. You can sometimes ride shotgun on some projects but building sustainability requires a deliberate and process driven framework. In short, pick a professional framework.
How do you significantly increase the odds for success? Go big by making it an enterprise-wide, long term and strategic initiative. Why? The business enablers for success include top-down leadership driven processes, regular progress and milestones reviews. Value creation is expected and that always gets the CEO and Executive Management team’s attention. It also ensures that cross functional resources the highest level from HR, Finance, Operations, Sales, Marketing, Innovation and IT will be allocated to the change programme. You need these high-level business partners to help drive this process. It simply cannot be done without business partners.
What if this is not an enterprise-wide initiative? You want to do the right thing. What can you do? Start where you can. It is still a Change Management programme business process. Even though you may not get the highest-level business partners you can still demonstrate value creation. From there you can then expand the initiative to other areas of the business. How do you eat an elephant? One small piece (process) at a time.
Be mindful of pitfalls. This will be a long and brutal process. To give us some perspectives and lessons learned, a former COO shares her top three “confessions” later in this issue.
If I can offer one core piece of advice, it is this, an organisation that is filled with happy campers is more likely to succeed. How do you do this when people are feeling anxiety and looking over their shoulders? It is not about winners and losers and don’t be afraid of over communicating this very point.
Make it the leadership and organisation’s purpose to provide the culture and environment to bring out the best in everyone. Work with everyone to help provide clear paths for their personal future growth. Ultimately, if the organisation’s path is not sufficiently aligned with that of the individual, we graciously help that person to find their next career move and personal development in another organisation.
When the leadership, at all levels, shows empathy and lead by example to help everyone to get the opportunity to become their best, it creates a positive working environment. It reduces the fear and negativity. It provides a place for winning. You can win here or win at another organisation. Whether they stay or not, just help them to envision their future growth.
How will the adoption of AI impact this evolution? The low hanging fruit is in the replacement of routine and low risk work. To future proof the organisation you will need to recruit the most appropriate balance of talent to leverage AI and to navigate the changes it brings. The impacts from AI will not be addressed in this edition, but meanwhile, I have two questions for you.
(1) When recruiting new employees at entry level roles, which ones of these talents will become increasingly more important, less important or no change, in the future?
(2) Will what new entry level employees want, be different?
The confessions section of this quarter’s newsletter is about the pitfalls that could trip you up during the process of building organisation resilience.
Good luck.
Jason Kwan specialises in leveraging change management frameworks for people centric transformation.
