#4 Leading through Change - The What

For most of my leadership journey I spent time learning about the characteristics of a good leader. Along the way, there has been a focus on a specific path that has become extremely important and that is how to lead through change to drive execution to the vision.

There are 3 major transformations efforts where I was part of the teams that were charged with leading and executing the efforts.  The first significant transformation effort was creating, communicating, and socializing an enterprise architecture organization and processes; ensuring an Enterprise Architecture (EA) Organization and the EA artifacts would add value to the overall organization. The team included Business and IT leaders and the effort was met with resistance initially. The IT community had two main areas of concern. First, the application and technical teams struggled with the level of accountability to an organization that would dictate designs and solutions with no perceived post-implementation involvement.  The other area of IT concern was that the organization would add a level of bureaucracy and paperwork to a current process that was already time consuming. The business organization were concerned with making changes to any processes while continuing to execute the day to day business.

In the first transformation effort took eighteen months before the transformation team hit the first key milestone.  This was the plan. Announcing the creation of an enterprise architecture organization, explanation of the architect's roles and then providing specific details on why everyone in the organization would be impacted is a very important milestone. It was the start of socializing the change. Following the plan crafted by the transformation team, momentum was leveraged and the effort continued to move forward. Architecture artifacts provided information and insight to the details of the operational environment through the definition of the current state. With the information documented and organized effectively, the duplicity of business processes and applications was obvious. The most visible area of duplicity was the address change process. It impacted several business units and more than 10 applications. This level of duplicity and complexity impacts the organization's ability to respond quickly to competitive levers. Any business need that would require changes made to the address change processes or applications would involve analyzing multiple business processes and applications which require significant time, potentially impacting a business strategic goal or gain a competitive edge. The EA organization showed value within the first 12 months through the artifact information and guidance provided early in the change process. The software development lifecycle (SDLC) was modified to include the enterprise architecture processes and artifact creation and updates.

The next transformation effort was done at another company. A new division was created that would be the first division at this company that would sell products and services direct to consumer instead of through a broker or agent. This was a a core strategic competitive differentiation for this company and was a pivot point for accomplishing sales goals. Through executive level support and perseverance, significant accomplishments were made to drive success until the 2008-2009 recession.

The latest transformation effort was to create the strategic plan for the church my family was attending. The church leadership wanted a plan to grow the church in ways to invite and engage the community to be involved in the church family. The changes would be transformative; doing church in a different way. There is a saying in leadership circles, "If you want to know if  you can lead, lead volunteers and see if you an make things happen."  A team was recruited, met weekly, developed a vision and draft plan. This information was presented to the congregation of 400 people to inform and start the process of socializing the change. As you can imagine, there were many questions. It was planned that this would be the situation so as much questions and answers were done during the time allotted and additional church meetings would be scheduled frequently to ensure they would remain informed. This was the start of the "buy-in" process.  In the next post, #4 Leading through change - The How, discussion of the eight steps of leading change successfully from John Kotter's book, "Leading Change" will be reviewed.

Change is hard.  There will be obstacles in driving change.  Unfortunately resources, cost, skills, and other factors can derail the effort to gain the momentum necessary to make the changes that are needed.  Listed below are eight mistakes or reasons why change can fail.  Please review the list. It is important to understand why the process can fail so that they can be mitigated.  List from John Kotter's book "Leading Change" to why change efforts fail:

1. Culture of complacency
2. Lack of support from the top
3. Realizing the power of a vision
4. Under-communicating the vision
5. Letting obstacles deter or detract from progress
6. Failing to create short-term wins
7. Declaring victory too soon
8. Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the organization's culture

If you have any comments or questions, please post them in response to the blog.  I would truly like to hear opinions from others regarding leading through change.