Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Transforming organization, the pressure on the organization to change, why and why firms fail?
Answer
Transforming organization “A process of radically altering the organization’s strategic direction, including
fundamental changes in structures, processes and behaviors.”
Transformation capability depends in part on the ability to create and embed processes which link business
strategy to the behaviors and performance of individuals and teams. These clusters of processes
Link vertically (to create alignment with short-term business needs),
Horizontally (to create cohesion), and
Temporally (to transform to meet future business needs).
Error # 1: Allowing too much complacency; it is the biggest mistake when trying to change the
organization is to plunge ahead without establishing a high sense of urgency to change in fellow managers
and employees, without inspire them to move and make objectives real and relevant , this error is fatal
because transformation is always fail to achieve its objectives when complacency level is too high.
Examples:
a- overestimating the force of change
b- the effect of comfort zone to people.
c- Reinforcement of the status quo
d- Paralysis by complacency
e- Confuse urgency with anxiety – anxiety causes more resistance to change.
f- 75% of mangers should feel that status quo is more dangerous than launching into unknown. Not
(Yes we have problems but we are doing fine)
Without a sense of urgency people will not give an extra effort , instead they cling to the status quo and
resist initiatives from people above, as the result reengineering bogs down, new strategies fail to be
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implemented well, acquisition aren’t assimilated properly, quality programs became surface bureaucratic
talk rather than real business substance.
Error # 5: permitting the obstacles to block the new vision: new initiative fail far too often when
employees feel disempowered by huge obstacles in their paths.
Some times the obstacles is the
1. organizational structure,
2. narrow job categories,
3. compensation or performance-appraisal system
4. Supervisors sometimes force employees to choose between new vision and their self interest
Whenever smart and well-intentioned people avoid confronting obstacles they disempower their employees
and undermine change and the challenge here is how to Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable
constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders - reward and recognize progress and achievements
Error # 6: Failing to create short-term wins; Real transformation takes time, complex effort to
change strategies or structure organizations risk of losing momentum if there are no short-term goals to
meet and celebrate, without short-term wins too many employees gives up or actively join the resistance.
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In successful transformation Set aims that are easy to achieve - in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers
of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones. Create not wait for short term wins
Error # 7: Declaring victory too soon; early celebrating with first performance improvement is a terrible
mistake, that it could be understood as the job is done while the truth that it still requiring ongoing and
persistence effort. Victory stops the inertia for change.
Until change sink down deeply into the culture, new approaches are fragile and subject to regression
Resistance to change
People resist change because it is seen as a threat to familiar patterns of behavior as well as to
status and financial rewards. Woodward (1968) made this point clearly.
Joan Woodward (1968) on resistance to change
When we talk about resistance to change we tend to imply that management is always rational in
changing its direction, and that employees are stupid, emotional or irrational in not responding in
the way they should.
But if an individual is going to be worse off, explicitly or implicitly, when the proposed changes
have been made, any resistance is entirely rational in terms of his [sic] own best interest.
The interests of the organization and the individual do not always coincide.
However, some people will welcome change as an opportunity.
These need to be identified and where feasible they can be used to help in the introduction of
change as change agents.
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