You’ve been asked to lead a large-scale change in your organization. You know this change is needed and will move your company into new stages of growth and impact. But figuring out the right first steps can feel daunting. How much preparation do you need to do before taking action? Should you just jump right in and hope everyone will follow? What should guide the change: numbers? feedback? your gut?
You’re not alone. Many organizations aren’t sure how to effectively approach change. Too often, there’s a now-or-never mindset that doesn’t give change the runway it needs, or there’s a narrow focus on change in one area without seeing how it affects other areas of the business, or well-intended strategies sit in slide decks because leadership is unsure how to implement them.
But there’s a better path forward: a practical five-step model that Proteus uses to guide leaders from confusion to clarity, making major transformation easier. Let’s take a look at why successful organizational transformation begins by better understanding what changes you’re making and, most importantly, why they’re needed.
The Five-Step Model That Leads to Successful Transformations
Every journey needs a map to help guide through unknown terrain. We developed the Five-Step Change Model to ensure that organizations approach change in a way that increases their likelihood of success. The model provides guidance on the steps you need to follow to drive real change in your organization:
Step 1: Clarify the Change and Why It’s Needed: First, understand why you’re making this change by surfacing and framing the change, clarifying the risks and rewards of that change, and making a compelling case for the change.
Step 2: Envision the Future State: Next, this step asks “What will be different after the change?” and helps leaders clarify the scope of change, create a shared picture of success, and establish ways to measure that success.
Step 3: Build the Change: This step evaluates who and what the change requires. Now’s the time to create the change team, identify and engage stakeholders, build the change plan, and assess your organizational readiness.
Step 4: Lead the Transition: Here you identify those most affected by the change, clarify key endings and beginnings for them, create a plan to accelerate the transition, and execute those change and transition plans.
Step 5: Keep the Change Going: The final step helps leaders understand how to keep the change going, which will include monitoring and reporting progress, institutionalizing ongoing adjustments, and making the organization’s systems, processes, structures, and culture more change-capable.
While these five steps are sequential here, it doesn’t mean they’re always linear in practice. There are often several sub-changes happening at different times as part of the larger change. Sometimes these steps need to be addressed iteratively to broaden the reach of the change or to increase the depth of the change.
Let’s take a closer look at the first step and how it helped one company set up a better foundation for its transformation initiatives.
Starting with Step 1: How One Company Clarified the Change and Why It Was Needed
I often talk to leaders, a bit tongue in cheek, about the importance of “picking a good change!” This doesn’t mean an “easy” change, but rather one that has its roots in a strong need or opportunity that serves the business. It will be a change about which there has been strong debate among the leadership team, as well as thought and research about the nature and direction of the change.
As you begin to clarify and define your change, look for red flags that include:
- Simply making change for change’s sake, which is especially tempting to new leaders.
- Taking on a change that’s not in alignment with the business strategy or the organization’s mission and values.
- Embarking on a change where the desired outcomes are ill-defined or ill-considered.
You probably won’t be able to clarify the change and understand why it’s needed on your own. Instead, determining the right change will likely involve scanning the external environment, talking to stakeholders and gathering input from across the organization.
We once worked with a client company that had just named a new CEO, who then appointed a new Head of Operations across their four businesses. Over time, each of the four businesses had built up its own off-shore capability, which was highly redundant. For example, each of the four businesses had its own operations center in the same city in India. The new Operations leader was asked to reduce costs without reducing headcount. She needed to figure out which changes would lead to achieving this goal.
When put in a position like this, many leaders might start with the numbers. The leader could have gotten together with her finance team, conducted a financial analysis, compared the numbers and ratios to industry benchmarks, and made the decisions of what to cut. (This approach is used more often than you might think.)
But you can imagine some of the potential pitfalls to this type of approach. What if the leader makes some faulty assumptions about how the money is used and the important role those investments play in the business? Even if they are the right decisions, how likely is it that the implementation of those changes will go as she envisions them? (Sometimes it’s necessary to take this approach, especially when the need for change is existential, and speed is the most important factor, but there are many potential risks associated with this approach as well.)
Instead, we worked with the Operations Leader to help her engage critical stakeholders, starting with the leaders of each of the businesses to get their input — including their hopes and concerns — about the goal of reducing costs.
The Operations Leader then pulled her Leadership team together to talk through how to best engage those who would be affected the most: the 15,000 employees who worked in the Ops Centers. They decided to crowdsource cost-saving ideas directly from the employees by hosting a live, 48-hour event they called Ideafest.
With Ideafest, the Leadership Team would be accomplishing several goals related to “Clarifying the Change and Why It’s Needed.” They would be tapping into those who knew best where the cost in the form of waste was hiding. They would be fostering ownership of the changes with those who would ultimately be involved in implementing them. And they would be developing a collaborative environment across the four businesses.
We already knew why the change was needed: reduce costs. But this is what we mean by clarifying what change needs to be made to meet the goal. Ultimately, the Operations leader didn’t guess on which change to make, or decide on their forward action based only on one area of data (finances). Instead, the Leadership team together decided to talk to the people directly involved in the business to gain their feedback and input on what they see and experience every day.
In our next blog post, we’ll look at how this organization implemented Step 2: Envision the Future State.
How Proteus Can Help
If you’ve been asked to lead a large-scale change in your organization, yet aren’t sure where to start, we can help.
Our Vision & Strategy process aligns leadership teams on the direction the organization needs to go and can highlight the most important changes needed to get there.
Our Organization Alignment approach can help identify the degree of alignment within the organization for the change you’re looking to make. The output helps you understand how much work you’ll need to do to get ready for the change.
Book a call with us today; we’d love to talk about your organization’s transformation and how we can help make it easier and more successful.
