“How many times do I have to explain to people that these business critical changes are necessary for us? Our people then tell me and their managers they understand, but when we turn our backs they continue like nothing has happened!”
Is this situation familiar to you?
It’s a real-life example of one of the biggest barriers that we, as a company, have experienced over the years and recent months in working with organisations that were dealing with change. The situation where leaders thought their people were aligned (which, by the way, unless you know how, managing and aligning the team remotely is really difficult to do) … only to find out later that actually they were not! This lack of alignment created serious obstacles to reaching the desired outcomes, and allowed good strategies to ‘crash and burn’.
We all know it, change is the constant factor for all organisations. However, speed is the variable – and the ultimate competitive advantage – now more than ever before! A key ingredient for landing change is the ability to enable people (managers and employees/leaders and followers) to pull together successfully and accept a deep sense of personal responsibility and accountability in making the desired change happen.
So why is it then that, in the organisation where enormous effort, energy and time was put into engaging each other, empowering people and giving them motivating responsibilities … despite this, people did not show the expected behaviour, drive, teamwork and results?
The list of reasons can be quite long because every organisation, its people and change processes have their own specifics, but what we’ve found over the past 50+ years is that the following recurring root causes are the important ones and still as relevant today as they were all those years ago:-
- They don’t understand:
- Why are we doing this?
- Why are we doing this now?
- Why are we doing this in this way?
- We’ve done this before – it didn’t work then, it won’t work now!
- Lack of trust, openness and honesty
- Lack of clarity or communication
- Lack of understanding about the W.I.I.F.M – What’s in it for me?
True alignment and full engagement between people and teams (and the commitment that goes with it) can only be achieved by following the tried, tested and trusted processes Sewells has developed and mastered over 57 years.
Please let us explain these processes for the brilliant execution of your strategies to you – and the stunning improvements they can make for your organisation.
Just contact us now to arrange a ‘no obligation’ discussion – face to face, on Teams, Zoom or any other platform.
