Assess your business’s Cultural Complexity to help SUCCESSFUL transformation

Managers responsible for leading change so often overlook the critical importance of ‘cultural complexity’ with often disastrous consequences. I write this article to highlight the importance of this essential consideration.	Image Source
A simple example. Navigating across London using google maps on my new iphone is easy for me. For my wonderful fiancée, it’s like an alien technology talking an alien language. This was clear just yesterday as we attempted to cross London to find the shops with the early Christmas sales! What’s easy for many of us is challenging for others.This simple example highlights an essential element that is too often ignored when assessing the approach to business transition. Managers are expected to ‘lead their teams’ through change. If Managers haven’t got the right tools, knowledge and experience to ‘lead’ then this simple assumption will be broken, and your business transformation will not deliver the benefits in the cost and time envelope.For your projects, programmes, initiatives assess the following aspects of your organisation’s culture: Leadership- Be honest with yourself and your business- are your leaders effective? Do your managers have the respect and loyalty of their teams? Are your managers effective at reflecting business priorities down at your front line? If not, then fine, plan to support weaker teams, but by all accounts, adjust time-scales, engagement activities, costs, accordingly. Revolution or Evolution? Does the transformation represent a huge change or is it a step change? Does the transformation need to happen in ‘one big go’ or can be it ‘incremental’? Big bang revolutionary change is much harder to do well then incremental evolution. Assess these factors and plan for this in your transformational approach. Shape and Diversity- how many stakeholders and groups are impacted by your transformation? In each of your key functions you may have many sub-divisions. The more spaced out geographically the resources are the harder simple meetings will be to facilitate. The number of services teams, the variety of business functions all impact the complexity of your initiative. 2000 similar field engineers will be easier to influence then 300 staff in a variety of different posts and functions. History- what’s the experience of change in your organisation? If your staff groan at the thought of another change initiative their negative experience from the past will directly affect your ability to spark change this time round. Plan for inertia. Has your business had any restructures and mergers? Are there still old company logos visible around your business? Companies typically pay lip service to mergers, acquisitions and restructures. These cultural differences often run deep and directly impede your ability to lead change. Readiness for change. Has the need for change been led by the people or are you leading the people? Often it’s a mix of the two. And often, despite positive engagement sessions, change is not attractive- despite what they say in the meetings to you! Acknowledging that some change is inherently ‘good’ for your staff and some is inherently ‘bad’ for your staff helps you to shape your project approach accordingly. Staff leading change will be a much easier project than a corporate change initiative that ‘must happen to remain competitive’- no matter how effective your leaders and comms- your staff will often remain highly cynical! factor this in. Capability- are your teams capable of changing? Actually changing anything requires an incredible amount of skill. Yes you can attend a training course and ‘learn’ new skills, but actually embedding and sustaining change to qualified quality objectives requires skill and talent. Are you managers and staff tuned to the needs of change? Capacity- As a transformation manager you will know to prepare a resource plan of transformational resource requirements and get it approved and balanced. How many managers however actually have a reliable system of resource planning? How many managers are truly empowered to assess the ability of their teams to support transition? Truly look deep to assess capacity. Failure to do so will constrain and damage your transformation. If you have two minutes free complete our free, no obligation, project complexity tool and assess the complexity of your transformation!
Drop me, Tim, aka one of The Frank Boys, an email now at tim.gray@thefrankboys.com if you would like to talk!And for a better way take a look at the Frank Project Management Office.

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