Council Post: How To Cure Organizational Change Disorder And Promote Innovation

A shared vision, an innovative culture and change leadership — they are bold words and have been defined over and over again. However, how do you move your organization to embrace the vision, innovation and change?

It’s easier for most people to continue to focus on the day-to-day routine, cling to the status quo and shove milestones off into a vague future. These are symptoms of what I call “organizational change disorder.”

As a former psychotherapist, I specialized in obsessive-compulsive behavior. Now, after 16 years of coaching, I find that many teams are stuck in the same repetitive patterns as an individual who cannot leave home because endlessly repeated security checks get in the way. You might have heard that 70% of change initiatives fail. From a different perspective, another study that examined over 5,000 innovations found that the success rate was just 4.5%. The cost of such change initiatives is measured in lost opportunity, revenue and competitive edge.

Fortunately, organizational change disorder can be cured.

Connect To The Big Picture

As a leader, you can provide a high-level view that inspires and coalesces the entire organization. Organizational change disorder can strike when you succeed brilliantly as a visionary yet still fail to ignite your executive team and employees to execution.

The problem: Teams are responsible for translating the overall vision into action. If an idea is too urgent, too vague, changes too often or doesn’t connect with root causes, then teams can experience an unwillingness to disrupt the status quo.

Every team consists of individuals who make separate contributions to change according to their expertise: The visionary clarifies the goal. The coach champions it. And the executor steps forward to execute it. If any of these roles is missing or undervalued, the change initiative can grind to a halt.

The cure: Give teams the incentive to move forward by allowing your vision to be broken down into small, easily identified and achievable steps. Ask each team to recognize a single small change that can be fully accomplished in less than 90 days — and then reward that win. With a sense of progress being made in small ways, significant changes will often follow.

Create Pathways For Innovation

You’ve established a company culture that works brilliantly when the status quo is unthreatened. However, that same company culture can go so far as to blame an innovator for complaining that a problem exists and a solution is needed.

The problem: Without the skills to rally support and without a standard procedure to follow, the innovator may struggle alone to identify and pass through levels of management approval, regulatory compliance and organizational buy-in. If those hurdles are surmounted once, few innovators may want to encounter them again.

The cure: Establish a culture that encourages new ideas by implementing a clear, repeatable innovation process and offering training in communications. The innovators will not only face fewer hurdles, but they’ll also learn how to use clear and compelling data to support their ideas and increase the rate of buy-in.

Innovators who understand communication styles and adapt to those that are different from their own can champion their new ideas effectively. Given a nonconfrontational vocabulary, they can embrace an objective language for discussing change and its potential consequences without blame.

Deliver The Tools To Move Forward

Innovation and change typically require accountability for progress. However, your milestones may become millstones to leaders who are struggling to achieve more and more directives with the same teams, resources and leadership skills (or lack thereof).

The problem: Providing vision and demanding results are often not enough. Leaders — from the executive suite to the individual supervisor — also may need training and resources.

There’s a cost to leadership, not only if a change initiative succeeds, but also if it fails. If leaders feel jeopardized by that cost — if the organization balks at providing resources for success and punishes failure — organizational change disorder can take over.

Many leaders are thrust into leadership because of their success as team members; leadership skill is often somehow expected to develop on its own. A 2016 survey of 500 managers found that 44% felt unprepared to lead and that 87% wanted more training. This data is particularly troubling since, according to research by Gallup, “people leave managers, not companies.”

The cure: In an agile and collaborative organization, decisions are made quickly, leaders are empowered to act and failures are considered a learning experience. An agile and collaborative culture is one in which the emphasis switches from “How can I protect myself from change?” to “How can I help?”

To develop that culture, train leaders to lead, and give them the tools they need to be successful. Try these two strategies:

• When leaders are too busy working to focus on change initiatives, talk about this pattern. Ask what obstacles they’re anticipating with the change and what hurdles they imagine they’ll have to overcome. Engaging in an open conversation can provide the psychological safety leaders may need to move forward.

• If teams are missing deadlines, encourage leaders to ask themselves whether the work is meaningful to each team member. Suggest that they take the time to paint the big picture. How does the change align with the organization’s mission? What will its success mean to their team, to the company and to customers? People often slow their pace when they don’t connect the meaning of change.

To implement a vision, my advice is to execute quick wins, provide an innovation process, and train innovators to innovate and leaders to lead. Organizational change disorder thrives only where those elements are missing.

Organizations that are mired in organizational change disorder may need help in realistically executing the big-picture vision, developing an innovation pathway and supporting leaders and innovators with resources and training. However, the benefits are clear: Cultures, leaders and frontline teams can find new incentive and power to drive the vision forward.