In today’s fast-paced and competitive environment, organizations must be adaptable, flexible and innovative to achieve success. Increased stakeholder expectations, budget constraints, competing priorities, economic instability and a range of labour market challenges make it necessary for leaders to look critically at the way they lead and manage their businesses. Being able to adapt and change course when necessary is imperative. However, change efforts often falter because individuals overlook the need to make fundamental changes in themselves. Recent McKinsey research and client experience suggest that half of all efforts to transform organizational performance fail either because senior managers do not act as role models for change or because people in the organization defend the status quo, i.e. they cannot foresee themselves in the future state, and they have deep purpose in the present state.
Deeper analysis into why change programs fail reveals that the vast majority stumble on employee attitudes and management behavior. Conventional change management methodologies do not address the subconscious, unknown and subtler psychological aspects of an individual.
In order to ensure success of these programmes, a Transformational Growth Leadership approach, that recognizes obvious human limitations, would be required to affirm the behaviours and values that it intends to embed within its staff complement in facing these transformations. Companies often brace their leadership and staff for substantial shifts, when in fact small incremental shifts in approach and thinking could ensure faster adoption and least resistance for a sustained flexible and innovative culture.
Embedding values such as the commitment to grow people, displaying integrity, striving for excellence, and self/other respect, require an increased maturity level within individuals first, before lasting change can be witnessed.
Quintessence proposes that by linking employees work to a Unity of Purpose (UP), and framing a change or transition along a deeper purpose, in addition to providing staff with the tools to grow and mature within the organization, sustainable transformation may be imbibed within the culture. In the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an understanding of uniquely human social, cognitive and emotional biases, so too the practice of change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of the irrational (and often unconscious) nature of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act.
Quintessence offers such a bespoke hybrid methodology. Transformational Change Leadership (TCL) has adapted effective methods from recognized change management methodology models including the McKinsey 7S, psychologist Kurt Lewin’s three-stage approach and John Kotter’s eight-step process amongst others, catered for their shortcomings of personal subconscious barriers that employees face, as well as the role of ego resistance in large organizations leadership structures.
Leyya Kalla
Director: Quintessence Development Solutions
