Читать книгу The Art of Change Leadership - Cheryl Cran - Страница 7

The future workplace is now – is your organization ready?

Are you ready?

We need change leaders now because the fast pace of change has made it an imperative. Why?

Because fast change means there is a need for people to adapt quickly. The truth is that change involves human beings who must be willing to move away from the familiar and move toward the unknown and embrace it.

The art of change leadership is to understand the fundamental of change from a human point of view. When we as change leaders consistently use strategies to improve our own approach to change and then share those strategies with those we lead, then we can effectively create sustainable organizational change. That's the goal of this book, to provide the human (feelings, thoughts, and behaviors) and the structural (steps to be taken) strategies as well as the behaviors (action/execution) that will drive transformation in our fast paced world.

In the past 10 years, there have been massive changes. The Conference Board surveyed 1,020 global chief executive officers (CEOs) in 2014 and asked them to rank their top business challenges. Human capital, customer relationships, innovation, operational excellence, and corporate brand and reputation emerged as the top five challenges. Although these challenges may have been similar a decade ago, at the core of these challenges is the underlying theme – the need to change the solutions. The solutions to the top five challenges are not the same that would have been applied even a year or so ago. The challenges require new solutions, which in turn requires change.

Human capital is the biggest issue keeping many CEOs up at night – it used to be that employees would find a career in an industry, remain in that industry for 20-some years, and then retire. My, how things have changed! Now, employers are faced with the reality of changing employee attitudes about work and life. The increase of technological innovation has created greater access for employees to educate themselves, to seek out other opportunities, and to seek more meaningful and impactful work. Generations of workers are finding that there is value in working smarter not harder and having fun at work. The changes needed to master the human capital challenge include having change leaders who can drive transformation in the fast paced and fast changing workplace reality. Imagine organizations that have recognized the need to build the future workplace today and to prepare their leaders for ongoing and rapid change. Imagine organizations having leaders who are able to inspire, share knowledge, and provide resources to their teams while creating a work environment that is open, creative, collaborative, and focused on transformational experiences for the employees and the clients.

The leadership skills that have been used for the past decade are not the skills that are going to create next level growth or expansion for organizations. We need change leaders with upgraded operating systems to inspire and create new approaches, new processes, and new ways of connecting to create an organization with happy employees.

Customers have become right-now consumers who want what they want and they want it now– not yesterday! Amazon Prime and its two-day delivery is still not fast enough for some of the drone-loving customers who want their deliveries today. Years ago the customer could wait. I remember a situation when I worked in banking: I was right out of high school and was promoted from bank teller to side-counter customer service. This was in the 1980s when customer service was not a “thing” and a customer came to the side counter and I jumped up ready to serve him. My co-worker who had been in customer service for years yanked me back down and said, “Don't get up so quickly or the customers will always expect us to jump.” I was in my teens at the time and remember thinking how silly that was. Fast forward to today and the customer IS king or queen and drives all solutions from the business perspective and also from the individual consumer perspective. In fact, I find that customer expectation of stellar service has gone up so high that there is a pervasive culture of never satisfied customers out there. So what does that mean for organizations? It means that the continued and increasing demands from customers are creating the need for adaptable and customized solutions. The ability to provide creative and innovative customer care requires a change of mind-set around what constitutes good service and a change in customer delivery processes. We need change leaders to transform customer processes.

Innovation is something that keeps many CEOs up at night as he or she struggles with staying one step ahead of the competition. An innovative culture requires teams of people to be thinking in new ways that are continually focused on creative solutions. Leaders and employees who may have been working in a culture in which new ideas were not valued are finding the new economy and new workplace demands creativity and innovation mindsets. The approaches, strategies, and processes all need to change in order to shift to a culture of innovation. We need change leaders to focus and create environments and structures that support innovation and creativity. Organizational executives need to value new ideas and create opportunities for employees to share ideas, to openly spend time creating, and to be rewarded for innovative product ideas, customer service improvement ideas, employee engagement ideas, and more. Many organizations are establishing forums and labs for innovation; for example AT&T and the AT&T Foundry™ innovation centers are fast-paced and collaborative environments. AT&T and technology providers work in the AT&T Foundry to deliver applications and services to customers more quickly than ever before.

The AT&T Foundry works in projects combining business, design, and technical resources. Since its launch in 2011, the AT&T Foundry has started more than 200 projects and deployed dozens of new products and services. Projects focus on areas of significant business or technology interest and typically involve external start-ups, innovators, entrepreneurs, academics, and inventors. Projects are organized in short sprints designed to determine success or failure quickly.

Another area that is undergoing massive change approaches is the operational excellence of the organization overall. Many organizations have policies and procedures that were established decades ago and that may or may not have relevance to today's business reality. When our team conducts organizational assessments with our consulting clients one of the questions asked is, “What are the policies and procedures you have in place that are not serving your actual objectives?” A company may state that their objective is for absolute customer satisfaction and yet the operations and processes hinder that same objective.

For example a company that has been in business for over 30 years or more may have had a policy to give absolutely no refunds to the customer, and today that same company has a direct competitor who does provide refunds for the same product. Does the policy need to change? That may seem like a stupid question and yet there are many organizations in which the operations and methods have not been changed, updated, or modified to meet the current customer or employee reality. We need change leaders in operations to lead operational excellence and to help drive transformation in the organization.

The corporate brand and reputation focus from the survey mentioned earlier is a key area for company success in the next few years. It used to be that you could manage brand and reputation by “spinning” content to ensure the best possible image was put forward. Now with social media and outspoken customers a brand slipup can go viral in seconds. Larger corporations have had social media staff for the past five years focus on brand and reputation management by focusing on Twitter feeds, YouTube video comments, and more. In addition, individuals within companies are recognizing the need and value to have a personal brand to promote skills for new jobs, for promotion opportunities, and more. I read recently that new parents are buying URLs for their babies either prior to birth or right after birth to ensure brand protection. The need for rapid adaptation to the brand and reputation challenge is an imperative. We need leaders of change to lead everyone within the company to be brand advocates, to leverage all channels of strategic brand promotion, and to see the interconnection of company brand with each individual's representation of the brand.