2. Leadership Commitment

Most significant change transformation efforts fail.

The most common reason for this is the absence of a strong, dedicated leadership team that are consistent in their efforts to transform the way they work over a long period of time.

Understandable as this enduring will to change is a big ask.

Leadership positions are ordinarily filled by highly experienced people who have achieved their role by demonstrating consistently adept managerial skills. They excel at dealing with problems within their direct areas of influence.

However, for sustained continual improvement to work strategically there is often a need for everyone to think and act in a new way and there are a great many paradigms regarding work that can hold us back.

To truly recognise this requires a great deal of time and mental fortitude before anything is even done about it. Seemingly impossible when already being very, very busy trying to maintain the status quo.

But busyness is often the problem. The first paradigm breaking step to take is to understand the role of a leader in term of apportioning time to activities.

The above diagram shows how people of different seniority in an organisation should spend their time.

Even from middle management level, 50% of time should be spent on improvement with the remainder being appropriately divided as shown on maintaining organisation performance at existing levels or strategic level innovation.

Leaders must extract themselves from all of the tactical day to day ‘firefighting’, repurposing that time for defining and disseminating direction to their teams and creating an environment for improvement, providing the time, coaching and crucially, trust to do so.

The trap is the feeling that speed is the priority. But for transformational change, the pace and quantity of the work done is nowhere near as important as its quality.

Leaders must commit to developing people while developing themselves and to do so, must think slow to go fast - a brave and often uncomfortable position to hold long term which needs recognition.

To significantly change an approach that has been worked hard on to achieve needs serious stimulus. This will be the subject of our next article, I hope you can join me for that.