It’s a tough time to be a leader. That’s doubly true for managers who are guiding people and implementing broader enterprise transformation at the very same time. Pandemic-weary and COVID-fatigued. Increasing demands coming from every direction. High turnover. Rapidly moving tech change. Tons of ambiguity. Put simply: every additional layer of newness will feel painful for managers right now.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Organizations that acknowledge this reality at the front end of transformation planning are positioned to get the full lift that new processes and technology provide. In fact, focusing on the human factor through the transformation process has been shown to increase the probability of the initiative’s success to more than 70%.
Here’s the key: positioning transformation as a human-centred change forged with your leaders vs. something that’s imposed on a group is a much more productive way to move change forward.
At EY, the results of a 2021 global board risk survey done with the University of Oxford showed that accepting ideas from more junior personnel positively contributed to transformations being successful. A system is really up and running only when the people meant to deploy it are fully engaged.
As competition for good talent is fierce and burnout is high, how do you lead transformation so it helps you keep and build talent rather than put talent at risk? This is where a coaching approach comes into play. Coaching flips the paradigm of “developing” leaders — something imposed on them — to helping them rise to a challenge by offering a new lens on leadership. Coaching a leader is about seeing a challenge from their perspective, joining them there, then helping them see it in a new, inspiring and more productive light.
Once leaders are operating from this place of possibility, they are naturally creative and organizations can begin productively deploying the proverbial toolbox of resources and skills development programs they can draw from.
Conversely, failing to take a human-centred approach can result in wasted time and effort. Research, such as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, has shown that 75% or more of the investment in training is lost when not enough attention is paid to setting the right context for learning and paying attention to how the learner feels in the learning process.
Organizations that keep three valuable principles in mind can better prepare managers to guide teams through change — even as our broader environment reinvents itself day over day: