Disruption of businesses has become an everyday event and it has become imperative for organisations to treat transformation as a core capability.
Transformational change is a type of change that occurs when an organisation makes a fundamental change in how they operate.
This is often triggered by changes in the environment. Cummings and Worley, note that transformational change occurs in response to, or anticipation of, significant changes in an organisation’s environment or technology.
Organisations undergo transformational change, for various reasons as follows:
Adopting innovative new technologies that require drastic process change and team structure
Introducing important strategic changes
Implementing significant cultural changes
Offering a new core product or service to address external market forces
The characteristics of transformational change are,
It is a change in mind-set, not just a change in procedure or policy.
It leads to radical improvements in performance.
It is based on a deep understanding of the business and its customers.
It requires buy-in from everyone in the organization.
For transformational change to be effective, there are steps to be followed to guide the process. These will be discussed below:
- Direction setting– kindling a need for change within the organisation by stating the rationale for change as well as defining the broad performance and organisational objectives. Direction setting is a leadership practice, which entails establishing shared goals and developing a vision (Sun & Leithwood, 2015). At this phase three key steps need to be taken to establish the direction for change: i) Analysing the organisation in relation to the market, ii) Organising workshops and engaging employees to reach a common vision and identify actions required to make the vision a reality and iii) Reviewing the experience of other organisations undergoing change to help build courage and conviction. Insights on how the organisation can evolve are also developed.
- Process design– this phase involves translating the change vision into specific performance objectives and to design processes for change. Creating a road map of how to get there by establishing the specification of which people must perform what tasks, in what order, in what location, under what circumstances, with what information, and to what degree of precision.” The key activities at this stage include: creating a change organisation, quantifying specific performance objectives, mapping objectives into organisation units and designing performance improvement approaches.
- Performance improvement– In this phase the transformational triangle planned in stage two comes into full play.
Top down- Initiatives to build awareness and capability in support of the change process are implemented through intensive communication, training sessions, and management forums for sharing expertise and best practices in implementing the new change vision.
Bottom up- involves rolling out the change programme to all levels within the organisation. Teams are set to evaluate current versus desired performance and develop plans to close the gap.
Core process redesign- involves cross-functional teams tackling one or more of the core processes that senior managers identify as needing fundamental redesign.
The activities at this stage need to be effectively managed to avoid chaos and confusion as a result of the many initiatives happening at the same time.
- Realignment– the various performance improvement efforts will bring to light the size and shape of barriers existing within the organisation. In turn they will also clarify how an organisation should evolve to institutionalise the new capabilities developing in the organisation. The required changes are identified and applied across the S’s
Structure- employee roles will be redefined creating autonomous, self-managing teams, as individuals master multiple skills and roles. Reporting layers will be removed as self-management takes hold within the organisation.
Systems- will be redesigned as the information available to the front line changes dramatically and as teams better define their own information needs. The new systems will give a clearer view of how a team’s performance contributes to the whole, and will have a strong focus on customer-oriented value.
Staff – the type of people and skills needed in the transformed organisation will be developed through the performance improvement efforts. This may result in Hiring new employees and promoting current ones. The balance between technical and managerial skills will also be redefined.
At the heart of transformational change is creating your organization’s new and better future. It requires careful planning and execution if you want to achieve lasting results.
Chiedza Kadare is an OD Practitioner. You can get in touch with her on WhatsApp/call +263 77 283 0986 or Email chiedza.kadare@gmail.com
Paul Nyausaru is an OD Practitioner and leadership coach. For all your OD interventions and leadership development training you can get in touch with him on WhatsApp/call +263774062756 or Email pnyausaru@gmail.com
