PHILLIMON MHLANGA
Zimbabwe companies are in a precarious position with operators living on the margin as they fail to deal with outright failure in their transformation efforts, a move that is threatening their viability, multiple organisational transformational experts have said.
Most local companies are now battling massive production decline, shrinking demand for their products and buffeted by sustainability challenges.
Speaking at the transformational change and development forum held in Harare last week, Tsitsi Mutasa, the managing partner at Governance Advisory Services Zimbabwe said the cost of failed transformation to organisations were huge in comparison to lost opportunities. Most business leaders, Mutasa said, lack clear and compelling case for change.
“Corporation or organisations are people. If we don’t deal with the human aspect, a lot of things you are trying to do as an organisation may fail. Change fails because a lot of people think it is an event. Nobody sees it as a process,” Mutasa said.
She said organisational transformation is not something “we should put in an organisational strategy meeting where we spend two three days and come out of that with just a document” which gathers dust on the shelf.
“When you go through proper transformational change, even, even yourself you don’t even know what it’s going to look like. And a lot of people sometimes are forced into a change scenario or to relook into their business model because everything around us is changing,” Mutasa said.
“What enables an organisation to do what it does are natural persons. Oftentimes we talk about wanting to transform organisations. A lot of change efforts, transformation organisations fail because we want to change the organisation without trying to change the people.
If you want to change an organisation, you have got to change the people.
“When we talk of how we can make an impact in the transformational journey it’s not having fancy job titles or so many letters after our names. We fail to understand that we don’t know everything.”
She said organisational development and organisational transformation is because change failed.
She added: “Some say let’s change the CEO, how does changing the CEO change your culture. To know what we don’t know is the starting point.
What is it that we are not changing? We should do enough to deal with the mindset of people running the organisation.
Justine Chinoperekweyi, the CEO of the Centre for Organisation Leadership and Development, said there was a need for a transformational mind set.
“The vision that we set as an organisation. We challenge those who we work with to foster a transformational mindset in their different spaces of engagement. In this country we have a lot of forums, a lot of presentations, people going up and down with these forums.
