Major transformation initiatives have a poor track record. They promise breakthrough benefits for the business and its customers, but the journey can be painful, and they normally cost more and take longer than expected.
We wanted to understand what leaders can do about this to make their transformation programmes less stressful and more successful.
What we did
We first spoke to 20 senior leaders, each with experience of major transformation initiatives in large organizations. The wide-ranging conversations covered the role of senior executives in business transformation, how decisions were made, the challenges they’d encountered, the results achieved and lessons they learned.
We then asked Andrew Campbell, Director at Ashridge Strategic Management Centre and author of Think Again, Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You to help sift through and interpret all the interview transcripts.
Out of this emerged five leadership challenges that should be specific focuses of attention for senior executives. If you are executive sponsor or a board director, these are what you should pay attention to. This is the Business Transformation Leadership Framework.
We then asked a further 100 senior executives to score their most significant transformation initiative against this leadership framework. They scored their initiatives on how well the different issues had been addressed, what they’d done to address them, the challenges they’d encountered, and what they wished they’d done differently. The interviews and the quantitative survey drive the Leadership lessons from 100 major business transformation initiatives.
Together, the Business Transformation Leadership Framework and lessons learned provide executive sponsors, leadership teams and boards with an agenda for their involvement. So they can be more effective at locking in customer loyalty and enhancing revenue levels as they lead organizational change.
This article is posted at firstsource.com
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