What’s Disguised in Your Organization?
As we approach the Halloween season, we start to think about the costumes we’ll wear – the disguises we’ll use to cover up our identity for the occasion. While I’m thinking about what inspires me for a costume this year (current plan is to dress up as a Barbie variation), I can’t help but think about common disguises that we encounter in our work as business transformation consultants.
Let’s investigate a few situations that could indicate things are not what they seem:
Low adoption of new processes and/or systems
Always hitting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
Immediate agreement about organizational priorities in planning sessions
Low Adoption of Processes or Systems
If you’re noticing that teams are not adhering to proper processes, especially if those processes are relatively new, it may be due to insufficient change management, training, and communications within your organization. To successfully onboard team members to a new process, we recommend leveraging Change Management best practices which includes going through stakeholder analysis, drafting a plan for socialization and training, and ensuring that communications are well-targeted to the audience(s). This same approach is also critical when introducing a new system or tool. Low usage of a system is probably a lack of training in disguise!
When a new process or system is being introduced, considering the Change Management strategy is just as important as getting the implementation right. Ensuring that there are consistent efforts to track adoption and to mitigate pockets of resistance will help you to avoid low adherence to necessary process/procedure and should help with enhanced usage of a new system or tool.
Always Hitting KPIs or OKRs
At first, this seems like a great thing… But this could represent a deeper problem that’s in costume as a positive result. If a team is hitting their goals month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year, it’s easy to think, “why change anything?” But this may be hiding one or several situations that leave opportunities on the table.
Here are some possible situations underneath the costume:
Goals might be too ‘safe’ and/or not challenging enough
If other teams are struggling to hit their targets, talent may not be adequately distributed across teams
The source of the numbers, the calculations, or the KPIs themselves may not be accurate
If one of the above scenarios seems like a possibility, we have some recommendations to consider:
Enhance the organizational culture so that courage is rewarded, continuous improvement is consistently pursued, and team members are encouraged to set ambitious goals
Review the allocation of team members to identify where high performers may be over-concentrated
Create a metric dictionary that defines and documents KPI / OKR data sources, calculations, and reporting details
Immediate Agreement about Org Priorities
Immediate agreement about large projects or organization-level priorities may be a symptom of bad practices in disguise. A few situations that may lead to lackluster discussion about important topics include:
Historical instances of certain leaders steamrolling their priorities in the past, resulting in others simply relenting
Examples of lack of follow-through on stated priorities or plans, causing team members to think, “well this won’t matter…”
Negative back-channeling (team members going around each other regarding major decisions)
Because the above situations are largely cultural, they are particularly challenging to address. We recommend pursuing a brief assessment involving conducting discovery interviews with members of the leadership team to identify if (and why) these situations are happening, and to establish a plan to address going forward.
Remove the Disguise
As you come to the end of this blog post, you may be thinking about other examples of disguised issues that are haunting your organization. We hope that some of the suggestions above are applicable or helpful in diagnosing and fixing situations that may not be what they seem.
If you’re interested in further exploring Change Management and org culture activities or assessments, reach out to us at info@flexpointconsulting.com for a free consultation. We’d love to chat!