Leading in Times of Change, (AKA) Business Disruptions –Part 4

This is the fourth and final part in our series of articles challenging businesses to properly identify and collaboratively react to change management and/or business disruption situations to assure on-going business success and avoid potential business failures.

When businesses work hard to properly identify and deal with sudden change and business disruptions, especially in a coordinated and collaborative effort, they immediately gain the ability to achieve the following powerful results.

• First – Team members begin to adopt and share a common language and establish goals for assessing and raising the performance standards of their entire corporate culture

• Second – CEO’s and other corporate executives, immediately begin to gain strong confidence in their corporate leadership in an effort to drive more and successful accountability

• Third – The entire corporate team finally understands how to systematically create a clear line of sight right down through their organizations. They make simple yet highly effective sequential investments in allocating time, assigning talent requirements and committing financial resources to create conditions for success

Highly successful corporate teams charged with identifying and resolving business disruptions also benefit by removing many former constraints, such as ineffective mindsets which cloud thinking and prohibit success.  These successful teams immediately gain the ability to practice and adopt feedback and conflict resolution protocols, thereby clearing any remaining obstacles to achieving success.

In turn businesses typically find themselves with new business leaders with restructured rolls. And, teams begin to align themselves to assure that not only are growth strategies met, future business disruptions can be immediately identified, properly acted upon and resolved without any fear of disaster.

Key Takeaways for Successful Business Disruption Performance

• Clearly and immediately identify all of the support capabilities within the organization
• Determine where all of the current primary and potential future constraints are
• Identify who owns those constraints
• Determine what, if any investment(s) in time, talent and/or finances are required to immediately and permanently resolve those constraints
• Decide what metrics will ultimately be used to confirm that all constraints present and future have in fact been resolved
• Assess if there is a chance that current constraints of any kind will move to other areas of the business
• Finally, what “ahead of the curve” initiatives can be implemented to eliminate any future constraints that might impact business disruptions

Seven Questions Every Successful Change Management/Business Disruption Team Needs to “HONESTLY” ask themselves

1. Are we a strong team operating with a clear purpose and do we have high expectations for the team leader as well as for all team members?

2. Do we have aligned priorities driven by real and timely data on our current state and are all of our priorities aligned to ensure a successful future outcome?

3. Do we think and act with full accountability and clearly demonstrate leadership qualities, keeping everyone inspired and continually inspiring others?

4. Does every key strategy and decision have a single owner who is totally accountable for execution and owns driving key issues for a successful resolution?

5. Are we clear where shared work exists; are we innovating and collaborating effectively, and do we have clear, concise and effective rules for engagements as well as business protocols?

6. Are all team leaders advocating their strategy and then aligning positive ways forward, each from the perspective of their role in service of achieving successful business results?\

7. Are we engaging and communicating a compelling way forward, taking immediate action when and if necessary, changing course direction when needed, and delivering tangible results in a way that creates collaboration, confidence and trust?

We truly hope that these series of articles outlining the keys for success to handling change management and business disruptions will be useful in your business.  We would really like to hear from you as to how you and your company overcame its business disruption challenges, or perhaps what didn’t work and why. We are sure there is much we can learn from everyone’s individual experiences.