Building a sustainable business requires the organization’s full cooperation.
While every company handles strategic situations differently, all want to leverage their strongest leaders and ideas in a way that sustains the business and fuels its growth into the future.
Realigning a business is a complex project, but a successful organizational transition does not focus on technical details. Instead, winning strategies need to be designed to solve complicated issues in a straightforward way that is easy for everyone inside the organization and customers to understand.
The key to driving a successful organizational transition: Lead collaboratively
Driving growth through collaboration requires more input from both leaders and employees to harness the full power of the organization. A traditional approach to development assigns people to projects to produce products or services and then test them in the market. Often, this requires a long time and uses the organization’s precious financial resources on projects not fully proven. There is a better way, and it’s wrapped up in collaboration.
The Problem
Losing customers, finding dysfunction in the business, market downgrades, and a host of other problems brought on by COVID-19 put demands on leaders to make a change. These fluctuations come rapidly, leaving much less time to assess and respond, and with a lack of coordinated communications between leaders, employees, and customers, the organization can go into disaster. In 2020, some 340 major companies declared bankruptcy in the U.S. and blamed COVID-19 for their demise, including retailers, airlines, restaurants, oil producers, mall landlords, and gyms.
The Solution
To combat these issues, the organization must change its organizational strategy and methods. And leaders must be willing to change how they lead. To create a sustainable and scalable organization, the total active contribution is required of all employees ready to take on leadership efforts they are generally not charged to provide. This, to many, is a radical idea, to give control to the employee at the level the problem originates, but who better to solve the problem than the one who knows the most about it? The question is, do they have the authority? In a collaborative organizational model, the answer is a resounding yes!
The Risks
The benefits and risks of changing an organization’s strategy and leadership model are well known. The organization’s structure and hierarchy are sensitive areas that few enjoy evaluating. However, it’s often the key to building a winning team. Frustration among leaders and staff can be high if a clear path of change is not fully established at the beginning of the transition. This frustration can become more intense if significant changes are not introduced that rally everyone’s full support.
Best Next Steps
The complexity of building something new requires the complete unity of all leaders and that they finish what they announce. Simply maintaining the status quo with the hope that the organization will continue to succeed with the same management method is perilous. A consistent leadership flow to staff and customers eliminates confusion and frustration. Carefully composed communications that are designed to be two-way produce the most positive interactions. And although this collaborative strategy for driving growth may seem like a slow way to implement, the truth is by eliminating misunderstandings and frustrations speeds up the organization’s drive to growth.