Building Successful Transformation Initiatives

4 things to consider when building impact-driven transformation initiatives

The future of work presents a paradigm shift that introduces participatory leadership, collaboration, and inclusion on all levels. This leads to less hierarchy, continuous learning, and shared decision-making. The organizations that will thrive are the ones with the most engaged people, aligned around a common purpose and individuals who know that their efforts play a role in the greater impact.

A key determinant for impact is the ability to collaborate. Collaborative impact enables organizations to reshape how they convene, think together, learn, and make decisions in order to yield greater impact.

Here are four things to consider to build successful transformation initiatives and ditch old-fashioned change management practices.

Traditional management is in crisis. Leaders were previously encouraged to have a top-down approach to making decisions and leadership. However, this style has direct control only over your own behaviors, not the behaviors of subordinates or colleagues.

A skilled leader today understands that you can influence other people's behaviors indirectly, by different interventions for instance, and that you also need to involve others in the leadership process. By involving others, you tap into their basic human needs, and they will become more inclined to collaborate and share their knowledge and experiences. They will also likely resist any changes when they understand the reasons why they are being made.

Every company needs to invest in facilitative leadership methods. With a workforce more physically spread out than ever, needing to solve more complex problems, leaders need to reinvent themselves completely. Management teams need to work very differently in the future than what we see now.

Impact, business success, and employee satisfaction depend on optimizing all of the know-how and experience within an organization. Everyone must be active participants by sharing their thoughts and being heard while the culture adapts and develops the resilience to transform.

There is no one person, political party, or government that will find a one-size-fits-all solution for the complex and constant change that we face. We need to be better at building mechanisms that help us have real conversations and better understand each other, not just on the organizational level but on a societal level.

Having the right tools and platforms for group co-design, facilitation, exploration, learning, and decision-making is fundamental.

To solve the biggest problems facing our society, like climate change and the looming mental health crisis, we need to be able to utilize the creativity, sense-making, and reflection of humans in combination with AI analyses based on both qualitative and quantitative data.

The mindset of "humans as machines" is finally coming to an end. The future of work is social and inclusive – less about output and mechanical work. Instead, we’ll see more adaptability, engagement and digital connectivity empowered by AI.

Businesses need the right tools for group-wide collaboration and real-time AI for analytics. With the right adoption of AI, organizations can make smart decisions across wider groups of people (and collective brainpower) – resulting in engagement, business results, and impact.

In an increasingly digital work-life, digital and mobile platforms must provide more than one-way communications and a constant flow of disruptions in order to impact experience and engagement, and produce tangible results. Companies should upskill their leaders and foster a culture that makes employees feel like valued members of the team where their voices are heard – no matter where they happen to be working from. Everyone needs access to resources that will allow them to do their job while working in hybrid teams.

Facilitation skills are valuable for leaders because they offer an arsenal of techniques that enable them to strike that delicate balance of focusing on task and relationship. When everyone was remote, facilitating teams was easier because everyone was equally placed. Now, with hybrid teams, facilitation is far more difficult to ensure fairness and equal treatment and avoid presenteeism or other forms of bias.

Megatrends like the Great Resignation and the War for Talent are forcing companies to shift from organization-driven recruiting to candidate-driven, as just offering a job with salary perks isn’t enough to retain top talent. The human-centric parts of work-life and the need for stronger purpose and meaning – with employees seeing how their roles create a bigger impact in the world – will continue to be an important focus point going forward.

A purpose-driven company can only be built with participatory ways of working. Employees and stakeholders expect a new era of meaning, action, and transparency.

Transformation is not about having a set goal; rather, the result is created and shaped through learning. We believe that transformation must take an open, experimental learning approach rather than focusing on the final destination.

In his book, From Good to Great, Jim Collins explains the concept of getting the right people on the bus. Leaders must be rigorous in the selection process for getting new people on the bus who share the same vision – asking “who” instead of “what” when it comes to your best strategy – having a busload of people who can adapt to and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next.

Trusting that the people who share the purpose and are given the freedom to do their work in the best way possible will stay and that the ones who leave are probably better off someplace else, and that will benefit all parties.

The number one factor for an organization's ability to survive is that they are able to learn. This learning and review process should be a part of the organization’s long-term strategy and be performed on a continuous basis in order to keep up with dynamic societal impacts.