Moving the Elephant, Five Transformational Steps to Driving Change When You’re Winning

It’s notoriously hard to drive change in large companies. Being at the top of the heap with steady earnings doesn’t sound like a burning platform for change. However, with the ever-accelerating speed of emergent forces in competitive markets, a company’s position can change seemingly overnight.
 
Under these circumstances, ambivalence towards change is easy to understand. However, whether it is leadership’s desire to be first in the market with an industry-leading solution or to respond quickly to competitive forces, in a fast-paced environment, the critical decisions about what has to change are not always self-evident. One thing we did learn in the heart of the storm was that latching on to an event or time when people expect change makes it easier to initiate a bit more. That was an unexpected lesson.  We’ve learned bigger lessons that we’re sharing here:

1. Establish Guiding Principles to keep teams anchored to company values during change.
2. An agile decision-making process, supported by real-time, actionable intelligence reduces strategic risk. 
3. Cross-functional teams that are empowered and self-sustaining strengthens accountability. 
4. 2.Attentive Leadership©, practices improve key skills needed for delivering the needed leadership responsiveness.
5. Bringing people closer to transformational change with a clear voice, emotionally connects all stakeholders.​

What we learned was our elephant-sized clients turn best through small steps. What started as a push strategy became a pull. Now, we’re taking this new way of working to other parts of the company. The big picture remains the same. The market moves fast and companies, large and small, must be agile and adaptable to compete. But, when a big company decides to move in the same direction through small transformational steps, its velocity can outpace the market. 
For a more detailed version check out our article on LinkedIN.

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Click here for extended version in a Linked In article.