“One key to successful leadership is continuous personal change. Personal change is a reflection of our inner growth and empowerment.” Robert E. Quinn
One of the aspects of working in a B2B – Business 2 Business – service organisation, is that there are organisations and research that the company I work for subscribes to and as a consequence I can reflect on as part of my daily work. I continually seek to learn of new research in the MoC arena and also the impact of people in the change world.
I was able to attend a Corporate Executive Board [CEB] webinar [an online presentation and audio broadcast] on “Driving change through leadership transition”. The fascination for me was to reflect the latest research and the impact of the “Y” and “Z” generations and on the way that how you manage and lead change has morphed over the past 10 years. The CEB has 21,00 senior executives [including 100% of fortune 100 companies in the USA, 90% of the Fortune 500 companies in Europe, and more than 85% of the UK FTSE 100 companies – so a well connected organisation]. I would never advocate any single group or organisation, but these folks have been used by everyone and every organisation I have worked for for the past 15 years in a non-judgemental approach and are highly rated.
I thought I would highlight some of the key outcomes from the research I have read so far. They include:
# Change agents and executives that plan and successfully execute the change plans, achieving the benefits 9 months BEFORE those that don’t do this.
# If you are able to execute the change plans, you can achieve revenue AND profit improvements of 3 to 5%.
# If you embrace and lead the transition – acting and behaving as a “Transition Leader”, your direct reports can feel more engaged and can improve their performance more than 15% better than those who are not engaged. This is a significant change as the “Y” and “Z” generations want to feel more engaged. if these terms do not connect, let me know and I’ll put up a definition of “Y” and “Z”.
# Financially, for every £1 of revenue earned, there is 20p directly attributable to change performance and the outcomes. I have always worked on 10p directly and a further 10p indirectly, or 20% impact. This is the same over the past 10 years. You need to think of the 20% impact rule on any change agenda.
The final statistic for this article is that 20% are likely to be disengaged or leave the organisation as a result of a major. If you are looking to cut your people – remove, delete, sack, fire, eradicate – whatever term you can use, reflect that people numbers on a excel spreadsheet are PEOPLE…… and that this has a significant impact on a business.
i’ll post the 2nd part tomorrow which will include the four categories of success and measuring the impact of the changes. The post after that will cover how to equip people to make the change a success.
Martin Summerhayes 