Why Organizational Transformation Efforts Fail: Common Factors And Solutions

Improper Planning of Change Process

Why transformation efforts fail? Discuss.

In all across the globe, there are many changes that are taking place. All these changes have been made by the organisations based on the requirements they have in the market. This has forced the firms to make sure that they have effective strategies for making these changes to work. Over the years there are many examples where the basic changes that have been made by the organisation have created the disruption in the business (Kotter 59-67). Some of the changes have slowed down their growth rate and some led to collapse of the market for the company. After evaluation it was found that there were many reasons why change led to business disruption. Even the best of transformation efforts have failed over the years because of negligence of common factors that could lead to change. In the longer run it was found that there were many reasons that could have been avoided but due to insufficient capabilities of leadership it was not taken care properly (Jamieson).

Since changes are required in every organisation from time to time so as to ensure that business are running according to the business environment that is present in the industry. The major reasons why transformation efforts fails is that change process have not been properly planned. It is generally seen that the change process gets started even without understanding the clauses that could bring business disruptions. The planning should be effective and not only should be made according to the things that may require change but should also be done as per the requirements of the company so that any external factor may not disrupt the business (Kotter). Some of the common things that were missing in some of the failures in the past were proper distributing roles in the changing requirements, improper governance and decision making structure, poor stakeholder’s engagement strategies as well as communication plans. Due to the lag of key initiatives it is seen that speed and efficiency of the change process also slowed down. For example the mergers like Sprint and Nextel, AOL-Time Warner failed because of the lag of proper plans for the mergers. Since it was going to change the whole structure and organisational operational style hence should have been planned more effectively.

It was also seen in many cases that selection of improper process for leading transformations was the major reason why they failed (Harmon). This can be understood in terms of the employee’s participation or readiness to adopt the changes. If the employees are not ready for adopting changes it is always difficult for the organisations to ensure long term growth of the company. For example National Board was trying to make the changes in their product design and the technology (System on Chip) they were using but failed because neither employees nor the market accepted that technology. Before making changes a company’s employees must be capable enough to adopt the changes so that they can add value to the change process (Brunsson and Olsen). Due to lack of effective training, employees face a number of issues during organisational change process which affects their productivity.

Employee Readiness to Adopt Changes

In the change process it is always seen that whenever the company have tried to skip the steps for speeding up the process of change has never resulted in a proper manner (Appelbaum, et al. 764-782). Often it is seen that one mistake by the company leads to huge loses for them. This can be illustrated with the fact that research has been one of the major factors in the change process. Whenever there is less research done about the things that needs to done for making the change process effective, it has led to business disruption. For example there were failed cases as the company was unable to understand the actual demand of the market. This is evident from the case of Kodak where the changes were made just in regarding to the processes that were used in their operation. The change that was actually needed was to change the technology that they were using in their products. This case also suggested that when the leadership was not competent enough to make change or the lack of vision in the minds of leaders can often leads to poor changes.

At the time of change process there are several confusions that are going on in the minds of the workers (Hayes). At this time they need the support from the leaders and it must be provided by them to support the employees. There are many people that are coming to the business from different cultural backgrounds and hence it is important for the leaders to understand the organisational behaviour. It is their role to fulfil all the needs of employees as their satisfaction values a lot. Whenever the interests of employees are neglected, it creates dissatisfaction among employees which becomes the major reason for failure of changes.  A leader must be active during the whole process so that he must not miss any crucial aspect (Shin, Taylor and Seo 727-748). The decisions must be designed as per the evaluation which has been made on the basis of what organisations want to achieve from the changes at the same time what initiatives will be better.

Along with this another major factors that have led to transformational failures is lack of resources. Those firms which planned for the change process and lagged in terms of availing adequate resources have often suffered a lot. Resources must be of high quality and should be able to fulfil the requirements of the change process (Burke). This is another crucial role of the leaders and is a part of the change leadership skills. Most of the organisations focus on leadership development while change leadership development is rather missing. Change is often not an easy process and requires a lot of efforts from the leaders to be effectively implemented. In this process, it is essential to improve the bench strength of the workforce. This is evident from the example that in the late 90’s when there was technological shift going on in various parts of the world in terms of manufacturing technology, Morgan still using handmade technologies for designing and developing of the car. They were resisting changes and were failed to do it properly because their leaders were not capable enough to take the risk or in other words they were not willing to take the risk which resulted in huge losses for the company (Czarniawska and Sevón). If the leadership is not ready to take risk then the chances of risk arisen gets reduced. It is seen that the leaders that are not making any kind of shifts in their approach, the change process often get slowed down and remain ineffective.

Inadequate Resources and Leadership Skills

It has also been seen that organisations have failed in their transformational process as they were unable to find their weak points. This has back fired the company’s change plans and has led to huge amount of loss to the company in the longer run. In the competitive business environment that is present in any industry, it has become essential for the organisations to make sure that they have a workforce that is capable of maintaining the changes. It is important that an organisation puts experienced persons at the crucial position in the company (Rafferty, Jimmieson and Armenakis 110-135). This helps in managing the change process. It was also seen in the failed transformational change process that important and experienced people were not sitting at the exact locations. Due to lack of experience it was not easy to execute plans as inexperienced people generally are unable to understand the complexity related to the change process. Most of the firms gave the responsibilities related to the change process to only few people. This made it difficult for the company to do it perfectly. Even the Hard-won gains were lost when the officials were unable to handle the situations. Research regarding this showed that new employees were unable to handle pressure.

Another crucial aspect related to this suggest that most of the leaders are in an illusion that everything is going perfect and in this they fail to notice the things that are actually not making up. In this regards monitoring plays a very crucial role and hence continuous monitoring is essential (Junaid and Uddin 186-205). With the use of modern day technologies each parameter related to the change process can be effectively monitored. This helps in checking each and every variable in a perfect manner so that no problems exist in the change process. This may be regarding the variables like the employee performance, employee behaviour etc. It is crucial that a company understands any change in these parameters based on the previous performance of the company before the change took place.

It has also been seen in many cases that lack of documentation may lead to severe loss to the company. This is because the documentation helps in finding the problems that may exist in the business. In documentation it is crucial that even the slightest of change is documented. This helps in making decisions as per the requirements of the situation. Documentation empowers the company to have a close watch on each and every process (Booth). This also helps in making changes in the activities that are done in the change process. Timely audit is also necessary in this regards as it helps in the improving the change process. Various researches have suggested that due to untimely audit of the process and the performance evaluation have led to failures.

Lack of Monitoring and Documentation

Another important error that companies have made while making changes are that the management or leadership did not understood the urgency to do the changes. This was also evident from the case of Morgan Car Company which did not understand the sense of Urgency of changing into an automatic company. Because of this when they made changes later here were already behind their competitors. Even the made changes did not help them in grabbing the opportunities available in the market earlier. Most important of them all why transformation efforts failed was that during the whole process the communication was poor. It was the failure from the side of leaders as they were unable to communicate the vision of the company towards making such changes to the stakeholders of the firm (Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch). The stakeholders understood that they were misguided and hence their participation was poor. Due to lack of proper communication methodologies, it was seen that people understood it in some other ways which took the change process is different direction and hence the efforts of transformation failed.

In the concluding remark it can be stated that there are various factors that are associated with the change process and if these factors were not controlled then there would be chances of failure. Every effort that failed was only due to the fact that there was something missing in the whole change process. In other words there were few things that was overlooked by the companies and resulted in poor transformations.

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