Change Management & Transformation Consulting

Executive leaders are required to drive change in their organizations. To significantly improve organizational alignment and get everyone pulling in the same direction requires a transformation of management systems, beliefs and behaviors. For over twenty years we have been working alongside leading companies to successfully implement transformation programs that create measurable and sustainable performance improvement. A key ingredient is that we don’t write a report and then disappear and leave the burden to managers. Our consultants are on the ground working directly with your people through it all.

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“The project team was extremely professional and a pleasure to work with. With no prior knowledge of our estimating and accounting software your team became experts in short order. As a company that has been around for years and successful it became somewhat apparent that we made money in spite of ourselves quite often. Change is often a nasty word in the construction business and we need to embrace that if we wanted to stay relevant in the future. Through your many hours of observing our activities you were able to put in place some real positive processes and more importantly showed us how to sustain those processes moving forward.”

President, Mader Construction

There are four cornerstones to our transformation approach:

1. Rally around a common purpose

The front end of an initiative is all about alignment. Before we even begin, we conduct what we call an Opportunity Analysis. This is a series of studies to quantify the performance gaps in the current operation. We gain agreement with senior executives on the specific objectives, benefits and costs of the initiative.

We then work with your management and employees to verify the performance gaps. We determine what portion of the gap is recoverable and the impact of those changes. We help management cascade objectives so that there is clarity of purpose, responsibilities and roles. People know why change is happening, what it means to them, and what they need to do to make it happen. We also develop a practical strategy to physically implement the changes and measure the improvement.

2. Make performance visible

Sustainable improvement only happens when people actually plan for higher performance, execute to that plan, and then physically act on the variances. These kinds of behavior changes are never easy. A key aspect is to make performance visible to all levels of management and employees. Better results reinforce the reasons for changing. The key performance indicators need to be straight forward, accurate, understood and believed in. Better results eventually drive changes in mindset.

3. Manage variances with humility

Change never works exactly as planned and to sustainably improve performance, managers need to act on variances. How they do this is critical to employee engagement. If managers genuinely see themselves as a problem-solving resource to support front-line employees, employees will be engaged and have confidence in the way forward. Many managers need training and coaching on how to support, rather than monitor, their employees.

4. Apply pressure for continuous improvement

The best managed organizations reach a performance objective and then re-set their sights on the next level. Continuous learning and improvement is part of their cultural DNA. This keeps managers thinking about the next frontier and keeps employees challenged and engaged. We help provide managers with the tools and coaching to foster this type of environment, and we reinforce the message when we do our follow up reviews after the on-site engagements are completed.