As a business, there is no way to avoid change — you can either choose to resist or embrace it. Often triggered by technological advancements, market shifts, or organizational restructuring, moments of significant change are best navigated through agility. After all, challenges can’t be resolved by running in the opposite direction or ignoring them. In fact, 47% of organizations that implement a strategy to manage change are more likely to achieve their business goals than those that don’t.
It’s normal to feel apprehensive about change, but these inflection points represent critical junctures where businesses must adapt to new realities or risk falling behind. By recognizing these moments of change as avenues for newfound success, organizations can drive growth and resilience that positions them for long-term success. At SEI, we’ve gained valuable insights into common challenges and opportunities that arise during inflection points and have dedicated ourselves to observing, supporting, and guiding our clients through the unknown. This time, we’re sharing common themes from our experience and offering solutions that can help empower your organization to adapt with confidence, resilience, and strategic foresight.
Common Issues at Inflection Points
Change can come in all forms, shapes, and sizes, but it often ignites common issues that can hinder progress if left unchecked. These include:
- Lack of Leadership Alignment: Change can be a disruptor, breaking the norms of what internal teams know and how they operate. To maneuver in this terrain, leaders have to be on the same page for decisions to move forward with momentum. Otherwise, this lack of alignment on direction and priorities can cause confusion and stall advancement.
- Unclear Roadmaps: Another obstacle is a lack of clarity on goals and the steps needed to achieve them. Without a clear plan in place, employees and leaders can struggle to understand their roles and responsibilities during the transition, making it easy for any strategy to fall apart.
- Inaccurate Assumptions: Overestimating a team’s capacity and appetite to execute changes at the right pace is also a frequent problem. Leaders may assume that their teams can handle the additional workload and adapt to new processes without additional support or resources, but this can lead to burnout, decreased morale, and, ultimately, failure to meet your objectives. It’s essential to assess your organization’s ability and agility, then provide the necessary training and resources to manage changes effectively, sustainably, and at scale.
Focusing on resolving these issues during ongoing operational work can be daunting when teams are already juggling priorities and limited bandwidth. Leaders may be pulled in multiple directions, dealing with urgent issues while trying to align on a strategic direction. Additionally, tactical teams must maintain existing projects and workloads, which can further strain operations as they jump between day-to-day operations and strategic initiatives.
The Risks of Inaction
When inflection points are not viewed through a strategic lens, work becomes fragmented, leading to wasted resources, redundancy, and confusion. For instance, teams may find themselves working on overlapping projects or pursuing conflicting priorities, diminishing overall productivity. As frustrations brew, employees can start to feel disengaged and unhappy, which can manifest in decreased motivation and higher turnover rates. With employees serving as the heartbeat of every organization, this can cause a business to lose its competitive edge.
Three Tactics for Charting a New Course
When preparing for change, your first step should be to align with your team and ensure you have the necessary resources to be successful. While having a plan is essential, without widespread support, it will be challenging to create buy-in and sustainability. Consider implementing these three strategies to set your teams and organization up for success before fully committing to your change strategy.
1 – Conduct Assessments
Utilize data-driven assessments to make the change process more scientific and take the subjectivity out of change. By quantifying an organization’s readiness for change, these assessments provide a tangible metric that makes the abstract concept of change more concrete and measurable. For example, if an organization scores low on readiness, it indicates that specific areas require attention and improvement, such as teamwork or communication. In this way, assessments can prompt targeted interventions — in this case, training programs, team-building activities, and better communication tools — to help refine and tailor change management plans to address gaps before operational bottlenecks start to unfold.
2 – Be Intentional About Strategic Planning
The beauty of proactive planning is that it allows you to identify potential obstacles before they become a real problem. Building detailed roadmaps drives alignment at the highest levels and ensures activities ladder back to your strategic imperatives. But the only way to do this is to start getting the right people in the room. Involving a diverse group of stakeholders ensures that all necessary perspectives and varying levels of expertise are included, leading to more comprehensive, well-rounded, and holistic plans. Not only does this collaborative approach help cover all your strategic bases, it gives leaders clarity on priorities and ownership of the work. As leaders effectively cascade this strategy, employees feel a sense of commitment as they understand the connection between their tactical efforts and the organization’s goals.
3 – Work with the Right Partner
Working with a partner will provide an objective point of view that can help you understand what will work for your company and what won’t. A good partner is heavily involved in brainstorming sessions, strategy syncs, and alignment calls to offer advice and guidance throughout a change management plan; but the best partner walks with you every step of the way to help implement the strategy through project work and operationalization while consistently checking for alignment.
How SEI Can Help
With nearly 30 years of experience guiding businesses through big changes, SEI is the perfect partner to collaborate with, whether you’re looking to execute a complete digital transformation or conform to the demands of a merger. We use proprietary tools to conduct organizational maturity and change capacity assessments, identify gaps, and uncover potential misalignment on priorities. By leveraging SEI’s expertise and experience, our consultants work closely with stakeholders to develop actionable plans and implement best practices that drive positive business outcomes to help companies meet their organizational goals. Some services we offer include:
- Maturity Assessments: Identifying areas for organizational improvement and creating tailored solutions.
- Change Capacity Assessments: Measuring how well-positioned your organization is for navigating change.
- Change Leadership: End-to-end management of organizational or team changes including communication, training, and stakeholder engagement plans.
- Leadership Alignment Exercises: Facilitating alignment among leadership for unified direction.
- Strategic Planning and Roadmap Building: Developing actionable roadmaps with defined success metrics.
- Project Execution: Implementing the results of strategic planning, assessments, and plans to drive successful change.
SEI provides the support needed to thoughtfully traverse transformative areas while positioning your organization for future success.
