August 16 2020 at 11:21AM
Transformation fatigue, a myth or reality?
Many companies’ board of directors and c-suites crack their heads against the wall to find the holy grail to boost value creation to their shareholders. Meanwhile, corporations engage internally to try to understand how to cope with a rapidly changing market and volatile environment. These externalities include pandemics, natural disasters and socio-political instabilities which appear more often than expected. As a result, firms need to keep changing (transform), and at the same time run their daily operations to deliver against their business goals (perform). Managing these two faces of the coin is incredibly challenging and decision makers need to comprehend where the optimal balance between perform and transform is.
What is transformation fatigue ?
Companies are facing change overload, and this creates what is commonly known as transformation fatigue. A study from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows that nearly 75% of business transformations fail to improve business performance, either short-term or long-term. One of the reasons is that employees experience tiredness, lack of motivation and as consequence productivity goes down. Usually employee’s targets are linked to their performance and not to the business transformation goals. For example, sales executives are incentivized on achieving their annual goals around revenue or profit generation, and not on adhering to a new sales platform or following an optimized sales process.
What to keep in mind ?
Employees’ time and energy are limited, and business leaders should “go to the Gemba” (Japanese terms meaning go the actual place) to monitor the situation of their workforce and implement action plans to keep them motivated. Is not enough to undertake employees’ surveys every month to evaluate the situation, instead what leaders need to engage with their teams at the different levels o the organization. Another aspect to keep in mind is the increasing number of firms striving for a multi-cultural and diverse workforce (BCG study showed that more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues because of innovation). In that sense, business managers should have an effective listening and an adaptive leadership style approach at all time.
