Responding to the Need for Change

When an organization faces challenges from direct-competitors, the marketplace or from transformations in the far environment such as new competition from disruptors, leaders have no choice but to manage through these challenges and lead change. But change always involves high levels of resistance and risk.

In the face of resistance and risk, leaders must embrace this need and then communicate to all stakeholders the inevitability of change; it has to happen. The logic of transforming an enterprise-culture is hard to escape when the market in which it is operating is changing. But there is often huge resistance from not only employees but also from senior individuals on the board and from shareholders.

These resistors must re-group and then mobilize to stress to all employees there is no option but to move forward through the stormy waters of competitive pressures, changing markets and far environmental factors.

Even in organizations where the owner, board of directors or C-Suite have become aligned and have agreed this need to transform the enterprise, there is almost always one major and fundamental difficulty; the conflict between an existing culture embedded in the enterprise, defining ways things are done and the need to become something different.

Powerful, defensive emotional responses are a reality for people whose lives are intertwined in the current culture of an organization. Anxiety and fear are powerful negative emotions driving how people think and feel. These are the enemies of creativity, innovation, and productive change, which are needed given the volatile, uncertain, unstable, complex and ambiguous marketplaces where we are all striving for sustainable success.