The best analyst on a team I advised was promoted to lead it, and within six months she was drowning. Not because she had gotten worse at the work. She had gotten better. She was still the fastest, most accurate, most reliable person in the room. That was the problem. She kept doing the work […]
A consumer goods company launched what leadership called the most ambitious operational transformation in the company’s history. New ERP system. Restructured supply chain. Redesigned order management process. Twelve months of intensive internal change work with executive sponsorship, change champions, training programs, and weekly progress dashboards. Eighteen months in, they hit their internal milestones. The system […]
Most organizations are good at managing resistance to a single change and poor at building the capacity to absorb disruption as a constant. Here’s how to shift from resistance management to organizational resilience as a standing competency.
Picture a scenario that’s becoming increasingly common. The head of transformation at a Fortune 500 manufacturer pulls a trusted advisor aside after a steering committee meeting and says something that’s surfacing with growing frequency across the field: “Our governance model is fighting the work.” Her organization is eighteen months into a multi-year operating model transformation. […]
A division president I spoke with last spring described a moment of clarity that came too late. He had just finished reviewing his organization’s project portfolio and realized that nine of the fourteen active initiatives on his list had been approved individually, in separate steering committee meetings, over a period of eighteen months. Each one […]
Before launching any change effort, find out what’s functioning and what’s functioning around a problem. The difference is where your real ROI lives. Every organization has a department that should be half its size. You can usually spot it during a transformation kickoff. The team in question has more headcount than seems necessary, more processes […]
Most leaders I work with are proud of their “no drama” cultures. Meetings run on time. People nod. Decisions get made without much friction. Disagreements get resolved offline, if at all. We tend to interpret that as success. I’d argue it’s often the opposite. When people stop speaking up, it’s rarely because they’re fully on […]
A chief transformation officer had what she called her “cascade problem.” Every major transformation update followed the same path: she briefed the executive committee, the executive committee briefed their direct reports, the direct reports held team meetings, and by the time the message reached the people actually doing the work, it bore almost no resemblance […]
Jesse Jacoby
