Change is inevitable in business; it’s often necessary for growth. Change in business highlights something about companies that most people don’t want to admit that their enterprises have disabilities. Whether they work with their capabilities and work around their disabilities is what makes or breaks the flow through change. You must implement change across the board when you grow your business to help it thrive.
What Does It Mean to Implement Change?
Implementing change involves shifting your strategies and processes. This could mean introducing new tools and software. Still, whatever it means, it’s necessary to develop a plan to implement changes and provide the tools for your team to change your business successfully.
The Benefits of Implementing Change
When you implement change for growth you:
- Improve collaboration
- Improve Productivity and Efficiency
- Improve your firm’s ability to adapt and respond to changes in the future
- Lay out a specific path for achieving your business goals
The Tenets of Capabilities
A business has capabilities based on its processes, resources, and values. When we make decisions about handling change, some business processes are changed based on what is wrong. Positive business changes should be based on our strengths and capabilities within the business.
Brands should be talking about the possibilities that are possible with the talents and strengths it possesses. For example, suppose a company wants to correct employee turnover or customer dissatisfaction. In that case, they should come to the table to discuss talent retainment and delivering customer service and up those things that are currently working and implementing change that will lend itself to the defined goals.
While businesses have these three tenets, so do the people in each unique business. Ideally, people’s processes, resources, and values will match their job and company. This happens with more or less success as businesses grow and shrink.
But even though people may match their job and business in values, for example, they are still not guaranteed success or failure within a company. Each position and personal response is so unique that you cannot base success on aligning values, resources, or processes alone. It takes something more that is often intangible.
When you set up business change, without the team’s support, successful transformation isn’t possible. Involve your team in deciding the changes and the implementation of changes that involve them. Trust them to want the best for the company and to offer suggestions that can effect change by using these strategies for implementing change in the workplace:
- Involve as many team members as possible from the start
- Make sure you’ve included team members who the changes will impact
- Allow employees to provide meaningful input in the decisions about their departments and roles.
- Check-in with them as the changes are implemented
- Use measurement systems to monitor progress and meet with succeeding or failing individuals.
Because success is so unpredictable based on business core capabilities, it’s essential to stay flexible in business. Managers should not be afraid to move things and people around when they know for sure that something isn’t working despite looking good on paper.
Knowing Limitations
Disabilities in business happen when we encounter friction with a situation and our capabilities as a business. Perhaps we do not have enough personnel at a certain point. Maybe our value of a particular profit margin effectively turns our business acquisition board of smaller markets.
Managers may be able to hire more personnel. They may acquire a company specializing in smaller markets to add to their portfolio. They may employ specific experts to fill in the company’s process failures. Whatever the case, a disability doesn’t have to last forever.
Every business has weaknesses, just as it has strengths. Look for your weaknesses, find out what complaints customers and employees are expressing, and look for processes slowing you down. Then look for opportunities to implement new approaches to strengthen these weaknesses.
When you can honestly identify weaknesses, you can begin to research ways to overcome them, create a strategy to implement change, and succeed as a business.
To find your businesses weaknesses:
- Review Processes to Identify Flaws
- Check-in on the Competition
- Talk to Your Team Members and Managers of Each Division
Acquisitions: A Major Source of Business Change
IPOs are confusing, but mergers and acquisitions of smaller companies are confusing too. There is a lot to business acquisitions and mergers. People can become so busy that they may totally lose sight of their de facto capabilities and disabilities as a business.
The critical thing to remember about acquisitions is that whatever you bought the newest asset for, you need to preserve it. An unfortunate fact about these business decisions is that as companies are bought and merged, they lose their unique resources because the buyer forces the company infrastructure to change. While some infrastructure change is usually necessary, the challenge lies in ensuring that core capabilities remain within the old and new companies.
How to Implement Change in the Workplace
- Identify Weaknesses and Strengths
- Identify Needed Changes and Assess How These Changes Will Affect Your Team
- Develop a Strategic Plan Involving Your Team
- Communicate the Changes to the Team
- Seek Feedback and Adjust as Your Progress
- Evaluate Your Changes
If you can learn to identify your capabilities and disabilities like a pro, you are one step closer to implementing change in an organization and successfully managing business change. Buying smaller companies with unique capabilities is just one way to confront limitations. In short, the best way to deal with constraints is to pursue specific growth as a company to increase its capability in business.
