9 Insights for Successful Organization Change: Avoiding the Traps That Derail Most Change Effort

9INSIGHTS FORSUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATION CHANGE

And How To Avoid the Traps That Derail Most Change Efforts

Abstract

Today’s social-purpose organizations are charged with solving our most vexing cultural, economic, and political challenges.

Organizations that hope to meet the moment with strategies and solutions to tackle society’s most wicked challenges must themselves embody the skills, capacities, and humility to lead planned change, negotiate competing interests, adapt and leverage emergent trends, and scale practices for learning and continuous improvement.

The reality is that most organizations struggle to lead successful change efforts… and sadly, fall short of their full potential.

However, organizations that prioritize building the “muscles and mindsets” to lead internal change produce better outcomes when it comes to:

Transforming resources into results

Building workplace cultures where staff members show up and contribute their best

Growing organizations that don’t just survive but THRIVE!

Making contributions of substance to the world with curiosity, humility, and gratitude

Identifying and acting on emergent opportunities just in time

Creating alignment across divergent interests toward greater impact

Building multi-stakeholder teams low on trust to accomplish more together than going it alone

Cultivating meaningful stakeholder collaboration

Creatingsignificant changeishard. Institutionalizingthat changeandembedding itinanorganization’s DNAisevenharder.

As an organization development coach and consultant, I’ve worked closely with hundreds of leaders and organizations seeking to make substantial, sustainable change within their teams, organizations, fields, sectors, and networks.

There are few things more rewarding than witnessing the human and institutional flourishing made possible when the collective creativity of human efforts are organized in a common direction and united by a shared purpose.

Watching clients begin to see the nature of their organizations as so much more than mere bureaucracies never fails to make my heart sing.

However, over the years, I’ve also noticed common pitfalls associated with organizational change efforts that fall short. So, in service to those I have not yet met and to those whose paths I may not cross, here are 9 things I’ve learned over the years that will help keep your organization on the path to making real change.

The Problem Is Not the Problem

Organizations come to me for help with pressing problems interpersonal conflict, staff churn, conflicting priorities, stakeholder disagreements, mismatches between strategy and goals, leader burnout, or a persistent sense that the organization is stretched too thin.

The problems are various, but these organizations have one thing in common.

9out of 10 cases

the problem they think they have is not their real problem.

Here’s what I mean:

Organizations, like humans, have unique DNA developed from and resulting in behaviors, attitudes, practices, and habits from decades past.

H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. ” Solving for the symptoms of a problem like developing a new strategic plan or a weekend team-building retreat doesn’t address long-standing patterns.

So before you jump to the “obvious” solution to your problem, pause for a moment. Treat the presenting problem as though it were a symptom… and then explore what it might be a symptom of.

Taking time at the outset to identify the root causes of complex organizational challenges will radically increase your capacity to solve the right problem and to do so permanently.

Explore the Symptom

Ask your team if they’ve noticed any other events, patterns, or conditions similar to the current issue that’s surfacing.

Ask yourself what issues you might be missing or only addressing at a surface level

Ask what you and your team might not yet understand about this issue.

Consider who else should be involved in solving this problem

Is the issue understood in the same way throughout the organization?

YOUR TEAM IS NOT THE ISSUE

When your team seems unable to move the needle on important goals and initiatives, it's tempting to blame interpersonal problems, communication issues, or general team dysfunction.

Here are the most common culprits I've seen throughout the organizations I've served:

Lack of Shared Purpose

Nothing impedes progress, like ambiguous goals or a lack of commitment to those goals. The ultimate source of team dysfunction in 90% of the teams I've coached is vague expectations regarding long-term goals.

When people are uncertain about what they're working toward, unconvinced as to why it matters, or uninvested in the organization's raison d'etre, their efforts will be diffuse, inconsistent, and sometimes even counterproductive.

If a team lacks a common basis for unity and consensus around objectives and priorities, interpersonal problems are likely to surface. Those problems will overshadow systemic issues. This is demonstrated by how failing to align divergent interests results in interpersonal conflict.

Lack of Clarity Around Roles

To execute well, team members must understand their roles. Overlapping responsibilities causes confusion over “who does what,” leading to stress, conflict, poor performance, and important work left undone.

Gaps in Processes and Procedures

Your processes and procedures guide your team on how to make decisions, divide resources, communicate, and solve problems. If those processes are unclear, frustrations grow, and teamwork becomes ineffective. It’s no accident that these root problems perfectly reflect organizational theorist Richard Beckhard’s model of team function.

Most team problems manifest on the base level of this model, with interpersonal relations. It's normal to want to intervene at that level. However, to truly resolve the issue, it's more productive to focus on issues arising in the upper tiers of the model.

Using the GRPI Model

Using the GRPI model to diagnose your team's trouble spots enables you to aim your intervention where it will do the most good and to significantly increase your odds of resolving problems for the long haul.

Resist Quick Fixes

Too often, leaders receive praise for making fast, decisive decisions, finding immediate conflict resolution, and solving long-standing problems quickly. Who doesn’t like the adrenaline rush that accompanies checking off items on one ’ s To-Do List?

As the leader of a social impact organization, you naturally want to lead change efforts that deliver fast results.

However, this quick-fix approach is one of the most tragic misunderstandings of what constitutes great leadership. It accounts for why so many organizational change efforts stop short of solving the root cause of an organization’s bottlenecks or fail to address entrenched complex problems because they are addressing symptoms.

As an internationally recognized pioneer in organizational transformation and large systems change, Dr. Robert Gass has trained thousands of leading consultants around the globe. I am inspired to be one of his students. From him, I learned that leading successful change that is profound, substantive, and sustainable requires a systematic approach. To create the conditions for transformation, leaders must always attend to the following:

The idea is that “Change” occurs through the interplay of these three elements.

Hearts and Minds

Allthatgoesoninsidehumanbeings; ourmotivations,beliefs,feelings, perceptions,etc.

Behavior

Whatpeopleactuallydo;ourwords andactions.

Structure

Ourexternalenvironment;thesocial realityandstructuresinwhichwe operate.

Sometimes, even when an organization is bound by a common narrative, or held together by shared purpose, the power wielded by its culture is too deeply entrenched to support a shift, we develop a new set of policies and procedures, or there’s awareness that a new set of behaviors are needed but no capacity or infrastructure to facilitate new ways of being. Successfully navigating transformation requires that a whole host of elements move in complementary relationships to one another.

Don’t Think You Can Outsource Change Leadership

When it comes to organizational transformation, the commitment to change begins at the top. Leaders have a lot on their plates, but the commitment to supporting new systems is best demonstrated by modeling the desired outcome.

If executives and board leadership want to realize genuine change, they must use the support of HR Directors and People Officers wisely. Successful change initiatives only succeed with active, genuine, and engaged executive leadership at the table taking responsibility for leading the way.

Remember to hold your executive team accountable for what is emerging. Real change cannot occur if it's an off-thefront-lines effort separate from the overall organization's day-to-day work.

Solve Problems, but Manage Polarities

Polarities are ongoing paradoxes that are fundamentally unresolvable. Problems have solutions, but polarities only pose dilemmas.

Let's take an example to illustrate this concept: consider the tension between planning and emergence. No organization can ignore planning for long, yet clinging to pre-set plans in the face of emerging threats and opportunities can be counterproductive. Planning and emergence will always be in tension, and you will always need to navigate that tension.

Trying to solve a polarity, such as choosing between strict planning and complete emergence, is one of the fastest ways to demoralize a team, kneecap a change effort, and waste a group ’ s time. However, learning to manage polarities effectively will open the door to many opportunities, progress, and success for your organization.

Ensure That Your Strategic Plans are Both Strategic and Plans

Without a doubt, the most popular service requests consultants get in the field are requests for strategic planning services. In part, it’s because the term is familiar and more accessible to business development consciousness than calling up to ask for scenario planning, organizational restructuring, or leadership development and coaching.

Certainly, there are times when revisiting an organization’s strategic direction is necessary and timely. Sometimes, it’s evident that

an organization

has outgrown its strategic plan.

Too often, we encounter clients with strategic plans that are neither strategic nor plans. They may have lost their way when trying to be all things to all people, or the organization’s mission might have lost clarity, necessity, or adherence to its vision in the face of the new world order. These scenarios are common and often lead to requests for external support. If in fact an organization feels that in order to make progress attention must be paid to its strategic framework, encouraging clients to consider nimble, shorter, time-bound engagements centered on addressing a few, yet difficult questions, might bring what’s most needed. Such as:

What is the world currently calling on us to offer?

Does the world still need what we have on offer and/or have we achieved our original purpose for which we ’ ve originally envisioned?

Are we solving the problem we intended to solve at its source? Or are we only addressing the problem downstream?

Are we complicit in exacerbating the very problems we aim to solve by allowing our strategies and approaches to become rigid orthodoxies and entrenched shibboleths?

Do we need to do more to foster a culture of critical thinking and flexibility so that we can be sure we are not complicit in perpetuating the very problems we seek to solve?

During intake conversations, I keep my ear close to the ground and listen with my entire body engaged. What often emerges are issues that a strategic plan won’t address [e.g. poorly defined roles and responsibilities, few organizational mechanism for conflict resolution, espoused organizational values that need to better align with organizational actions, or many of the other issues I address in this article].

While there may be a need for a new strategic framework around which the board and staff can align, it becomes noticeable that while the organization may need to work on its strategic direction the issues that prompted their call could be solved by means other than building a new strategic framework. There is always a bigger picture. Therefore, jumping into an expensive and extended linear planning process intended to create an entirely new strategic plan is not what’s most needed. Remember, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created the problem.

Design Processes That Authentically Engage the Widest Range of Voices

Don’t confuse alignment across differences for a lowest common denominator consensus, or worse yet, a “false consensus ” .

Authentic engagement of diverse voices in design processes requires a commitment to actively seeking out and valuing a spectrum of perspectives.

It involves creating inclusive spaces that foster genuine dialogue where individuals feel psychologically secure in expressing their unique insights and experiences.

Recognizing and celebrating the richness of differences rather than settling for a diluted consensus is vital to unlocking the full potential of collaborative design processes.

Get Serious About Your Culture

“Culture building” is a buzzword these days, but we ’ ve known for decades how essential an organization’s culture is to its success.

Edgar Henry Schein, founder of the discipline of organizational behavior, was a champion of this idea. He believed that no matter how brilliant an organization’s strategy, performance would eventually suffer if the organization’s espoused values and lived values were out of alignment.

I've witnessed this to be true over and over and over again. While economic benefit is an obvious motivation for seeking employment, it's never the sole raison d'etre for what attracts and retains talent over time. When an organization's espoused values are out of alignment with those by which it lives, an organization can expect staff churn at best and a revolving door of top talent at worst.

Moreover, today's workforce expects a just and human-centered workplace culture, a place where whether a union represents an organization's workforce or not, the leadership shows intention, effort, and a chief executive who walks the walk and holds their leadership team accountable in prioritizing these values.

Focus on the System

Whenever I speak to prospective clients, it goes something like this: We chat about the problem they’re experiencing They tell me what (or who!) they believe is to blame They’re almost always wrong. But they don’t see it.

Most of us won’t see it. I didn’t for a long time. I thought, “If I could just replace the board chair or find the perfect executive assistant, deputy, staff director, or co-executive…things would turn around.”

What I've learned over the years is that changing who is sitting in the seats on the deck rarely changes the outcome of the voyage. That's because most organizational problems at least those significant enough to spur a call with a consultant are related to the seats themselves, not who sits in them. They don't occur because of a person, team, disagreement, wrong decision, or misguided strategy. They occur because organizations are systems that produce conditions where specific problems can flourish. And just as with almost every complex, intractable problem, finding solutions calls on us to understand the nature of the system in which the challenge lies.

The good news is that the problems you face within your organization can point you to the systemic issues that need addressing. Better yet, building the muscles and mindsets to solve problems at their root sharpens skills and capacities within your organization and gives your team more resources to lead systemic change that will help you carry out your mission. Reconciling one piece of a larger puzzle will only get any of us so far. Solving the whole puzzle will require thoroughly considering how your system must transform concurrently and in relationship with every piece. While the field of systems change is vast and filled with many nuances, there are three general elements on which you can focus. They are:

Determining Points of Leverage

And the required transformations that will be most effective in bringing about system-wide change.

Effectively Aligning Agencies

And mobilization so that a range of stakeholders work toward a path in which each is uniquely motivated and has a distinct role in advancing the mission

Learning About What Drives Change

By gathering insights from past and present examples of transformation to identify the drivers that will accelerate progress while mitigating unexpected consequences

Solving organizational challenges is never quick, easy, or accomplished without some pain.

Leaders must instill a sense of clarity to calm anxiety and help their teams resist the human instinct to seek simple, pain-free checklist solutions. The problems that you ’ re trying to address are complex and entrenched. Developing and applying successful solutions will require patience, preparation, and clear thinking.

So, resist the temptation to jump straight to the solution. Instead, be sure that you have adequately diagnosed the problem… and that you have the capacity to deliver a solution capable of creating the change you desire.

Take care to ensure that you have:

Correctly diagnosed root cause sources needed to solve systemic issues.

Develop a process for engaging meaningful stakeholder voices.

Establish a shared vision and agreement on success metrics.

Build a shared narrative about the purpose of change and what you need for efforts to succeed.

Make sure the right people are engaged and taking ownership of results.

Create early consensus on the highest impact priorities.

Identify the systemic inhibitors you are dismantling and the enabling conditions needed to support meaningful change.

Want help leading organization change that will enable you to make a bigger impact in the world?

I’d love to talk!

Book a free 30 minute strategy call with me

amy@amybdean.com

www.amybdean.com

ABOUT

AMY B DEAN

Amy B. Dean, MSOD, PCC. is a transformational leader with a lifelong passion for working on innovative solutions to solving some of the day’s most wicked social problems. Dean currently works at supporting change makers who build healthy and strategic organizational ecologies at the scale needed to tackle issues systemically.

As a senior consultant and professional certified coach specializing in leadership development, Dean’s work is informed by behavioral science and humanistic psychology for clients such as the Ford Foundation, Rotary Charities, Service Employees International Union [SEIU], Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, Center for Social Innovation, Walter & Evelyn Haas Jr. Foundation, 350.org, Labor & Innovation Fund for the 21st Century [LIFT Fund], Annie E. Casey Foundation, Constitutional Accountability Center, LeadersTrust, Atlas Technologies, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to name a few.

Dean brings over 30 years of executive and entrepreneurial leadership to any table and has a demonstrated track record of leading large-scale organization transformation initiatives, driving the execution of strategic initiatives, mergers, and new start-up ventures By bringing a blend of qualitative and quantitative research tools to her clients, both domestic and global, Dean partners with nonprofits, B corporations, public sector agencies, foundations, and for-profit firms to increase alignment between strategic objectives, performance measures, and mission, values, and organizational goals.

Dean has held adjunct faculty positions at the University of Illinois’ Industrial Labor Relations Department, San Jose State University’s Department of Political Science, and San Francisco State University’s Labor Studies Program. She also served on the Board of Trustees for the California State Community College System

Dean served as a public policy fellow of the Century Foundation, a regular columnist for Al-Jazeera - America and Truthout.org, and freelanced for publications such as Huffington Post, YES! Magazine, In These Times, the Nation, Boston Review, Democracy: a Journal of Ideas, Harvard International Review, Tikkun Magazine, BillMoyers com, Stanford Social Innovation Review [SSIR], Nonprofit Quarterly, and New Labor Forum, to name a few. She is a co-author with David B. Reynolds of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement [Cornell ILIR University Press, 2010] translated into Japanese and released in Japan in 2017.

As President & CEO of the South Bay AFL-CIO [Silicon Valley], Dean served on the board of the National AFL-CIO, where she led a 7-year organization change initiative designed to retool, reposition, and revitalize the labor movement at the state and local levels. She is credited with being one of the architects of the new labor movement. During her tenure as a labor leader, the New York Times called Dean “ one of the most innovative figures in Silicon Valley ”

Dean is also the founder of two national nonprofits housed in California [Working Partnerships USA and co-founder of the Partnership for Working Families [rebranded as PowerSwitch Action in 2023]. Both organizations are dedicated to increasing civic participation, strengthening democracy, and advancing racial and economic justice.

ABOUT ABD VENTURES

ABD Ventures was founded as a boutique coaching and consulting shop to help leaders and organizations pursue transformational change. We help leaders and organizations create healthy workplaces by aligning strategy with organizational values, fostering conditions for team collaboration, prioritizing systems change, and promoting creative methods to support healthy conflict resolution.

Our vision is to foster thriving, equitable, and innovative workplaces and communities through progressive governance and values-driven policies so that people and the planet thrive!