Errors Associated With Organizational Failure

Errors Associated With Organizational Failure
Substantial change has developed greatly in organizations due to influential economic transformation. There are numerous causes requiring organizational change to include: technological, global economic and opening market forces. Both more hazards and opportunities are created for organizations. Beneficial change is linked with a process that creates power and motivation substantial enough to overcome all sources of resistance and is motivated by quality leadership, and not solely on excellent management (Ingram, 2012).
John Kotter, over his career has evaluated both the successes and failures in change initiatives in business. "The most general lesson to be learned from the more successful cases is that the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time” (Kotter, 1996, p. 3). As a result of his many evaluations, Kotter identified eight primary reasons that organizations are unsuccessful when implementing efforts to change.
ERROR #1: Allowing Too Much Complacency
One of the major pitfalls when attempting to change organizations is to rapidly initiate the change without conveying a high sense of urgency in peer leadership and employees. This significant error results in change failure due to high levels of complacency.

ERROR #4: Under Communicating The Vision By A Factor Of 10 (Or 100 Or Even 1,000) Major change is usually impossible unless most employees are willing to help, often to the point of making shortterm sacrifices. But people will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they think the potential benefits of change are attractive and unless they really believe that a transformation is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, employees' hearts and minds are never captured.
Three patterns of ineffective communication are common, all driven by habits developed in more stable times. In the first, a group actually develops a pretty good transformation vision and then proceeds to sell it by holding only a few meetings or sending out only a few memos. Its members, thus having used only the smallest fraction of the yearly intra-company communication, react with astonishment when people don't seem to understand the new approach. In the second pattern, the head of the organization spends a considerable amount of time making speeches to employee groups, but most of her managers are virtually silent. Here vision captures more of the total yearly communication than in the first case, but the volume is still woefully inadequate. In the third pattern, much more effort goes into newsletters and speeches, but some highly visible individuals still behave in ways that are antithetical to the vision, and the net result is that cynicism among the troops goes up while belief in the new message goes down.
One of the finest CEOs I know admits to failing here in the early 1980s. "At the time," he tells me, "it seemed like we were spending a great deal of effort trying to communicate our ideas. [10] But a few years later, we could see that the distance we went fell short by miles. Worse yet, we would occasionally make decisions that others saw as inconsistent with our communication. I'm sure that some employees thought we were a bunch of hypocritical jerks." Communication comes in both words and deeds. The latter is generally the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with the verbal communication. And yet this happens all the time, even in some wellregarded companies.
ERROR #8: Neglecting To Anchor Changes Firmly in the Corporate Culture In the final analysis, change sticks only when it becomes "the way we do things around here," when it seeps into the very bloodstream of the work unit or corporate body. Until new behaviors are rooted in social norms and shared values, they are always subject to degradation as soon as the pressures associated with a change effort are removed.
Two factors are particularly important in anchoring new approaches in an organization's culture. The first is a conscious attempt to show people how specific behaviors and attitudes have helped improve performance. When people are left on their own to make the connections, as is often the case, they can easily create inaccurate links. Because change occurred during charismatic Coleen's time as department head, many employees linked performance improvements with her flamboyant style instead of the new "customer first" strategy that had in fact made the difference. As a result, the lesson imbedded in the culture was "Value Extroverted Managers" instead of "Love Thy Customer."
Anchoring change also requires that sufficient time be taken to ensure that the next generation of management really does personify the new approach. If promotion criteria are not reshaped, another common error, transformations rarely last. One bad succession decision at the top of an organization can undermine a decade of hard work.
Poor succession decisions at the top of companies are likely when boards of directors are not an integral part of the effort. In three instances I have recently seen, the champions for change were retiring CEOs. Although their successors were not [15] resisters, they were not change leaders either. Because the boards simply did not understand the transformations in any detail, they could not see the problem with their choice of successors. The retiring executive in one case tried unsuccessfully to talk his board into a less seasoned candidate who better personified the company's new ways of working. In the other instances, the executives did not resist the board choices because they felt their transformations could not be undone. But they were wrong. Within just a few years, signs of new and stronger organizations began to disappear at all three companies.
Smart people miss the mark here when they are insensitive to cultural issues. Economically oriented finance people and analytically oriented engineers can find the topic of social norms and values too soft for their tastes. So they ignore culture—at their peril.

References
Ingram, D. (2012). What Happens When an Organization Changes Its Strategy? Retrieved from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/happens-organization-changes-its-strategy-2690.html
Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail [Magazine]. Havard Business Review, 1-20.