
How to get sustainable business transformation right
Sustainable corporate change is a challenging feat to pull off. Julia Binder examines the barriers and drivers of change to increase your chances of success. ...
by Stéphane J. G. Girod Published 7 March 2022 in Brain Circuits • 3 min read
In part one, we looked at the competing demands you have to reconcile for boosting strategic agility. Let’s look in more detail at one of the common areas that can be a challenge for top executives: dealing with the politics of competing teams and agendas. Many companies have lots of good ideas circulating but cannot implement them because of structures and politics.
There are reasons your business is successful in the first place and you need unity among leaders at the top, but often those people can be entrenched in the way they do things. It’s important to find creative ways to balance competing interests.
There are at least seven types of tensions that will stop executive teams from both being creative and accepting outlier thinking. Keep an eye out for them:
You need to find ways to alleviate any of these tensions, especially psychological safety.
Create a culture of safety
You should make sure teams regularly have conversations and exercises where even junior staff can play devil’s advocate on ideas raised. This helps separate ideas from the individual in order to create a habit of critical thinking, of bringing something new to the table, but still collaborating so everyone can contribute to the team’s new ideas. This is essential for psychological safety.
Pair junior and senior members together
It can be useful to get a younger perspective when keeping up with rapid changes, but people with more seniority can get upset when they are eclipsed by someone with far less experience. One way to handle this is to establish mentor situations where the senior member can help advocate for the junior employee’s ideas and credit is shared.
Look at your reporting structure
If you have a team tasked with implementing a new idea, consider whether they should report directly to the CEO, so they don’t get caught up in cost battles and other corporate pressures.
Make it win-win
New ideas may fail because the leaders in charge of executing them did not necessarily invent them. To mitigate this issue, align their incentives. Executives who will implement the new ideas must have a stake to make them successful.
Remember, even when you find solutions to the tensions within your organization, you should always be looking for new and creative ways to handle things – that is the essence of agility.
Further reading:Â
Resetting Management: Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty by Stéphane J.G. Girod
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Professor of Strategy and Organizational Innovation
Stéphane J.G. Girod is Professor of Strategy and Organizational Innovation at IMD. His research, teaching and consulting interests center around agility at the strategy, organizational and leadership levels in response to disruption. At IMD, he is also Program Director of Reinventing Luxury Lab and Program Co-Director of Leading Digital Execution.
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