5 skill areas needed to transform your organization

Don’t miss the mark, develop the right skills

Change happens every day both inside the organization and outside the organization. I’ve talked quite a bit about the fact that I believe this change is happening at a faster pace than we have ever seen and that this is driving high performing organizations to look for ways to develop organizational transformation capabilities. As someone who has spent a lot of time talking to the stakeholders within organizations, I have seen a lot of soul searching around what it really takes to pull off organizational transformation. Enabling an organization to regularly be able to move from a current state to some future state that is better suited to meet evolving stakeholder requirements, changing compliance criteria, disruptive technologies and other forces that drive the need for organizational change is tough stuff.

I believe that there are really five key areas that organizations should be focused on developing in order to deliver a truly world class ability to enable change:

Leadership: I fall firmly in the camp of folks that believe leadership skills can be developed and that focusing on this area of development can pay real dividends for organizations that are willing to invest in it. I also do not believe that leadership skills are something that an organization should only focus on at the executive level. The fact is that as organizations become flatter and more agile leadership skills have become more important than ever even at much lower levels of the organization than have previously been focused on. This also ensures that people who are thrust into leadership roles have some skills when that occurs and aren’t learning on the fly (and failing) until they figure it out.

Transformational methodology: If you buy into the fact that understanding and executing on change within the organization should be a primary capability, then you will need to find something that can function as a repeatable process focused on helping you identify areas that require change and then execute that change. Properly executed enterprise architecture should fulfill this role. Focused on understanding the strategic direction, resources, processes, assets and operating environment of the organization this function should rightly be the focus of managing the information driving change and providing real input into both planning for change and executing on it.

Risk: More change means more risk. Organizations are almost always focused on the simple execution of change and not on the implications with regard to risk for the business. Rapidly implementing an online application may help you shave costs, meet customer requirements, or improve productivity. It may also introduce risks that need to be mitigated. Risk management skills need to be embedded within your transformation team in order to ensure that someone is thinking about the dark side of transformation.

Security: See risk. Change always has security implications. The downside of your new found agility means having more discussions around the security implications of that change and so having skills in this area are critical for transformation teams. Leaving security out as an afterthought means inviting last minute changes of the worst kind. Find out up front what the implications of your actions are for security and you may be able to tailor your solution more easily in the early stages or even alter the scope to ensure your solution is viable.

Personal Productivity: You may be surprised to see this on the list, but I think it is a major oversight to think that everyone is functioning at the same high level with regard to organizational, presentation, speaking, writing, negotiation and other critical core skills. None of the rest of your transformation team’s domain expertise matters if their insights cannot be communicated to the outside world. I have often heard the counter argument that “we” don’t hire people without those core skills. I’m sure that is the intent but usually when someone is being recruited as a java developer, accountant, or other functional area specialist at the beginning of their career the focus is on their domain expertise. This stays the same through much of an individual’s career with advancement mostly tied to domain expertise – not these skills. When thrust into senior roles where these skills are required because getting the job done requires the ability to get others to see their point of view, etc. they fail. Do not make this mistake when you begin working to develop your transformation team.

Conclusion

In this I have tried to lay out some core areas of focus as you work to develop your transformational capabilities. I’ve tried to stay at a fairly high level, while still providing some insight into the types of backgrounds you may want for folks on your team as well as areas where you may want to focus on as you pursue your organizational development objectives. The above is not meant to be an all-inclusive list and in fact I invite your feedback. What have you done to prepare your organization for change?