How can a CEO motivate a workforce during a major business transformation?
By talking about transformation in the context of how an employee's job will change, what they will be held accountable for and how their performance will be assessed.
CEOs bear the blame for failed business transformations, yet many fail to realize the root causes of that failure. Frequently, a CEO will think he or she has made the case for a business transformation, only to find out later that no one bought the rhetoric.
Employees, after years of service, arguably end up knowing more about what works and what doesn't--but senior management rarely solicits their opinions on how a business transformation will affect their work processes.
"The impacted group needs to be involved early in the process of transformation," says Jeanie Daniel Duck, author of 'The Change Monster' (Three Rivers Press, 2002). "Their opinions of the real barriers need to be understood thoroughly, and the overarching goal of the new strategy, whatever it is, should be to solve their problems in a way that works best for them. While a new strategy is predicated on a company's business performance issues, you will not get traction if you don't consider the human performance issues. Besides, you may end up spending a lot of money to fix something that wasn't broken to begin with."