7. September 2009 16:32
Posted by Lina Palmer
It seems that the business world has always struggled with managing organizational change processes, and developed strategies that fail to be implemented remain to cause inefficient resource usage and give rise to frustration. So what are Swedish corporate leader’s views on key success factors and common pitfalls when implementing strategies and managing change projects? SamSari decided to ask them!
207 people at leading positions in large Swedish companies with more than 2,000 employees received the survey and 34% of the respondents, representing 28 of Sweden’s largest companies, took the time to answer it and share their views on implementation of corporate strategies.
81% of the respondents point out well working information and communication during the entire implementation process as the key success factor in successful strategy implementation projects. Still, 42% state that the main reason for unsuccessful implementation stems from a failure in reaching out to their organizations with a clear message of why the strategy needed to be implemented, and 32% attributed this failure to an inability to provide the organization with motivation and engagement to realize the strategy.
It is interesting (or maybe frightening?) to see that Swedish leaders haven’t learned to address what they perceive as a main difficulty in strategy implementation projects. Organizations’ reluctance to change place high demands on new strategies being presented in an inspirational way, and still many industry leaders continue to act as if they didn’t have that knowledge and carry on pushing out information to their workforce without allowing proper time and space for dialogue and internalization of the messages. It is also striking that only 20% of the respondents seek help from specialists during the implementation phase when the strategies are to be realized (to be compared with approx. 50% during the strategy development). Even though change management is a competence that all competitive businesses need to develop internally, this shouldn’t limit them to consult professional advice when dealing with large scale change initiatives involving thousands of employees.
It’s about time leaders learn to speak to both the hearts and minds of their employees when conveying corporate messages. In the development of such capabilities there is an opportunity for Swedish companies to increase ROI on strategy implementation projects.
