Mulligan believes that successful transformations are dependent on the right people of a business being invested and dedicated to the outcome and gives an example from an old client to show why it’s so important, “one client was based in an open office so we raised a request to find a working room for the team as it was hampering productivity. Not only did it take three months to get the room, it was not fit for purpose when we got it,” he says. The reason the request was met with such a slow response, Mulligan says, was because the people responsible for controlling the meeting rooms were not part of the transformation, “they were in a different building and were therefore disconnected from the problem itself.” However, a disconnected team isn’t the only barrier to successful transformation, he says. “There are lots of statistics on the web about the amount of transformations and change programmes that fail, and there are far too many for our liking, so we looked across all our experiences and researched many other transformations and identified ‘The 5 dysfunctions of transformations’.”“I’ve had clients with massive budgets saying to me, ‘make things better’, but they don’t know what they want.”
If lack of accountability hampers transformation programmes, in what sort of business is this most likely to happen? “I would say that bigger firms can afford bad behaviour,” says Mulligan. “There’s a higher motivation for SMEs to be open to trying new things as bad behaviour hurts them more financially.” When it comes to achieving transformation during times of change, SMEs win again he says, “smaller companies can move quicker, but they must also understand what they want to change, how feasible it is and what they have to put in place to get there quickly.” However, a number of businesses try to transform for the wrong reasons, Mulligan warns. A common mistake they make is engaging in a transformation because their competitors are without understanding why they’re doing it themselves, “once, I asked a client that was already midway through a transformation what the purpose of their transformation was, they said, ’stop asking – you’re making me look foolish,’” he says.“Companies require the humility of their leaders to say staff can and should hold them accountable if things get in the way of transformation.”
“In many organisations, there’s a disconnect between what they want and what’s feasible, where the culture is ‘go and do’ instead of asking ‘why’.”“Most organisations are not designed for change,” says Mulligan. “You put in a process and people leave it alone. It then becomes old and inappropriate especially if it has been designed with limited knowledge, but people use it anyway.” Instead of this, he says businesses must “challenge” ingrained processes and question if they really are ”sacred” to their organisation, as they could be blocking the business from transformation; “say you’re a digital business and your site goes down, you get it fixed, you drop all the unnecessary processes and just get it done, don’t you?” After the emergencies are sorted, Mulligan says businesses tend to go back to their “slow and lethargic” ways of working, but they shouldn’t, “when you feel you don’t have a choice you cut out the stuff that’s not important – transformation comes from that place.” Mulligan and Harbott’s book, ‘The HERO Transformation Playbook’ is out on September 22, 2020. Pre-order it here.
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