As a business leader today, you can't rest on your laurels. New technological innovations, shifting geopolitical alliances, and other forces continuously reshape industries. Your legacy relies on how you keep up with the market and stay relevant — that means implementing strategic change.
Though virtually every company has some sort of incentive to make strategic changes, many efforts either struggle or fail outright. Pushed up against their limits, organizations find they're less flexible than they had hoped, making it hard for them to compete.
As an executive, this means it's time for you to become familiar with strategic change best practices. By looking at notable successes and failures with organizational change management strategy, you can draw lessons about what it really means to oversee change and your role in that process.
Why is strategic change so important today?
No organization can remain stagnant for long. Even a quick look at the shifting corporate climate over the past few decades shows how easy it would be for a company to be left behind by a major industry shift.
Businesses have had to deal with significant differences in the business environment, including the rise of digitization and related increases in the overall speed of commerce. A company built to function in an analog environment would be wholly out of step with a cloud-enabled business environment and permanent hybrid work, for example.
These changes occur every few years. Sometimes, they run in contradictory arcs, as when an age of globalized economies was followed by the logistical shocks of COVID-19 shutdowns and a redrawing of geopolitical alliances that upended supply chains again. Inflexible organizations have suffered major setbacks amid these disruptions.
The need to cope with frequent, high-priority market adjustments means strategic change management should be one of your organization's core values. Rather than just anticipating a shift on the immediate horizon, your company should build its culture around flexibility and the need to be ready for whatever comes next.
Managing change initiatives is a unique piece of an executive skill set. Inspiring key stakeholders across departments and at many levels of the business to follow you through strategic change initiatives is a specific ability. Successful implementation of a significant change project such as a digital transformation requires a combination of effective change management strategy formulation and canny people management.
The strategies and approaches pioneered by industry leaders, including MIT Sloan Executive Education faculty members, are designed around the idea that strategic change is an essential component of modern leadership. Furthermore, these theories posit that existing methodologies aren't delivering on their potential, which means there's a need for a new approach to organizational change model development.
Read more: Gain valuable perspective on leading change management from MIT Sloan Professor Jon Van Maanen.
Why so many changes fail, and how yours can succeed
When a company fails to execute a pivot or a change initiative and takes too much time or money to make the necessary adjustments, what's to blame? It may be a result of the methods these businesses use, according to Dr. Elsbeth Johnson, a senior lecturer with MIT Sloan Executive Education.
Johnson cautions that executives often adopt the "Hollywood version" of leadership, with deep involvement throughout the process, and that this approach serves neither them nor their companies. As an alternative, she suggests that leaders follow the "Step Up, Step Back" method laid out in her book and covered in her executive education courses.
"Step Up, Step Back" is a philosophy that encourages leaders to be personally involved in the early stages of change, adding more than they would normally contribute during this initial strategic planning. From there, they "step back" and let the later steps play out with less direct management.
This reversed balance of focus is opposed to conventional thinking about how executives should lead their companies through strategic change. According to Johnson, however, the shift in organizational change model development allows leaders to focus more closely on their actual, long-term priorities.
The problem with quick wins
In Johnson's approach, companies focus less on "quick wins." These are traditionally popular — it's natural for companies to seek the validation that comes with measurable success. With that said, these short-term victories can undermine the slower, more fundamental work that it really takes to change a company's path.
Investing in sustained changes to practices is essential for companies, or at least it should be. By learning to apply a framework that lets you prioritize this vision of change, you can help your company become comfortable with real, strategic change rather than surface-level wins.
See more: What does it really mean to deliver a strategic change initiative? Watch a webinar from Dr. Johnson to learn the answers.
Enhancing organizational change management through executive education
Considering both the unstable state of the global market and the need for leaders to take an active role in strategic change, there's a clear need to build your experience with new frameworks and methodologies. MIT Executive Education courses like Leading Strategic Change, which Johnson directs alongside Professor Nelson P. Repenning and Senior Lecturer Ben Shields, are designed to fill this need and prepare you to be a leader in today's fast-moving business climate.
Executive education can connect you with industry-expert faculty members and ambitious peers who are working on the same types of issues affecting your organization. The curriculum in these courses foregrounds case studies and real-world examples of companies that have succeeded in embracing strategic change, as well as those that have come up short.
Reflecting on why conventional methods often fail to bring effective change is an important consideration when committing to a potentially counter-intuitive but impactful model like "Step Up, Step Back." Achieving that end will call for cultural change — not a process to undertake lightly, but one that can set a company apart in its field.
The course’s end goal is to equip participants with actionable takeaways to bring back to their own organizations. This means building a step-by-step action plan for how to implement change within a company, along with warnings about the potential factors that can derail new strategic directions.
See more: Hear additional insights on strategic change from Dr. Johnson.
You need strategic change management expertise
The question isn't whether your organization will need to make a strategic change, but when. Business models today come with expiration dates, as technological and logistical changes bring new strategic planning priorities and demands on ever-shortening cycles.
By taking a formalized approach to leading change, you can either deliver improved performance in a current role or build a strong executive resume. The type of strategic change prescribed in the Leading Strategic Change course curriculum is designed to provide clear roadmaps to lasting improvement rather than quick, ephemeral success.
This begins with creating a company-wide "change narrative." One of the hardest parts of leading an impactful business effort is clarifying the need for a change as well as the intended outcomes near the outset of the practice. By learning to accomplish this and related tasks while pursuing your organization's strategic objectives, you can build a consistent engine for sustaining change over time.
Enroll in Leading Strategic Change to take a forward-looking, clear-eyed approach to transforming your business.