Building an organisation capable of leading change
The capabilities, responsibilities and mechanisms that make change last.
Public and private organisations operate in environments where reforms, reorganisations and digital projects follow one another. In this context, the question is no longer only how to succeed in a given transformation. It is how to build an organisation capable of leading change repeatedly, without exhausting itself.
Transformation is not a project like any other
A project ends when its deliverable is produced. A transformation ends when practices have actually changed. This difference explains many disappointments: tools are rolled out, organisation charts are published, but daily work barely changes.
Changing practices means acting on several levers at once: structures, processes, skills, information systems and management behaviour. Acting on only one of them rarely produces the expected effect.
An organisation does not change because it is shown a new target, but because its daily mechanisms make the new way of working easier than the old one.
Middle managers, the decisive relay
In most transformations, the role of middle managers is underestimated. Yet they are the ones who translate directions into the organisation of work, answer their teams’ questions and escalate difficulties.
Involving them early in the design, informing them before their teams and equipping them to support change is often more effective than general communication campaigns. Conversely, managers presented with a fait accompli can become, sometimes unwillingly, points of resistance.
Protecting absorption capacity
Every organisation has a limited capacity to absorb change. When several projects affect the same teams at the same time, the load builds up and support erodes.
Sequencing transformations, measuring their cumulative impact on each group and agreeing to postpone some initiatives is a leadership decision. It is not a lack of ambition. It is the condition for the changes under way to succeed.
Building a lasting capability
Beyond each project, several elements help build an organisational capability to change:
- a transformation steering function with an overall view of ongoing projects and their impact on teams;
- shared change management methods used by project managers;
- a network of trained and recognised internal change agents;
- adoption indicators, tracked alongside time and cost indicators;
- systematic lessons learned, to build on experience from one project to the next.
Measuring what really changes
Finally, a transformation should be assessed on what it actually changes: processing times, service quality, team autonomy or the reliability of decisions. These measures, defined at launch, make it possible to steer support, correct course and report on results.
Leading change is not a skill reserved for a few experts. It is a capability the organisation builds, project after project, provided it gives itself the means to do so.
GOVENTIQ · Published