206|Goals That Actually Work: Leadership, Employee Buy-In & Successful Organizational Change

There's a lot that goes into it.

And a lot of times, I'm brought in from corporations.

So for example, when Morgan Stanley merged with Smith Barney, they had to train up 10,000 people in one year.

So they bring me on to figure out, OK, how do you train up 10,000 people in less than a year? So you need a strategy.

Basically, you need a clear vision.

So what are we aiming for? What does good look like? What does this mean? The second is you need the plan, the implementation.

What step-by-step things are you going to do? What processes do you need in place? What resources, tools, technology? What do you need to be able to support 10,000 people through a change? And then the third is evaluation.

So is it working? And if not, how do we figure out how to tweak it until it does? Worldwide, the percentage of project initiatives, companies spend millions and millions of dollars, and yet the actual success rate for organizations across the world is less than 30%.

That means over a 70% failure rate.

Okay.

My organization with 40 clients in 15 countries across 12 industries, we have a 97.5% success rate.

So people are always like, how, how, what do you do differently? And it's because we keep at it until we find the right solution.

And we work with people to make sure they're set up from success from the very beginning, instead of just coming in at the end in the middle and then trying to figure it all out.

What I have heard across listening to previous interviews, so you work for the organization, but you're really about the success, yes, of the organization, of course, but of the person.

And to me, that seems unusual just in walking through different things with different companies that maybe I've even been part of the, you know, in the transition is it feels like often the transition the worker isn't top of mind that they would be successful.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

You're absolutely right.

We call it people first.

So for me, an organization doesn't mean anything.

An organization is a collection of humans, of people, right? And so if you really want to make it work, you have to focus on the person.

You have to focus on the people that it's impacting directly, impacting indirectly, right? So whether you're a leader who's going through this with your team, whether you're an individual of changes being thrust upon you, I'm always thinking about that lens of the people first side, because if you get the people side of it, everything else will fall into place.

But that's the part that people miss.

They, you know, so many times senior leaders come in and say, we're doing this initiative or this is the plan.

I'm going to flip this switch and everyone's just going to do it.

Make sure they do it.