Thursday, December 16, 2021

Change Roadblocks

Roadblocks are intimidating, you need to overcome them; barriers can be daunting, don’t let them cloud your vision.


Change is inevitable, we all should adapt to it. The human element of change entails a people-centric approach to change management style. It’s imperative to awaken the changing consciousness of the people, encourage them to develop changeability, keep them alert of risks on the way.

 Without taking a breath to look back, look forward, plowing on to the next big thing before completely embedding the change into business as usual or running multiple simultaneous changes can leave a workforce reeling and exhausted. How do you overcome the objections or roadblocks on the journey of changes, and how can you improve the success rate of change management?

Silo as roadblock to change:
Silos self-perpetuate because that is the business culture of some organizations, consciously encouraging individuals to pursue. Silo mentality and management discipline makes those business divisions which are supposed to work collaboratively for solving common problems, compete for the limited resources and budget to achieve functional performance or short-term benefit, but sometimes with the cost of overall business achievement and long-term win. Silos have individual, team, or divisional goals, but strategic goals need to be shared and common to ensure the entire organization accomplishing the high-performance business results. Silo enforces the wall between organizational functions, stifles information flow, and turns to be the roadblocks that decelerate the speed of changes.

It’s no surprise to know that many of today’s businesses are running as a sum of pieces, not a holistic whole. Most organizations today are inside out process and control driven, business processes become inflexible or over control due to the increasing pace of changes and frequent disruptions. There are silos, egos, over specialization and empires to consider in those organizations. There are many stakeholders and their personal agendas etc. There are communication gaps, decision bottlenecks, outdated links, redundant applications, internal politics, bureaucracies, or finger-pointing cultures, etc, which contribute to silo and ineffectiveness. Greater specialization does not need to lead to silo thinking or working. Sometimes you need to go back to basics, realign and refresh the purpose and maintain the correct direction of business leadership. To break down silos, the specialized generalists with interdisciplinary knowledge and expertise are in demand to bridge silos and contribute to cross-functional communication and collaboration

Negative perception of experience as roadblock to changes: People have perception differences, career or life is accumulation of experiences, some you can choose, others perhaps just happened to you. Good experience brings you confidence or delight, negative experiences make you frustrated, and become a roadblock to change. It’s important to gain an in-depth understanding of your experiences and learn from them, and turn roadblocks to building blocks for shaping future changes. One missed many opportunities if negative experiences get them stuck. Whether an experience is a roadblock or a building block, it is the thought which decides. Experience which makes a person learn and increase his/her value is a building block but in case it is an experience related to extreme emotions or permanent discouragement is a roadblock.

Psychologically, what you learn from your experience depends on how open your mind is. We feel we know because we have visibly used that knowledge on some part of our work/life situations. With a static mind, experience often brings a teaching mindset, not a learning mindset; with a growth mind, you can put aside your experience to learn new knowledge, and refine your experience to the next practices for taking new adventures and generating more compelling stories. Practically, even if two people went to the same place, participated in the same event, or experienced exactly the same thing, they might have totally different feedback, and tell a completely different story.

Ineffective communication as a roadblock:
Change is usually a collaborative effort, miscommunication enlarges gaps and slows down the pace of changes, the finger pointing becomes a huge roadblock to the success of business transformation. The business is complex today, without the contextual understanding of people, process, and technology, the blind spots, and gaps are inevitable and cause misinterpretation and miscommunication across functional or geographical borders. Misinterpretation is perhaps caused by pre-conceptual judgment, conventional assumptions, or simply lack of deeper understanding. It is imperative to overcome objections or roadblock by encouraging communication, engaging employees, harnessing partnership, and gaining empathy to ensure long-term business success.

When you intend to understand, interpret, judge, or articulate something, you need to form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, common understanding, and clarified notions. Communication is complicated because there are differences in goals and contexts. These contexts can shift. Communication is not a soft discipline only, it’s both an art and science. The great communicators can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and empathetic understanding. Ineffective communication is a roadblock, as change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the company in a systematic way.

We are living in a complex world with continuous changes and disruptions that makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many existing or emerging issues. Roadblocks are intimidating, you need to overcome them; barriers can be daunting, don’t let them cloud your vision. Consider how awesome the synergy of a highly adaptive organization could create, to make people happier, customers delightful and the business as a whole in accelerating growth and improving business maturity.

0 comments:

Post a Comment