Change Leadership

The importance of people and the cultural aspects

Often the biggest challenge faced by companies implementing business process improvement programmes is addressing the softer cultural and people aspects. There is inevitably pressure on time, cost and resource and these aspects tend to be ignored until it is too late. Companies should focus from the start on people as well as processes. It is critical to adopt an integrated approach during the programme design and implementation.

Companies overlooking the cultural and softer aspects will almost certainly fail to deliver economic success from their programme. It is the delicate balance between financial drivers and people aspects that underpins success, and neither is sufficient alone to deliver the required benefits.

“If you want to change the process, you have to persuade the people!”

Financial Services companies may be built around processes, but in the majority of cases these processes rely on people. People provide the inputs, people conduct the processing and people produce the outputs. This has a number of implications. Firstly, the inputs to the process are often incomplete and inaccurate. Secondly, there is a high likelihood of human error and Spanish customs within the transaction processing. Lastly – and most importantly – if you want to change the process, you have to persuade the people!

So how do Financial Services companies guarantee success when choosing to follow an Operational Excellence path? It is seldom that we hear of manufacturing companies who have failed spectacularly in their Process Improvement programmes. Yet it is not uncommon to hear of service businesses where the initiative has failed to get off the ground and achieve the commitment it requires to succeed. This has caused a fair level of scepticism with senior executives in the Financial Services market and has deterred many companies from adopting the traditional Six Sigma method.

Communication

Communication is the single most important aspect of Change Leadership. Poor communication with employees poses a significant risk to the success of a programme and should be an integral and structured element of the programme deployment plan. This is another area of business where Operational Excellence can provide powerful methods and tools to enhance success and open up meaningful channels of communication between the business, its employees and its customer base.

Collaboration on projects and improvement events

Our experience has proved that the most effective way to overcome cultural issues, preconceptions and indeed to boost morale is to bring teams together to work on collaborative Lean Events or Projects to achieve specific business results. Lean, in particular, is a very powerful means of delivering rapid cultural change, in addition to service and process improvement.

Venturehaus has considerable expertise in implementing Change Programmes and advises many of the world’s leading financial corporations in this area. We also support this aspect with a range of Change Leadership and Facilitation training solutions.