Are organizations effectively driving change? How do employees factor into this process?
Josh Seiden’s Outcomes Over Output says to treat employees like customers in organizational transformation. This way, colleagues are viewed as internal clients to align their needs with company goals.
Discover how this perspective can transform your organization’s approach to change and employee engagement.
Viewing Team Members as Clients
To achieve a successful transformation, it’s crucial for organizations to treat employees like customers aligned with the company’s goals. Ingrid, in collaboration with Jeroen Schouten, the business architect at Bank Mendes Gans (BMG), emphasized the necessity of prioritizing outcomes and began the endeavor to secure support for this approach, starting with the company’s upper echelon and subsequently permeating all levels of the organization’s workforce. It is crucial to view these stakeholders as customers, acknowledging their capacity for significant changes in behavior and guiding them to achieve the desired outcomes.
Concentrating closely on outcomes is essential to pinpointing fresh actions required to achieve the organization’s goals. For example, the transformation of BMG aimed to cultivate a work environment characterized by increased openness, aligning with the advantages offered to customers, thus promoting a change in behavior that places customer needs at the forefront.
When team members view one another as clients, they cultivate empathy and align their drives, resulting in altered behaviors. Grasping the viewpoints, driving forces, and behavioral changes sought by colleagues is crucial for initiating transformative endeavors. Leaders and their teams must dedicate themselves to devising and advocating for approaches that consider specific colleagues, thereby increasing their worth.
Embracing Experimentation for Organizational Change
The growth and progress of a company hinge on its willingness to embrace experimentation. Organizing change-oriented efforts as a sequence of experiments aimed at altering behaviors is crucial, viewing each element as a chance for evaluation and improvement.
Introducing changes within an organization entails designing them as trials that can alter behaviors. For BMG, this meant redefining work methods, with each change treated as an experiment focused on improving behaviors to achieve corporate goals.
To effectively instigate change within an organization, it is crucial to engage in swift and repetitive testing. Embracing a mindset geared towards taking decisive steps and considering different methods is recommended, as changes in one’s actions can lead to challenges and elements of uncertainty. Organizations employing short, iterative cycles of experimentation to assess their theories can collect insights and fine-tune their approaches accordingly. BMG’s case exemplifies a progressive approach, continuously modifying its strategies and scope of activities to synchronize with outcomes, illustrating the practical implementation of agility during the company’s development.
