Leading Transformation: How Clarity of Purpose Drives Organisational Change

In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, executives and leaders are tasked with steering their organisations through significant and ongoing transformations.?

Whether sparked by external events, market shifts or technological advancements, the ability to plan and execute transformational change will determine the future success of their business.

But transformation isn’t easy. According to McKinsey, 70 percent of transformations fail to reach their stated goals, so what is it about the few that succeed?

Clarity of purpose counts for a lot.

The Harvard Business Review outlined a study examining 28 high-performing companies with compound growth rates of 30 percent or more in the previous five years, finding that clarity of ‘purpose’ was central to their ability to transform and overcome declining growth and profitability.

In this article, we’ll look at the role purpose plays in leading transformational change, including a case study of a company mobilising its leaders.

What is Transformational Change?

Transformational change describes a fundamental shift in the way an organisation goes about its business and shouldn’t be confused with incremental or continuous improvement.

For example, it could be a manufacturing business moving from a global production model to a regional one; a category leader completely overhauling its most successful product; or a service provider collaborating with competitors to spur industry growth.

The emergence of AI, for example, is presenting opportunities for business model innovation, however, as Jim Collins noted, technology is an accelerator of momentum, not the creator of it.

Clarifying the end goal that AI is enabling is what matters, which is why ‘purpose’ comes into the frame.

Leadership Challenges

Two big challenges for leaders charged with delivering transformation are, firstly, to overcome the stress and exhaustion brought on by relentless change, and secondly, to cut through the noise and successfully deliver significant change programs.

There are purpose-driven methods to help them focus on what’s important and then align their people around the common goal, which is explained further in this article .

With this approach, work becomes simpler and less stressful because their task is clearer.

Effective leadership is about clarifying the purpose of the transformation, creating a shared vision of the future and motivating people to take the journey together.

What might that look like in practice?

Case Study

Carolyn Butler-Madden and I recently helped a company engage its entire leadership team in transformational change.

It isn’t a company in crisis, it’s building on its success. However, it needs its leaders to think and work differently in order to execute its strategy because the way they’ve gone about things in the past won’t produce the quantum of change to sustain them into the future.

Before the half day session we worked with the sponsors to gain insights into their organisation’s transformation journey so that we could meet their leaders where they were at and point to examples reinforcing the best of who they are.

Why does this matter?

While Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” is well known, our unique approach is to “Start with Who” because it makes purpose personal to every leader and builds a shared narrative amongst the group.

We devote time to making their purpose ‘real’ through a series of table exercises using a who-why-how-what structure.

The session was a success, with the CEO pointing to whiteboard outputs from one of our exercises and saying, “there’s our strategy right there”.

Leading Transformation

The fundamental steps in any transformation are: assess where are you now, where you want to be and devise how you get there. Don’t be fooled, though, because even if your planning is first rate, it has no value without execution.

High-performing and collaborative work cultures are built upon clarity of organisational purpose and, within that, the purpose of their transformation programs.

Given the complexity of today’s business environment, we encourage leaders to embrace purpose so they can meet or exceed what’s expected of them.

A purpose-driven approach ultimately inspires commitment, drives progress and steers businesses towards a prosperous future.

Phil Preston helps leaders, teams and organisations embrace purpose as their driving force for navigating change and achieving success. He’s a keynote speaker, strategist, facilitator and author who can be contacted at [email protected]