Organizational Transformation? Lead With Your People.

Successful businesses are those that build their growth strategies around customer centricity. They listen to the people and provide solutions and services that meet their needs ... their demand. In today's world, you simply cannot be everything to everyone. You need to "niche down" to be successful. And then scale.

That's great for dealing with the external drivers for a business, but what about the internal? How do you ensure your company can be successful in being customer-centric. So often, I hear of companies being in the midst of an "organizational transformation" ... their "changing the way they do business." But more often than not, what I also find is they're not really changing ... well ... anything.

That's the problem. We say we are transforming by offering new products, engaging in new ways. Exploring new channels. New geographies, but in the end we still function the same way. With the same processes. The same procedures. And where, if we acknowledge this, do we begin changing. Org structure. Tools and systems. Processes.

We need to lead with our people. Once we identify "what" we want to be to our customers, we need to identify "who" we need to be to get there. Do we have the right people? Do they have the right skill sets? We need to stop seeing our people as "resources" and as "investments" but this is not always easy. Too often, we find ourselves too far down "the path of no return" to the point where we need to make the difficult decision to cut our losses and reset. But this is avoidable. How?

Two things. Designing your business to be (1) in a state of continuous improvement and (2) centered on your "human capital" ... your people.

By taking a Human Centered Design (HCD) approach to our organizational strategy, we provide an actionable, data driven program that improves the employee experience. Much like how we build a strong customer experience, by leveraging a research-based, collaborative, innovative and employee centered end-to-end experience, we ensure improved engagement, improved accountability of our teams and improved performance. With this, our teams now drive productivity and process change. Our teams provide technology advancements that improve the way we do business. Our teams ensure an unparalleled customer experience and ultimately successful growth strategies for our organizations.

We continue to say we must be "customer-centric" to transform our business, but that's only a piece of it. To truly be sustainably successful, we need to "lead with our people" and let them drive real change.