Analyzing Transformation Failures: Leading Change for Success

This essay examines the reasons why many organizational transformation efforts fail, drawing on examples and research to highlight common pitfalls. It identifies factors such as inadequate planning, improper role distribution, poor stakeholder engagement, lack of employee readiness, insufficient training, skipping crucial steps, and inadequate research as major contributors to failure. The essay emphasizes the importance of competent leadership, effective communication, resource allocation, and continuous monitoring throughout the change process. It also underscores the need for organizations to understand the urgency of change, address their weaknesses, and ensure that experienced personnel are in key positions to manage the complexities of transformation. The document is contributed by a student and available on Desklib, a platform that provides various AI based study tools for students.

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CHANGE MANAGEMENT

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Leading Change: Why transformation efforts fail
In all across the globe, there are many changes that are taking place. All these changes have
been made by the organisations based on the requirements they have in the market. This has
forced the firms to make sure that they have effective strategies for making these changes to
work. Over the years there are many examples where the basic changes that have been made
by the organisation have created the disruption in the business (Kotter 59-67). Some of the
changes have slowed down their growth rate and some led to collapse of the market for the
company. After evaluation it was found that there were many reasons why change led to
business disruption. Even the best of transformation efforts have failed over the years because
of negligence of common factors that could lead to change. In the longer run it was found that
there were many reasons that could have been avoided but due to insufficient capabilities of
leadership it was not taken care properly (Jamieson).
Since changes are required in every organisation from time to time so as to ensure that
business are running according to the business environment that is present in the industry.
The major reasons why transformation efforts fails is that change process have not been
properly planned. It is generally seen that the change process gets started even without
understanding the clauses that could bring business disruptions. The planning should be
effective and not only should be made according to the things that may require change but
should also be done as per the requirements of the company so that any external factor may
not disrupt the business (Kotter). Some of the common things that were missing in some of
the failures in the past were proper distributing roles in the changing requirements, improper
governance and decision making structure, poor stakeholder’s engagement strategies as well
as communication plans. Due to the lag of key initiatives it is seen that speed and efficiency
of the change process also slowed down. For example the mergers like Sprint and Nextel,
AOL-Time Warner failed because of the lag of proper plans for the mergers. Since it was
going to change the whole structure and organisational operational style hence should have
been planned more effectively.
It was also seen in many cases that selection of improper process for leading transformations
was the major reason why they failed (Harmon). This can be understood in terms of the
employee’s participation or readiness to adopt the changes. If the employees are not ready for
adopting changes it is always difficult for the organisations to ensure long term growth of the
company. For example National Board was trying to make the changes in their product

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design and the technology (System on Chip) they were using but failed because neither
employees nor the market accepted that technology. Before making changes a company’s
employees must be capable enough to adopt the changes so that they can add value to the
change process (Brunsson and Olsen). Due to lack of effective training, employees face a
number of issues during organisational change process which affects their productivity.
In the change process it is always seen that whenever the company have tried to skip the steps
for speeding up the process of change has never resulted in a proper manner (Appelbaum, et
al. 764-782). Often it is seen that one mistake by the company leads to huge loses for them.
This can be illustrated with the fact that research has been one of the major factors in the
change process. Whenever there is less research done about the things that needs to done for
making the change process effective, it has led to business disruption. For example there were
failed cases as the company was unable to understand the actual demand of the market. This
is evident from the case of Kodak where the changes were made just in regarding to the
processes that were used in their operation. The change that was actually needed was to
change the technology that they were using in their products. This case also suggested that
when the leadership was not competent enough to make change or the lack of vision in the
minds of leaders can often leads to poor changes.
At the time of change process there are several confusions that are going on in the minds of
the workers (Hayes). At this time they need the support from the leaders and it must be
provided by them to support the employees. There are many people that are coming to the
business from different cultural backgrounds and hence it is important for the leaders to
understand the organisational behaviour. It is their role to fulfil all the needs of employees as
their satisfaction values a lot. Whenever the interests of employees are neglected, it creates
dissatisfaction among employees which becomes the major reason for failure of changes. A
leader must be active during the whole process so that he must not miss any crucial aspect
(Shin, Taylor and Seo 727-748). The decisions must be designed as per the evaluation which
has been made on the basis of what organisations want to achieve from the changes at the
same time what initiatives will be better.
Along with this another major factors that have led to transformational failures is lack of
resources. Those firms which planned for the change process and lagged in terms of availing
adequate resources have often suffered a lot. Resources must be of high quality and should be
able to fulfil the requirements of the change process (Burke). This is another crucial role of

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the leaders and is a part of the change leadership skills. Most of the organisations focus on
leadership development while change leadership development is rather missing. Change is
often not an easy process and requires a lot of efforts from the leaders to be effectively
implemented. In this process, it is essential to improve the bench strength of the workforce.
This is evident from the example that in the late 90’s when there was technological shift
going on in various parts of the world in terms of manufacturing technology, Morgan still
using handmade technologies for designing and developing of the car. They were resisting
changes and were failed to do it properly because their leaders were not capable enough to
take the risk or in other words they were not willing to take the risk which resulted in huge
losses for the company (Czarniawska and Sevón). If the leadership is not ready to take risk
then the chances of risk arisen gets reduced. It is seen that the leaders that are not making any
kind of shifts in their approach, the change process often get slowed down and remain
ineffective.
It has also been seen that organisations have failed in their transformational process as they
were unable to find their weak points. This has back fired the company’s change plans and
has led to huge amount of loss to the company in the longer run. In the competitive business
environment that is present in any industry, it has become essential for the organisations to
make sure that they have a workforce that is capable of maintaining the changes. It is
important that an organisation puts experienced persons at the crucial position in the
company (Rafferty, Jimmieson and Armenakis 110-135). This helps in managing the change
process. It was also seen in the failed transformational change process that important and
experienced people were not sitting at the exact locations. Due to lack of experience it was
not easy to execute plans as inexperienced people generally are unable to understand the
complexity related to the change process. Most of the firms gave the responsibilities related
to the change process to only few people. This made it difficult for the company to do it
perfectly. Even the Hard-won gains were lost when the officials were unable to handle the
situations. Research regarding this showed that new employees were unable to handle
pressure.
Another crucial aspect related to this suggest that most of the leaders are in an illusion that
everything is going perfect and in this they fail to notice the things that are actually not
making up. In this regards monitoring plays a very crucial role and hence continuous
monitoring is essential (Junaid and Uddin 186-205). With the use of modern day technologies
each parameter related to the change process can be effectively monitored. This helps in

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checking each and every variable in a perfect manner so that no problems exist in the change
process. This may be regarding the variables like the employee performance, employee
behaviour etc. It is crucial that a company understands any change in these parameters based
on the previous performance of the company before the change took place.
It has also been seen in many cases that lack of documentation may lead to severe loss to the
company. This is because the documentation helps in finding the problems that may exist in
the business. In documentation it is crucial that even the slightest of change is documented.
This helps in making decisions as per the requirements of the situation. Documentation
empowers the company to have a close watch on each and every process (Booth). This also
helps in making changes in the activities that are done in the change process. Timely audit is
also necessary in this regards as it helps in the improving the change process. Various
researches have suggested that due to untimely audit of the process and the performance
evaluation have led to failures.
Another important error that companies have made while making changes are that the
management or leadership did not understood the urgency to do the changes. This was also
evident from the case of Morgan Car Company which did not understand the sense of
Urgency of changing into an automatic company. Because of this when they made changes
later here were already behind their competitors. Even the made changes did not help them in
grabbing the opportunities available in the market earlier. Most important of them all why
transformation efforts failed was that during the whole process the communication was poor.
It was the failure from the side of leaders as they were unable to communicate the vision of
the company towards making such changes to the stakeholders of the firm (Watzlawick,
Weakland and Fisch). The stakeholders understood that they were misguided and hence their
participation was poor. Due to lack of proper communication methodologies, it was seen that
people understood it in some other ways which took the change process is different direction
and hence the efforts of transformation failed.
In the concluding remark it can be stated that there are various factors that are associated with
the change process and if these factors were not controlled then there would be chances of
failure. Every effort that failed was only due to the fact that there was something missing in
the whole change process. In other words there were few things that was overlooked by the
companies and resulted in poor transformations.

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