Leadership Challenges to Business Transformation
Rockford’s business transformation process with Sharing in Growth has taught us valuable lessons in change management and what it takes to effect ongoing transformation.
It’s often said that the leadership of an organisation can make or break a transformation process. Directors who have become stuck in their ways often reject the most extreme changes suggested by visionaries and therefore fail to make continual progress.
But it’s always important to remember that what got you to where you are won’t get you to where you want to go. Continual transformation is the key to business evolution and success over time.
Understanding the Leadership Challenges to Business Transformation
Any leader who is too focused on past success can easily lull the business into complacency, and fail to pursue transformation geared towards future success. Businesses under this sort of leadership can find themselves in a life-or-death situation before they admit they need to do something drastic and commit to doing something about it.
To avoid the need for emergency intervention, a continual change process and monitoring of those changes is the best approach. But it takes an open-minded and brave leadership to accomplish this, as it revolves around the business being continually in flux, and acknowledgement that the transformation will never ever complete.
Rockford’s Approach to Change and New Ideas
The Sharing in Growth (SiG) team has many stories to tell about how leadership can stifle attempts to change a business for the better. They explain that it is natural for humans to reject change, especially if what they’ve been doing so far has worked well.
Some directors get quite defensive about maintaining old practices, even if they want to see the results of change. However, SiG is quick to commend Rockford for its willingness to take on new ideas, adapt and learn.
During our transformation with SiG, Rockford went through a very dramatic change and was extremely successful on a certain project, which led the SiG team to pull back on resources somewhat and let us continue the transformation work alone. However, it was soon clear that the lessons we had learned had only been embedded as far as that project, and other projects were not meeting the same high standards.
At that point, many companies would have given up, or just gone back to old ways for good. But Rockford persevered and specifically asked SiG to tell us what to do and help us do a better job.
It was this extremely positive attitude from Rockford’s directors after a huge setback, combined with our success with the SiG transformation programme in the first place that left SiG staff in disbelief saying “Wow, what a fantastic company”. Because of this, SiG provided Rockford with the Inspire Award in 2017, saying that Rockford is a role model for learning and for the SiG programme in general.
It’s clear that management at Rockford has embraced change and taken on new ideas and challenges set by the SiG team. We still have plenty of work ahead of us and look forward to solidifying everything we have learned into a robust continual transformation process.
Rockford
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