The harsh truth is that when most organizations make the decision to undertake a transformation of any type, they do so without knowing their underlying attributes like processes, behaviors, knowledge, culture, skills, current practices and technology inside their own organization. This just epitomizes how most organizations perceive, interpret, evaluate, and respond to real and potential risks, problems, and opportunities. All of this put together should spell out an organization’s vision for their transformation. An organization’s vision for their transformation should spell out how they plan to meld their attributes such as, culture, learning and practices with skills and technology to encourage and empower desired workplace behavior.
All organizations have their own vision for a transformation, these can run the gauntlet from good, bad, and ugly! Management needs to continually be cognizant of the impact that their dominant attributes (positive to negative) have on workplace effectiveness and value creation. An essential capability, in the current high-velocity digital era, is the ability to recognize problematic values, cultural issues, missing skills, behaviors and change quickly.
A proactive transformation vision incessantly adjusts and refreshes the values, attributes and behavior preferences that support and sustains an institution’s culture for employees and associated stakeholders. In this context, the organization’s vision is a crucial component and modifier of the enterprise culture. Without having an understanding of the organization’s transformation vision prior to attempting any transformation, the organization will find that they are fighting an uphill battle the entire time.
A well understood organizational transformation vision provides positive influence and guiding behaviors resulting in the right decisions supporting transformational efforts, instead of working against them.
We have to understand that not all organizations are gifted with a positive and widely accepted transformation vision. As an organization ages, the truth is that historic governance and policies, practices, culture, behaviors and skills mold into something that is simply unable to adjust to the rapid changes we see today and thus cause most organizational transformations to fail.
Many leaders look upon a transformation vision as the ‘elephant in the room,’ and ignore it because to do otherwise would cause great embarrassment, despondency, or arguments among the management team. In many settings, long-tenured managers are the ‘sacred cows’ adverse to change and the primary impediments toward modernizing the strategic thought process to support an improved vision of where the organization would like to head. Organization’s experiencing these difficulties are predisposed to continual problems and inherent risks in undertaking any transformation effort.
PIVOT takes a behind the scenes look at seven dynamic attributes that combine to produce an organizational transformation vision that shows the current state of the dynamic attributes and how the organization would like them to look like. These seven dynamic attributes are composed of one hundred and twenty unique categories. It’s important to understand that PIVOT is not a traditional assessment or survey, instead PIVOT takes an in depth look at the seven dynamic attributes through a series of scenarios, current practices and mindset questions that show the true stripes of the organization.
The seven dynamic attributes are then scored across three levels, “missing”, “shallow” and “adequate”. If an organization scores “missing” in one of the seven dynamic attributes, this is a clear indication that the organization needs to focus their attention on this attribute prior to undertaking any transformation. A score of “shallow” indicates that the organization still has work to do in order to bring the dynamic attribute into the “adequate” level. Organizations identified with favorable continuum positions for the seven dynamic attributes tend to have employees who operate and conduct work activities and decision-making with similar positive behaviors and levels of intensity.
Research supports that particular attributes are more likely than others to support positive outcomes for businesses, especially if they are present in combination. For instance, companies that are flexible and detail-oriented and headed by malleable, and conscientious executives are the most likely to experience revenue and profit growth, because they possess attributes for both the openness, to exploit new opportunities and the conscientiousness to create and implement a new strategy quickly.
Missing If an organization scores “missing” in one of the seven dynamic attributes, this is a clear indication that the organization needs to focus their attention on this attribute prior to undertaking any transformation.
Shallow A score of “shallow” indicates that the organization still has work to do in order to bring the dynamic attribute into the “adequate” level.
Adequate A score of “adequate” on any of the dynamic attributes indicates the organization has sufficient knowledge, skills, practices or technology in that attribute
