Simultaneously transforming companies and people in turbulent times

Business transformation requires improving the skills of its people, especially its management team. A new strategy, which is necessary in turbulent times, requires new profiles and skills in the human team working in the company. It could be said, simplistically, that any business transformation entails a transformation of its human team.

There is no better lever for the transformation of a company than to contribute to its strategic and organizational health, that is, to be free of all the pathologies that so often develop in organizations. Ideally, companies should be able to reinvent themselves naturally, at the pace of the markets, driven by a competent management team with healthy relationships with each other.

What makes a company “healthy”? The answer lies in the degree of external and internal integration it is able to achieve. The role of a management team in any situation, but especially in turbulent markets, is twofold: on the one hand, to increase the company’s integration with its changing market, and in parallel to increase internal integration, i.e. to make the subsystems that make up its organization fit together.

It could be said that a company has successfully achieved its transformation when the management team is able to increase its external integration and decrease its internal disintegration, as Dr. Ichak Adizes teaches.

Reinventing a company or an organization, that is, integrating it externally and internally, is an arduous, complex and risky task, since it involves significant changes in five elements. These elements are the determinants of its integration both with the market and internally:

1. The first is to have the right business strategy and, if possible, that this strategy is the product of serious and joint work by the management team. Strategy is what integrates the company with its market. Strategy is operationalized in the reconfiguration of the business model. Transforming a business model involves innovating in the product and service offering, in the typology and understanding of the needs of key customers, in the operations model, and finally in the sales and after-sales model. In addition to the reconfiguration of the business model, what is important is the cohesion of the management team around the strategic priorities and the values that give life to this business model.
2. Internal integration begins with the alignment of the organizational structure with the strategy and its fine-tuning. Fine-tuning involves improving reporting lines, assigning responsibilities and determining the boundaries between neighboring areas, improving the execution capacity of managers (who have the necessary authority, power and influence), and finally, adapting the results-based management scheme to the achievement of the strategic objectives set.
3. Internal integration is also achieved by reviewing and improving the coordination mechanisms between areas. This includes improving the functioning of the committees, increasing mutual respect and trust, making the necessary information available, clarifying the decision-making roles of each one, etc.
4. Another element that favors internal integration is the improvement of behavior reinforcement systems.The most important of these are incentives and company culture. Culture is the habitual behaviors that occur within the company, which are partly the product of the daily mechanisms of positive and negative reinforcement. Culture is also the result of dominant beliefs and emotional states.
5. The last of the elements that most influence internal integration is the professional and human profile(the sum of technical and leadership skills, attitudes, values and disposition) of the people who make up the organization, especially its managers. We need people with integration skills, capable of collaborating, teaming up and creating complementarities between different people. The improvement of human and professional profiles, through a mentoring process or similar, is one of the points of convergence between a business transformation or reinvention and a process of improving leadership in the organization.

Activities that contribute to the transformation and integration of the company, in any of the five points mentioned above, are the best playing field for the development of new leadership competencies.

If a company does not undertake transformation processes on a regular basis, it runs the risk of accelerating its aging process and becoming irrelevant. The same is true for people.

People have biological cycles of seven years that call for a certain amount of professional reinvention. Successful reinvention can capture new career opportunities and improve relationships in both the professional and personal spheres.  Without reinvention, managers will not easily be able to avoid premature professional aging.

The convergence of a strategic transformation process with a process of improving the competencies of their managers generates a positive feedback that benefits everyone.

Our recommendation is that companies do both simultaneously.  The transformation of their strategy and the process of developing the leadership skills of their human team. The latter can also be done when there is no need for the former.  In this case, the foundations are laid so that the transformation of the strategy can be done continuously, without major shocks.

For the process of skills development linked to the promotion of strategic levers, we recommend a self-development itinerary with mentors that has given very good results in several companies and institutions. The role of the mentor in these processes is to inspire, provide methodology and follow up. The protagonism falls on the mentee, but the mentor has that magical role of acting as a catalyst for a process of personal improvement.

The improvement of people’s leadership skills requires that three variables converge in time and space: wanting to change, knowing how to do it and being able to do it.

The conjunction of a mentee with the desire to go further in his or her professional life and a mentor with art, and at the same time with methodology, makes it very likely that tangible results will be achieved in a reasonable period of time.

The role of a mentor in a process of transformation of managerial competencies can be summarized as follows:

• Challenge mentees to challenge their status quo, generating healthy discomfort in the most inspiring way possible.
• Helping to identify the competencies and other aspects of their talent whose improvement may be most valuable to them in their next career stage.
• Provide intellectual and emotional “food” to help mentees develop the competencies and other aspects of their talent that you want to focus on.
• Help them to choose the playing field for initiatives to improve their leadership competencies in order to push for the improvement of strategic levers.

Companies are living beings whose health is entrusted to the management team; that task and responsibility is shared jointly with ownership. As mentioned throughout this article, the health of companies is directly related to the degree of integration with the market and with the integration of all the internal elements of an organization.

In turbulent times companies have to reconfigure their strategy, and are also obliged to promote the development and adaptation of the competencies of their managers. A self-development path with mentors is a splendid way of making the development of people symbiotic with the strategic adaptation of companies to their markets.