1. Key Success Factors in Shifting Business Performance
By Stan Nabozny, Key Partners Consulting
Based on our years of working with organizations that are bringing about significant
shifts in their business performance, we have identified common barriers and success
factors that are experienced at the various stages of a major business improvement.
These barriers need to be dealt with directly; you will not be able to eliminate them
completely but ignoring them can be fatal. This requires certain leadership capabilities to
be present or sustaining shifts in business performance will be compromised.
Barriers faced while initiating shifts in business performance in the first six months:
• Not Enough Time or Too Many Initiatives - A common plea at the beginning of
any change effort. This challenge represents a valuable opportunity for reframing
the way that workplaces are organized, to provide flexibility and time for reflection
and innovation. Otherwise the too many initiatives can turn into no results or
worse yet, negatively impact business performance due to overload.
• No Support - Some managers believe that asking for help is a sign of
incompetence; others are unaware of the coaching and support they need.
Meeting this challenge means building the capabilities for finding the right help
and for mentoring each other to develop successful innovations. Difficult when
first beginning any change effort as participants may be embarrassed to ask for
support often due to their appearing incompetent or sometimes due to a
commitment to the change in the organisation is somewhat inauthentic.
• Building Commitment - Creating a compelling picture for change is an
important part first step of a change effort. If people are not sufficiently committed
to an initiative's goals (which need to be tangible), a quot;commitment gapquot; develops
and they will not take part wholeheartedly. Building commitment depends on
candid conversations about the reasons for change and the commitments people
can really make in terms of actions they will execute (which they actually do
follow through on). Important to maintaining and sustaining this commitment is
transparency and authenticity. Transparency needs to be created around impact
or results created (or not created) and authenticity needs to be created around
what participants can actually accomplish. Otherwise, the commitment becomes
a looking good phenomenon which then is replaced with the “next initiative” when
the previous one “didn’t work”.
• Leadership values - What happens when there is a mismatch between the
things the boss says and his or her actual behavior? People do not expect
perfection, but they recognize when leaders are not sincere or open or
committed. If executive and line managers do not provide an atmosphere of trust,
transparency and authenticity, how can they expect their people to do the same?
Genuine authentic change cannot move forward under these circumstances.
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2. These next challenges occur sometime during the first year or two, when the
organization has clear goals and has discovered that new methods save more than
enough time to put them into practice and some results have been established.
Fear and Anxiety - Everyone expresses their fear and anxiety with a different

form of defensiveness. How do you deal with the concerns of an individual about
exposure, vulnerability and inadequacy, triggered by the conflicts between
increasing levels of candor and openness and low levels of trust? Some may be
experiencing a level of openness that they have never seen in their career. This
level of openness is often required for success is by far the most frequently faced
challenge and the most difficult to overcome. It requires the leader to listen as if
they were in the other shoes and see through the conflict or anxiety which is
often an expression of vulnerability and often is a request for support.
Assessment and Measurement - How do you deal with the disconnect between

the tangible (but unfamiliar) achievements of the organization and the
organization's traditional ways of seeing or acknowledging and measuring
success? You may be creating success as intended, but pockets of the
organisation won’t see it as success as their definition is grounded in older
historical beliefs. Often you will hear results discounted as if these results really
don’t mean anything. Acknowledgement, recognition and reward both from
internal and external leadership will help instill different values and traditions into
an organisation over time. Do not expect those who are used to the old ways of
the past to shift overnight. This one will take a few years to instill into the
organisation.
Believers and Nonbelievers - Riding on a wave of early success, speaking their

own language, those initiating the success will become increasingly isolated from
the rest of the organization and perhaps even become somewhat self righteous.
Outsiders, meanwhile, are put off and then turned off by the new, unfamiliar
approaches and behavior. These misunderstandings easily accelerate into
unnecessary, but nearly unavoidable opposition and sometimes even death of
the change effort itself. If groups or subgroups form and polarize, this is the first
step towards freezing forward momentum. Dealing with conflict directly,
grounding the conversation in outcomes and eliminating the “win-lose” attitude is
essential to success. Leaving this to “sort itself out” is most often a formula for
failure.
These next challenges appear as the change gains broader credibility and confronts the
established internal infrastructure and practices of the organization.
• Governance - As the change capabilities and activities increase, it runs into the
priorities and established processes of the rest of the organization. This leads to
conflicts over power and autonomy and to a destructive, quot;us-versus-themquot;
dynamic that nobody wants. If the new ways of working create results and are
measured and proven; then “us-verses-them” can be turned into goals, roles and
effective business process through alignment conversations. Nothing measured?
Nothing proved? Attempting to instill any form of governance is asking for
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3. stuckness as change through compliance often creates a “winners” and a
“losers”.
• Diffusion - Unless organizations learn to recognize and deal with their
mysterious, almost unnoticed inability to transfer knowledge across
organizational boundaries, people around the system will not build upon each
other's successes. This also contributes to the “Believers and Nonbelievers”
mentioned above. Very common to hear cross functionally how “they” can’t do
their jobs or what “they” are working on won’t work. Creating opportunities though
job rotation or use of specific projects to transfer knowledge and capability are a
necessary support to initiate knowledge and capability transfer. You can’t initially
expect this to occur by osmosis.
• Strategy and Purpose - How do you develop, revitalize and rethink the
organization's intended direction for success, its' contribution to its community
and its future identity? How do you improve the processes of conversation that
lead people to articulate and refine their aspirations and goals for achieving
them? This conversation is the one commonly missing across most large
multicultural organisations. This conversation is needed throughout any change
effort, in good times and bad, so that ongoing alignment and commitment can be
created and recreated. Doing this conversation once or having those at the top of
the organisation do this for everyone else can contribute to many of the barriers
described earlier in this article. Ongoing recreation of a conversation on Strategy,
Purpose and how participants identify with it is an ongoing requirement to create
the support for the change.
These barriers seem common globally across most large organizations engaged in a
large scale change efforts. When these barriers are not dealt with effectively, this can
lead to a culture of apathy and supports the next initiative to be even more difficult.
Given the shifting nature of markets today, being nimble is almost a requirement of
survival for most companies. If your organisation intends to survive long term, having
your leadership become proficient at seeing and dealing with these barriers is essential.
We hope by making these barriers explicit that this helps you navigate your own change
efforts more effectively.
Copyright © 2009 Key Partners Consulting, All rights reserved. 3
Confidential Information of Key Partners Consulting
Do not use or reproduce without written permission