Leading with vision: 3 pillars of sustainable change in modern organisations
Written by Louise Ellekilde Forgstrup
Louise is an executive advisor and sparring partner to top executives in various industries. She is an experienced leader and enabler of change management and business transformation, motivated to create impactful and sustainable change. With board experience, she is in a unique position to understand and advise boards strategically during the change process. Learn more about Louise here.
Building bridges for sustainable change
Before the pandemic, I had the pleasure of working with a forward-looking HR director, whose European organisation was going through vast transformation. We had many conversations about:
how best to support her leaders and employees going through change
how to ensure they would build on one-another
how to break down barriers between the different country entities
how to enable change across cultures
how to enable change to build lasting competences and succeed with the current change and future ones.
In other words, we discussed how to ensure a sustainable change journey.
What is sustainability when considered from a change perspective?
Is sustainable change about:
employees thriving during change?
the organisation receiving the desired results?
the need to run current operations whilst undergoing change?
As a boutique consultancy curious to know what different professionals thought, we raised the question: What is Sustainable Change and what are the barriers to implementing it?
Here is a summary of what we found:
A holistic approach: Sustainable change is about being ready for change. Embedded in this is that we prepare the organisation in all areas for any kind of change. Learning from experience, we cannot predict all changes and we’ve learnt that multiple changes tend to happen at the same time. In this holistic approach, we also find that we are managing the daily operations and the change in parallel. We cannot drive change and drop the necessary everyday operations.
Building lasting competences for change: To ensure long-term sustainability for change, we need people who can step in on short notice to help enable it. This means we must build competences for change before the change happens. The focus here is on competence, not on a specific change methodology.
It starts from the top: Sustainable change does not take place only in a boardroom, but it starts there. The top management must be comfortable stretching themselves, knowing they have a safe base, can communicate an effective case for change and bring the organisation with them on the journey. If it’s not important for the senior leadership team, it will not be important for the organisation.
Beyond consulting: Enabling sustainable organisational change
At Enabling Change this is what we mean, when we say, that “We enable leaders and organisations to turn business un-usual into business as-usual.”
In the “enable” lies a deep belief, that it is not enough to help our clients to be successful with one change. We work and interact with you, to enable you to implement lasting, sustainable change.
Our focus is always on supporting our clients in achieving their goals. We are flexible in our approach and focus on the outcome rather than the plan. For us, change management is never the goal. It’s the enabler—an enabler that we use to deliver lasting results.
Change means having a clear north star, so we all know what we are working towards and can see our own contributions. It is also about leaving our clients with better capabilities to meet future changes.
This is why we see ourselves as ‘enablers’ and not ‘consultants’. We have not succeeded, and we have not delivered sustainable change unless your team and organisation are able to lead the change independently in the future.