Featured on Forbes
By Gino Damasceno, Vice President
Change management within organizations is a nuanced art—one that demands precision, behavioral insights and a robust system for execution. Success is predicated on understanding the structural and cultural barriers within organizations and systematically addressing them to achieve transformative outcomes.
Here, I will delve into the perspectives, methodologies, challenges and results that have been obtained from our company’s 60-plus years of experience in helping clients achieve a culture of continuous improvement while meeting their financial objectives.
Understanding Behavioral Paradigms And Challenges
Change initiatives often falter because of entrenched behavioral paradigms and organizational silos. People box themselves into steadfast belief systems and behavioral norms consistent with sets of rules and regulations that individually define success in the current state. Our global professional services firm has observed these issues consistently across industries:
• Cultural Resistance: Organizations often harbor legacy cultures that resist top-down mandates. For example, a Houston-based client, one of the world’s largest oil refiners and petroleum product manufacturers, struggled with a dual culture—a loose, “good ole boy” approach and a tightly managed, data-driven style from acquired entities. This duality created resistance to compliance, especially where past initiatives had failed.
• Siloed Structures: When business units operate in isolation, objectives are often misaligned. We’ve seen that competing priorities between teams often lead to inefficiencies, escalated costs and diminished accountability.
• Informal Systems: Organizations frequently rely on ad hoc processes and personal expertise rather than structured, repeatable systems. In another client’s post-merger operations, critical processes like capital expenditure forecasting lacked consistency, undermining operational predictability.
An Approach To Overcoming Challenges
Here’s our approach to overcoming challenges:
Create A Blueprint For Change
For us, every engagement begins with a comprehensive assessment of the organization. Using proprietary tools, we identify systemic inefficiencies, quantify the client’s financial impact and build a tailored Blueprint for Change. This roadmap aligns strategic goals with tactical execution steps.
A Blueprint for Change—essentially a system for work effectiveness—elementally begins with the creation of and agreement upon a mission. Create a statement of what, collectively, everyone engaged in striving toward the actualization and attainment of the vision must do over the following 12-15 months. These action steps should serve to promote positive movement toward vision actualization and attainment of collective and commonly defined goals and expectations.
Align Goals Across Hierarchies
Strategic alignment is critical to ensuring all organizational levels work toward a unified goal. People will always have a desire to be part of something bigger than themselves. We’ve found that one of the best ways to achieve alignment and produce exceptional value is to ensure everyone in the enterprise has a clear understanding of where their individual value lies and knows and lives the values of the organization. You also need to make sure the execution of talents and skills are aligned to master models and precision-defined roles.
Implement Robust Systems For Managing
A structured management system enables organizations to shift from reactive to proactive decision making.
For example, we designed a Measurement Assurance Group for a client to oversee oil custody losses, incorporating tools for real-time variance tracking and corrective action. The primary result was a substantial 22% improvement in yield ratios and millions in cost reduction.
Work Toward Behavioral Transformation
In every organization, change is a constant. Achieving a sustained and positive change in human behavior is a complex, multi-level process that begins with understanding both what needs to change and why. Getting a sustained change requires establishing the “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) proposal and then engaging each individual where they are. A change that is perceived as positive will be achieved in far less time with far less grief than one that is perceived as negative.
Lessons In Driving Change
Having the benefit of delivering 2,000+ engagements over a 60-year history to our Chairmen and CEO clients, four key takeaways continue to remain front and center:
• Marrying operational discipline with behavioral transformation is vital. The linkage of process and operational discipline in coordination with upgrades in behavioral model requirements is essential to building a foundation for enduring success as industries evolve.
• Leadership buy-in is non-negotiable. Successful transformations rely on visible commitment from top leadership. Leaders must not only endorse change but actively drive it.
• Data-driven insights enable precision. Identifying the organization’s vital signs, reconciling the understanding of those metrics and ensuring capabilities for a clear line of sight for these metrics are critical for identifying issues and tracking progress. These metrics must be agreed on by all key thought leaders, as they become the primary means for measuring quantified financial benefits.
• Sustainability requires ownership. Embedding skills within the client’s team ensures that improvements are not just achieved but maintained long term. This is key to delivering sustainable organizational growth and business optimization in situations of high complexity, ultimately leading to maximum shareholder value and profitability.
Transforming an organization requires more than just procedural changes—it demands a deep understanding of cultural paradigms, strategic alignment and behavioral transformation. By addressing structural inefficiencies, fostering leadership commitment and implementing data-driven management systems, organizations can overcome resistance and drive sustainable change. The key to lasting success lies in embedding these principles within the organization’s DNA, ensuring continuous improvement and long-term profitability. Through disciplined execution and a people-centric approach, businesses can navigate complexity and achieve transformative outcomes that stand the test of time.
