It’s a popular perspective in business – to “leave well alone”.  However, in a competitive environment, to be successful you know you cannot standstill.

So, what to do?

You know that you must remain open to ideas for change and improvement, but does that mean also being deliberately disruptive to your business?  Well, frankly, sometimes “Yes!”

In such circumstances, how do you galvanise your people to embrace change, when there’s no obvious “burning platform”?  In my experience, it starts with your vision – and how effectively you communicate it. 

If you can see clearly where you want your business to be compared with where it is today, your first task is to share that with all your people and, in the process, explain why it’s important that some things change.

You also need a good sense of what the journey is likely to be between here and there.  But you don’t have to know all the details or have all the answers to the questions that your people will inevitably raise.  In fact, instigating disruption to your business provides a great opportunity to up the level of engagement by your people.  It also means you can ask them to figure out the details of the journey and to help you decide on the priorities for change.

A few years ago I was a Director of a business that was doing just fine – but it was not growing fast enough and consequently we knew it would soon be sliding backwards in a highly competitive market.  So we initiated change, in order to be in a better position to compete in the coming years.

It felt quite risky when we first contemplated the impact that significant change could have on our currently profitable, successful business – but as an executive team, we just knew we couldn’t stay as we were.  So, we designed a new organizational structure that would be better able to respond to a rapidly changing market and we re-designed processes so that we could also be more responsive to clients and to the actions of our competitors.

Within 18 months we had a larger, more dynamic organization winning more and different business than we had in the previous four or five years.  It was also a more fun place to work.  There were two major factors in our success – we were clear with our people about why we needed to change and we engaged them in designing and implementing the changes – so they took ownership of what needed to be done.

Is your business fine?  When was the last time you challenged yourselves to consider ‘what if we….”?  If you’re not considering change, you can be sure your strongest competitors are.  Imagine it’s broken and start your repair process today.