Managing and Leading Difficult Transformations with Olivier Lazar

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Describe the context and continuum of organizational transformations, how to navigate in a crisis, and how to determine the appropriate governance models.
• Define the expected benefits of a transformation, identify stakeholders and understand their resistance factors, and identify political games and how to positively influence them.
• Develop transformation and crisis response strategies, deploy and execute transformation and crisis response plans, and measure the impact in order to make decisions accordingly.

Organizations need to change and transform to survive. This transformation can be intentional or triggered by external factors, including a major crisis, that create challenges to business continuity and require quick responses and reactiveness. Organizational transformation has become a trendy and frequent tendency in many companies today. Businesses try to transform themselves to gain agility, productivity, efficiency, and to develop additional value triggers for their clients and employees. That’s coming from the increasingly dynamic business environment, raising market complexity and technical factors such as the emergence of digital business models, globalization, and integration of automated artificial intelligence (AI) powered data processing. But there’s a harsh reality: 70% of digital transformations are deemed failures (Harvard Business Review, 2023)! This makes “Managing Difficult Transformations” sound like a euphemism.

In this training, learners will explore the context and continuum of organizational transformation and responses to crisis situations. We will review the application of the different levels of transformation to adjust the impact on the ability of the organization to absorb a certain level of change. We will then embrace the human aspects of transformation and crisis response such as what triggers resistance and what nurtures adherence. We’ll look at the political aspects related to any change in the way people work and interact that creates conflicts. We’ll debunk a few myths, for example: the 5 Whys.

Learners will examine how to define and communicate the transformation and crisis response strategies by translating them into a concrete set of actions. They will learn techniques on how to measure an organizational change’s progress and success aimed at sustaining and enhancing the core business values while developing organizational resilience.

This training is designed for managers, leaders, and contributors to organizational transformations, crisis response, and changes. We also welcome those who are impacted by a transformation, to understand where all of this comes from and where it should lead to.

The tools, techniques, tips, and tricks explored here come from the instructor’s experience in leading, managing, and assisting organizational transformations for the past 15+ years in various industries and cultures.