In order to succeed in today’s business world, it is imperative to become excellent at change management. After all, almost every new project or initiative requires change of some sort. Therefore, the better you become at managing change successfully, the better your bottom line impact.

According to Harvard Business Review, there are six problems that can slow your corporate transformation to a crawl. I’ve listed them below, along with a few hints on how to resolve:

1. Cautious management culture – need to confront reality and agree on ground rules for working together
2. Business-as-usual management process – run a no-slack launch on a parallel track with regular systems; make sure there are early, visible victories
3. Initiative gridlock – limit to 3-4 initiatives
4. Recalcitrant executives – compress launch to quickly engage key executives & to identify & confront those not on board
5. Disengaged employees – rapidly cascade the changes to all employees to boost engagement
6. Loss of focus during execution – anticipate and defuse postlaunch blues, midcourse overconfidence, and the presumption of perpetual motion

As this is an important subject, I’ve written several articles over the years on the topic. A few of my favorites are the following: Transform Crisis into Real Change and Secrets to Successful Change Management.

© Lisa Anderson 2010. All rights reserved.