What’s the biggest barrier to change in your organization?
Our reader poll today asks: What’s the biggest barrier to change in your organization?
– Inertia and the power of the status quo: 34%
– Lack of resources/competing priorities: 32%
– People not wanting to take risks that could hurt them: 26%
– Lack of skills/expertise to make changes: 5%
– We have no challenges and make changes as we need to: 3%
The fear of change and the fear of risk are the big barriers to moving your organization forward. When you look at the power of the status quo — 34% — dominating the lack of change, the root cause is because the status quo is known, comfortable and relatively risk-free. Add the dynamic of people fearing taking risks because of personal implications, and you have a recipe for inaction. The result is that resources are all allocated to less-risky projects while ones that drive change are starved. Your job as a leader is to break that inertia, balance the risk of your project portfolio and make change happen.
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC
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These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.
I agree that the status quo can be quite the barrier. Coming from the ad world, there is a long history of “how things have always been done” which is one of our biggest barriers. The second biggest barrier that we face is feeling like change is massive and needs a long-term gameplan where every scenario is thought out. Tweaking our process in small increments and accepting failure for those small tweaks is an area where we can improve the most.