4 Reasons Why Small Businesses Need a Social Media Plan

Small business owners and their employees wear many hats. Often, the day-to-day management of their businesses takes precedents over important but overlooked marketing and promotional strategies (among other things). While the marketing landscape is vast, budgets are often absorbed quickly, leaving business owners wondering how they can get the most out of their marketing dollars.

With social media evolving at such a rapid pace, businesses large and small need to consider their presence on popular social platforms and how this presence can amplify their brand, increase recognition, and support their overall marketing and sales strategy. In fact, considering its potential impact on sales, there is no business too small for a social media strategy.

Given the accessibility of today’s most popular social platforms, the integration of cost-effective advertising, and the availability of social media content discovery apps that mitigate the time-consuming process of sourcing content, social media should be a go-to resource for small businesses. But, time, as we all know, is a precious commodity and small businesses must approach their social strategy with efficiency and effectiveness in mind.

For entrepreneurs and small business owners looking to harness the power of social media, they must develop a plan before diving into the world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat and the like. Otherwise, much of the time and energy put into social media will be for naught.

1. It connects you to your target market

Social media allows businesses to connect directly with core demographics. But, first, they must think about the social channel(s) their audience populates. If time and budget are concerns, businesses should start with the platform that connects them to their target market the quickest and scale from there. For example, interior designers may find Houzz is the go-to platform to quickly reach buyers who are interested in their services. LinkedIn might be the trusted tool for a logistics company or law firm. 

A wedding photographer may look to Pinterest as a top website referrer because of the searching habits of brides-to-be and their families. And a fashion label may invest in Instagram to reach their ideal buyer with branded imagery. No matter what the industry, understanding your audience and how best to reach them is an essential first step to any plan. Without said plan, most business owners find themselves making posts on the fly and underestimating the overall impact social media can have on their business, even if it is just one account to start.

2. It supports your growth trajectory

Yes, the power of the organic post on platforms like Facebook and Instagram is diminishing. But, with the onset of audience targeting and conversion tracking tools, social media can quickly become an online sales tool for a business. For example, today’s social selling services, particularly Facebook’s advertising platform, allow businesses to target and re-target audiences, measure the results and repeat if successful. In essence, a link to a product offering or piece of content from social media becomes a lead magnet that provides businesses with conversion rates and ROI, supporting brand awareness and company growth.

3. It allows you to build relationships with customers

Any good social media plan involves consumer relations. From the beginning, social media has continuously evolved into an external customer service department for brands and businesses. Without an overall plan supported by consistent posting and account maintenance, businesses miss out on important customer interactions, like responding to reviews as well as public and private messages, that build relationships, encourage brand loyalty and, over time, yield substantial returns for their business.

4. It keeps you relevant in a competitive market

The digital marketplace is vast and the competition to have content seen and heard is great. A social media plan allows small businesses to not only have a presence but to become a part of the online conversation. By defining an audience and overall goals, and executing against these goals with curated content, businesses can position themselves as a leading enterprise, a go-to resource for clients and customers in need of sought-after information and services. This builds loyalty and keeps businesses top-of-mind with customers, giving them an edge over industry competitors.

  Source: http://bit.ly/2an8Y4n

5 reasons to say "No!" to marketing

Over the course of my 15-year marketing career, I have evaluated my fair share of marketing ideas. Many of these ideas have come from co-workers, managers, and owners. I have had requests for everything from videos to exhibiting at trade shows in Las Vegas to creating printed brochures and more.

Early in my career, I didn't spend much time evaluating their requests, rather, I would add them to my to-do list and get working on them. As I gained experience, I also got smarter, and I soon became critical of internal marketing requests.

Now, when approached by someone who says "We need to attend the annual tech conference in Seattle the first week of October" the first question I ask is "What is your business case?".

I can't recall a single time when someone has been able to provide a reasonable business case. Most of the time I get one sentence responses something to the tune of:

"We need to do this because our competition is doing it."
"We have always done it this way."
"I can't explain it - just trust me."
"I'm the boss - just do it."

I usually end up categorizing these requests as RAM - Random Acts of Marketing. Sometimes they pay off and other times not so much. None of them lead to long-term growth.

So, here are five reasons to say NO! to marketing:

1. The idea has little impact on the bottom line.

If you think the issue with marketing is that only 50% of your efforts pay off but you don't know what 50% is paying off then you're doing it wrong. Marketing efforts can be attributed to bottom line results when benchmarks are put in place and campaigns tracked correctly. If you can't draw the path from a marketing initiative to sales then just say "No!".

2. The idea is not part of the company strategy.

Small businesses serious about growing will have a strategy. Most plans will outline the target consumer of the main products and services key to a company's success. If the marketing idea does not focus on your primary audience then just say "No!".

3. Your customers expect you to do it.

There is limited time and money in every department - marketing is no different. It would be nice to be able to do every initiative, but it doesn't work that way. Choices need to be made every day. Where is marketing time and money best spent? If the only reason you are running a campaign is your customers expect it, then just say "No!". Only consider the campaign if it is strategic.

4. The competition is doing it.

If you want to be a leader in your industry, then be just that - a leader. Base your marketing on a sound strategy, defined objectives, and continuous measurement. If the main reason to go through with a marketing campaign is your competitor is doing it, then just say "No!". Second place follows. First place leads.

5. You have always done it that way.

Executing a marketing campaign simply because you have done it before is not a reason. There are variables constantly changing that impact the growth of business. What worked at one time may no longer work today. Marketing is ever-changing, and so marketers and businesses must adapt. If you're executing a marketing campaign for the sake of tradition then just say "No!".

The growth of a small business requires marketers to be strategic and to say "No!" is an important part. However, always saying "No!" and never saying "Yes!" will get you nowhere.

As mentioned, marketers of small businesses have limited time and resources. Removing the "noise" that doesn't contribute to the growth of a company leaves a lot more time to focus on marketing initiatives that do have an impact on business.

 Source: http://exm.nr/1qPK5Wm

4 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Becoming An Entrepreneur

1. Are you ready to work harder than you ever have?

As an entrepreneur, you will most likely work harder and longer than ever before. True entrepreneurs aren’t only putting in 40 hours a week and then calling it a long week; they are more than likely doubling the hours they had at their regular jobs.

The best part about working that hard and that much is you’re working towards something that you are passionate about. You’re working towards what you’re creating and what you will be able to call your own.

Working for someone else can be satisfying in a certain sense, but you are still working towards a goal and building a company that is not your own. Working for yourself means ownership, and creating, from the ground up, what is yours.

2. Are you ready for the obstacles ahead?

Being an entrepreneur and following your own path has its own set of obstacles. Tough obstacles. In a 40-hour work week, you faced obstacles, but usually on a smaller scale. The obstacles you face with a normal job can be missing a deadline or messing up a sale, but it’s not life-threatening. The obstacles you will face as an entrepreneur can be life-threatening in the sense of, if you fail or quit, you or your family could lose everything. If you don’t make it through the obstacles as an entrepreneur, you could easily ruin your life and have nothing to show for it. But overcoming the obstacles of entrepreneurship will reap some of the biggest rewards.

3. Are you ready to be your own boss?

Being a full-time entrepreneur means you set your own schedule, make your own hours, and do your own thing whenever you want. That sounds pretty exciting, right? Just make sure you don’t get too comfortable with that idea. Everything you do as an entrepreneur will affect your results and your success. If you constantly procrastinate and get complacent, you will see the same thing happen in your business and in your life.

4. Are you ready to have fun?

Despite all of the hard work and different challenges you will face as an entrepreneur, you will still have fun. The best part is seeing you slowly progress and build a company or a brand from the ground up. At eye level, it doesn’t seem like too much fun with all of the hard work and dedication, but if you take a step back and look what you have created, you will feel accomplished and it will only motivate you to keep moving forward.

Entrepreneurship takes a lot of effort and dedication, but it’s amazing. Are you ready for it?

 Source: http://tcat.tc/1oIV2aZ

The 10 Most Destructive Lies Business Owners Tell Themselves

We talk to ourselves constantly. Okay, maybe not literally, but the psychological phenomenon of self-talk is real and it can have a major bearing on your life, moods and even your professional performance. Self-talk can manifest as reactions to certain events and situations. For example, you might think “that was a dumb mistake” or “this is going to be awesome,” and these thoughts generally have an effect on how you perceive the event in question. They can also manifest as assumptions, in the short-term or long-term, about different aspects of your life and business.

There’s no question that business owners lie to themselves, often knowingly, but some lies are innocuous. Others, like these 10, are destructive and should be avoided at all costs.

Lies Business Owners Tell

My Customers are Going to Love This

This lie stems from your own personal biases. You came up with the idea for your business (or product), so, of course, you’re going to love it! That doesn’t mean everyone else in your target audience is going to, and assuming that’s the case may set you up for failure. If you don’t have any objective data backing this statement, you’re lying to yourself.

Everything Will Work Out

It won’t. Not if you allow things to continue as they are. There’s this persistent myth that businesses succeed because they had a good idea and a good system. Then they just waited for everything else to fall in place. This isn’t true. Successful businesses have to experiment, tinker, and evolve constantly. You have to put in the effort if you want to succeed.

I Can Always Change This Later

This can be true, depending on the context, but it’s not a line of thinking you want to apply to many areas of your business. Assuming you’ll be able to change something later gives you a lower threshold for quality, meaning you’ll start off with a weaker strategy. And thanks to procrastination, you’ll probably end up never changing it anyway. Start strong if you want to finish strong.

I Don’t Have to Worry About This Yet

There are many reasons for procrastination, and some of them are actually pretty good. However, when you delay a task, the indefiniteness of “I’ll worry about that later” can set you up for a perpetual cycle of delay. Instead, if you don’t have time to do something, either schedule a concrete time to do it in the future or delegate it to someone else.

I Have to Do This Myself

Entrepreneurs love to get their hands dirty, and many take it as a point of pride. You might convince yourself that you’re the only one with the skill set or experience to handle a certain task, or that if you don’t do this yourself, you’ll lose control of your business. However, it’s unlikely that these things are true. Learn to let go, and trust your teammates to help you out.

I Don’t Have Time

Entrepreneurship is demanding. It takes a heavy investment of time and effort to see any progress, so many business owners end up putting off or ignoring other aspects of their life — like family, friends and leisure time. Trust me, you need to make time for these things, or you’ll regret it later.

I Just Have to Work Harder

Working harder isn’t always the best approach, just like hitting your head against a brick wall with more force isn’t going to help you tear it down. Instead, opt for smarter, more innovative solutions to your problems. Putting in more hours with a “brute force” style will leave you burned out and frustrated.

This Could Never Work

This lie often stems from preconceived notions about different strategies. You might hear an idea for the first time and immediately write it off as impractical or useless, or you might be presented with a strategy that didn’t work out well for you in the past and assume it could never work out. It’s important to be open to new ideas, especially since many strategies can be feasible as long as you use the right approach.

All I Need Is . . . . . 

Businesses are ridiculously complicated, and even to the most seasoned, successful entrepreneurs in the world, they’re somewhat unpredictable. There are too many variables for you to definitively boil down any problem to a single factor. If you give yourself this problem-solving tunnel vision, you could wind up ignoring the factors that are actually responsible for your predicament. Know that every problem is complex, and no one fix will solve everything.

No One Understands

Entrepreneurship can be painfully lonely. Because you’re working long hours, you’re in an isolated position, and you have to put on a “brave” face for your employees and clients, you might find yourself thinking that nobody understands the stresses you’re dealing with. This weighs heavily on the mind. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re alone. Connect with other entrepreneurs and open up about your experiences.

Don’t feel ashamed if you lie to yourself. In fact, if you don’t, you’re in the minority. Some lies are important to reframe your expectations, help you think more positively and direct your line of thought to something more productive. However, don’t let yourself get caught in a trap of unproductive self-deception. Keep your thoughts and assumptions in check by remaining as objective as possible in your business.

  Source: http://bit.ly/1XY9dVM

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3 ways marketers can improve customer experience

Customer experience is a hot-button topic in marketing.

As more and more marketing pros seek to add this skill to their toolkit, advice from one of the leading minds in the field, Brian Solis, can help.

I met Solis, a former public relations and digital media executive, a year ago. My blog post about our conversation, Is Customer Experience the Next Killer App? was one of the most widely shared, liked and tweeted blogs that I have ever written. Since then, marketers are chiming-in everywhere you turn about improving CX.

I was talked to Solis again while he traveled to one of his worldwide speaking engagements discussing CX, and gathered more insights. Here are three main ways that Solis says PR and marketing pros can improve customer experience:

1. Uncover points of friction.

The first step is the most difficult. It requires that you recognize that customers’ experiences could be improved and requires you (and others) to step outside of your roles and collaborate to bring about sweeping change. But, it can start with small steps.

Any employee or manager can address customer experience by looking within their domain—whether it is sales, marketing, product development or customer service.

A good place to start is uncovering points of friction. This can be done personally or with the help of other team members and customers. Look at the experience within and outside your department, paying attention to what happens before and after your department becomes part of the customer experience.

When you involve your customers and other departments, interesting developments can appear, enabling you to identify things that are broken and how to fix them.

2. Place innovation over iteration.

Changing the customer experience may not require a complete product or customer journey redesign, but every aspect can benefit from a benchmark review through the eyes of the connected customer.

To make meaningful changes, you need to look at the experience from both ends. This leads to improvements and opens the door to innovation. It’s important to find a balance between innovation and iteration. Both are required for success.

Take a note from Steve Jobs and the development of the iPhone. Jobs didn’t want designers with traditional cellphone experience on the team, because he didn’t want any previous biases. Rather than focus on what a phone was, Jobs looked at what it could be.

3. Rethink what success means to CX.

Improving the customer experience can have widespread value. It is important to determine goals and how to measure them early in the process. Goals should focus on business value as well as how they affect the customer experience.

What’s the ROI of customer happiness? You can use existing metrics, but to truly track experience, rethink what success means and develop additional metrics that ensure how the two align.

Track key performance indicators related to customer satisfaction, shared experiences, customer paths and conversions. Focus on new customer growth baselines, looking at revenues and return on revenues once changes are completed. Also look at the journey and whether or not it is efficient for customers based on intent, context, device and immediacy.

The more tangible goals that you set, easier you can measure success.

  Source : http://bit.ly/24Uyndd

28 great tactics for promoting online content

Content distribution has been a big topic all around social media.

As Mark Schaefer’s book “The Content Code” explains, “Great content isn’t the finish line; it’s the starting line.”

We spend so much time and inspiration on creating our content, and then once we hit publish we forget that we must work to share that content.

Here are 28 tips on how to extend the reach of what you publish online:

Promote your content on social media

This is probably the first place we all go. You hit publish, and your automation tools push your post out on social media.

Then you forget about it and run off to the next piece.

Nope. There has to be more planning. The folks at CoShedule say having a social media sharing schedule will double your traffic.

Here’s what they suggest:

1. Upon publishing —Social media message is sent when blog post goes live.
2. Same day —Initial social media messages trickle out to your accounts over the next two or three hours.
3. Next day —Messages are shared again on the appropriate social media channels.
4. Next week —Another series of messages are pre-scheduled and sent.
5. Next month —Even more social media messages are pre-scheduled for the following month.
6. Next _____ —Additional messages can be scheduled for the three-month mark or beyond.

Here’s what I do:

1. Upon publishing —Twitter: I schedule this through IFTTT to go out with #new, the title and the featured image once the blog is live. It’s also pushed to Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google Plus the day it publishes.
2. Same day —Twitter: I’ll use the Click To Tweet quotes to send out a few times later the same day, but by using the quotes versus the title these have different ledes (opening or enticing paragraphs) and don’t seem like I’m pushing the same content over and over. (I try to have at least one quote in each post.)
3. Next week —I’ll pre-schedule reoccurring tweets over the next few days, and over the next two months from my personal handle (if it’s evergreen).
4. Next two months —Again, using prescheduled tweets with different ledes and different images (if there are any), my posts are hitting my personal feed for a good two months.
5. Ongoing —From here I let Revive Old Post take over, which helps our evergreen content to “live forever.”

RELATED: Free download: 11 Essentials for a Stellar Online Newsroom

Other tips:

• Changing your lede helps the content stay fresh; try to come up with three different ways to pose one title.
• Ask questions. For instance, for this post, I could change my lede or pose a question (depending on the platform and the space it affords) to say, “Are you doubling your content distribution efforts with a promo schedule?”
• Add hashtags to help searchers find your content.
• Tag people, and ask them to weigh in, but only if you have a good relationship; don’t spam people.
• Use pithy quotes or stats from the article as a new lede.
• As mentioned, use Click To Tweet to create snackable, shareable bites.
• Reference your article—when relevant— in online conversations. Again, don’t be spammy.

Promote your content to your list(s)

If you have a marketing list (and you should), use it.

Many people share weekly newsletters or several times a month. Use this as a vehicle to share your latest post(s).

Here’s what I do:

1. We have a monthly newsletter with themes, so I share a post from the prior month only if it fits with the theme we’re working with.
2. We have a subscriber-only blog email that delivers our blog to straight to inboxes. This is a highly segmented and highly engaged list. How? We give subscriber-only gifts— templates, workflows, tricks and tips—to those on our list as a bonus for the blog post’s theme. In this email we have two places with ready-to-tweet links.

Other tips:

• Have an RSS feed set up on your blog so subscribers can add it to their aggregators.
• If you decide to take it a step further, as we did with our subscriber-only list, make sure those links tag your brand, use any branded/relevant hashtags and are trackable. We use Bitly and Click To Tweet’s link generator to make this happen.

Promote your content through syndication

Our posts are syndicated through a few platforms, including B2Community and SteamFeed.

This means nearly all our posts are republished on these sites with permission.

Many sites do this for free; some do it as a paid service, such as Outbrain.

Here’s what I do:

• I research well-trafficked sites offering syndication (B2Community) and ask to be a part of the program.
• I vet offers from sites asking to syndicate my content (SteamFeed and a few others that are on a post-by-post basis). In some cases, I get paid to let other sites use my content.

Promote your content through advertising

As we ramp up with advertising efforts for our clients, this is an area I have to beef up in 2016.

There are so many ways to promote your content. Here are some of the easiest/most common:

• Facebook ads
• Facebook custom audiences (show ads to your lists)
• Facebook lookalike audiences (show ads to people similar to those people on your lists)
• Remarketing ads (Facebook or Google—ads that “follow” users with cookies)
• Twitter ads
• Google AdWords

There you have it! These 28 tips are only a starting place, but a solid one.

Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments section.

Source : http://bit.ly/1KTJL1V

Snapchat: The King of Millennial Micro-Moments

In 2015, Snapchat put the world on notice that the app is an advertising force to be reckoned with — maybe theadvertising force to be reckoned with. Named Adweek‘s hottest digital brand, Snapchat commanded a reported $750,000 for brands to place ads, and the millennial darling reported more than 6 billion videos daily. Snapchat will become even bigger in 2016 as brands learn how to apply the app to create micro-moments for the surging millennial population.

Snapchat has accomplished something nearly impossible: opening its door to brands while retaining its essential coolness among a loyal user base composed largely of millennials. In fact, big brands climbing onto the Snapchat bandwagon may have helped the app transcend a reputation as the go-to platform for sharing racy photos. Here are some of my favorite examples of brands that relied on Snapchat to increase their own coolness quotient:

• McDonald’s became the first brand to sign up for a sponsored geofilter, or a special content overlay (akin to a digital sticker placed on Snapchat photos and videos) that can be accessed only at certain locations. Customers across the brand’s 14,000 U.S. restaurants could decorate their Snapchat images with playful illustrations of fries and double cheeseburgers, creating tremendous engagement for a brand that needs it.

• Dunkin’ Donuts took the geofilter ad concept a step further to generate demand by offering free cups of coffee on National Coffee Day (September 29). Snapchat users who clicked on a geofilter of raining coffee beans could get a free medium cup of coffee, but they had to unlock the image either at or near a Dunkin’ Donuts store to get their coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts also used Snapchat to run video ads on the ESPN Discovery Story on Snapchat as part of its sponsorship of ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown.

• In November, Sony Pictures Entertainment made innovative use of Snapchat Discover channels, which consist of dedicated content for publishers such as CNN and Mashable. Sony launched a temporary channel devoted exclusively to the movie Spectre as part of a worldwide marketing blitz to promote the 24th official James Bond movie. The channel consisted of behind-the-scenes content (such as photos from different shoot sites) shared across 17 countries. The exclusive nature of the information shared made Spectre exist comfortably alongside all the publishing-oriented channels.

These three brands are all using Snapchat to capitalize on “micro-moments,” which Google defines as real-time moments of consumer discovery that occur on mobile devices. Micro-moments are little touch points that can add up to big moments for brands who are present with compelling content when consumers are on their mobile phones to find places to go and things to do.

Google characterizes micro-moments as “the new battleground for brands.” In a seminal report,Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile, Google notes that we check our phones 150 times a day. Brands have an opportunity to create contextually relevant content that will engage consumers when we’re checking our phones to perform tasks. Writes Google:

Thanks go mobile, micro-moments can happen anytime, anywhere. In those moments, consumers expect brands to address their need with real-time relevance.

What Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, and Sony realize is that millennials are creating more and more of those micro-moments. In 2015, millennials surpassed baby boomers as the largest share of the U.S. voting population. As Google notes, 87 percent of millennials always have their smartphones at their side.

In recent weeks, Snapchat has made it easier for brands to create micro-moments through micro targeting. Snapchat has been offering “audience bundles,” or users grouped by different themes such as “world news and culture-themed package.” The themes correspond to readers of different media such as Mashable and CNN that have Snapchat sections. According to Adweek, Snapchat can already target content by gender and for users over the ages of 18 and 21.

Given the size and influence of the millennial population, Snapchat becomes an increasingly important option for brands. Businesses that want to capitalize on Snapchat would do well to:

• Be contextually relevant. Content that strikes the wrong tone and fails to engage in a playful way will fail. Many other brands besides the ones I’ve cited have learned how to create contextual content on Snapchat, including Taco Bell, which does an excellent job gamifying Snapchat on special occasions such as Valentine’s Day.

• Create “next moments,” or actions that occur after a brand and a consumer find each other. Dunkin’ Donuts created a next moment by encouraging Snapchat users to walk into its stores and receive a free cup of coffee.

As Snapchat builds out its targeting capabilities to justify its advertising rates, I believe next moments represent a huge opportunity for brands on Snapchat in 2016. Enterprise brands with multiple locations can and should tap into the Snapchat geo-filtering feature to create customers at the local level. So long as businesses stay focused on creating the right kind of contextual content, brands will win and so will Snapchat.

Jay Hawkinson is a digital marketing professional with 20 years of sales, marketing and merchandising experience including organic search optimization, paid search advertising, local search, mobile and social media. Jay joined SIM Partners in 2006 as an equity partner and currently oversees mobile, social media and emerging technology at SIM Partners as the senior vice president of social and emerging products. 

Source : http://bit.ly/1Pah3q6

4 Things Successful Change Leaders Do Well

We know that two-thirds of large scale transformation efforts fail. But that’s not a terribly helpful piece of information―unless we’re looking for confirmation that this is hard, really hard. What is useful is to understand what leaders can do to substantially increase the odds that their companies won’t be among the two-thirds of those that fail. From my research and work with companies around the world leading large-scale transformation initiatives, here are the four things I’ve found that virtually all successful change leaders do really well:

Recognize embedded tensions and paradoxes

Smart, capable, solid professionals most often perform well in their roles until they reach a level in their organizations at which they are confronted with a series of embedded tensions and paradoxes that make leading effectively much more complicated. The most common paradoxes leaders face when driving a transformation effort are:

1. Revitalization vs. Normalization. At the core of every change initiative is the desire to breathe new life into the organization―to revitalize ways of thinking, behaving and working. But one change initiative often morphs into many, and before long employees become “change weary.” Thus, we find ourselves in the conflicted situation of needing revitalization but desiring normalization.
2. Globalization vs. Simplification. Doing business today means doing business globally, but the complexities brought on by globalization are often in conflict with the need for organizations to make it simple for customers to do business with them. Leaders struggle with creating organizational responses that address the need to master globalization while offering customers and employees optimal simplification.
3. Innovation vs. Regulation. Many organizations, particularly in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, are saddled with trying to do business, let along innovate, under increasingly crushing regulatory environments. This is a stifling tax on a company’s capacity to find creative approaches to solving unmet customers’ needs. As such we struggle with the tension between the desire to boost innovation and the need to operate under increasing regulation.
4. Optimization vs. Rationalization. Customers not only have more power today―in some industries, they seem to have all of the power. Organizations are struggling to provide solutions that are better, faster, cheaper and increasingly customized. Leaders are caught in a seemingly endless struggle to reconcile the tension between optimizing benefits to customers while rationalizing their costs of doing business.
5. Digitization vs. Humanization. Advanced technology is at the core of virtually every company’s business model today. Entire value chains are being digitized. Yet, the onset of ubiquitous digitization is occurring at the same time that individuals are yearning for a sense of meaning in their organizations. Leaders are struggling with how to reconcile the increasing need for the digitization of their business models while trying to create organizational climates that have an authentic sense of humanization―creating an overarching sense of purpose and collective ambition.

Successful transformation leaders embrace these tensions even though they make the challenge more complex. There are no easy answers; however, the leader’s bedrock commitment to helping to reconcile these tensions is paramount. That means above all committing to an on-going communications and listening campaign so people know what’s going on and know how they might contribute to the transformation effort―and know that they are invited to do so. This process starts by the CEO and top team telling powerful and compelling stories of where the company has been, where it is now and where it needs to go―and why. But it doesn’t end there. Senior leaders must be ready to open up the flood gates so managers and employees closest to the client interface can surface these tensions and discuss them openly. While this might not resolve the tensions and paradoxes, it enables people to at least acknowledge that they exist, have their concerns heard, and discuss proactive ways forward together.

Hold everyone accountable

The leadership of the change effort can’t end with the top team, the top 100 managers, or the top 1,000 managers. It has to be an all-hands-on-deck engagement. The change leader must signal that enterprise-wide transformation will be a collective effort, with accountability distributed throughout the organization.

But it is far easier to say this than to do this, so change leaders must be ready to back up their statements with real world initiatives that will strengthen engagement. For example, when Hess Corporation launched its 2020 Change Initiative, CEO John Hess challenged his entire leadership team to come up with solutions that would make the company more agile, cost conscience, and faster at decision making. And to minimize change weariness brought on by needless duplication of effort, he created a champions team responsible for coordinating the variety of efforts underway.

Invest in new organizational capabilities

Change leaders must go beyond storytelling, motivation, and mobilization efforts―they need to provide resources so that the organization has what it needs to win in the new environment. This might include capital improvements, process improvements, and building new talent capabilities.

For example, for three decades leading up to 2010, HSBC had successfully pursued a growth strategy and organizational capability that was founded upon acquisitions. However, with acquisition upon acquisition, the leaders within HSBC failed to develop a one-company culture, which made it difficult to integrate its offerings to an increasingly demanding customer base. As such, Stephen Green, HSBC’s Chairman at the time, set the company on a course that called for a dramatic slowdown of acquisitions, at least until the current portfolio of companies was integrated and a culture of what Green referred to as Collective Management was cemented. This meant nothing short of building new organizational capabilities based upon collaboration and client-first thinking, which not only meant developing new systems and processes but building a collective mindset that would make aspiring to being a one-company culture a reality.

Emphasize continuous learning

It’s far easier to talk about revitalization and renewal than to actually do it. The companies that pull it off have transformation leaders that commit to a relentless learning process.

Perhaps the best example I know of a remarkably successful transformation leader is Alan Mulally, who not only led the transformation effort for Boeing Commercial Airlines, but also the stunning turnaround of Ford Motor Company. Mulally would be the first to insist that Ford’s transformation was not his achievement but rather the collective achievement of thousands of stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, dealers, unions, financial institutions, Board members and others. Mulally believed deeply in his “leading together” philosophy from his Boeing experience, but this became even more critical at Ford, due to the multitude of stakeholders and a political infighting culture that had become toxic. Mulally would have none of that. He brought his top managers together weekly to assess problems and progress, through his implementation process called the Creating Value Roadmap. Met with heavy resistance at first due to fear of admitting problems, Mulally pursued this course and built trust that those who were brave enough to acknowledge that they needed help were actually showcased as exactly the kind of leader that Mulally was looking for in Ford’s future. At every meeting, managers were asked: what have we learned by airing concerns, making course corrections, and especially, fixing problems together? By combining his relentless focus on implementation and making tough calls with an equally important focus on continuous learning, Mulally transformed Ford from a moribund company on the verge of bankruptcy to one of today’s most successful automobile companies in the world.

Leveraging these four activities, while framing the transformation effort as a collective challenge to be embraced together, fuels positive change over the long haul—which is important since the transformation journey is a never-ending one for most companies today. Ultimately, these practices create a culture of agility and resiliency that will pay dividends out into the future, as large-scale change becomes an organizational capability and not a recipe for management failure.

Source : http://bit.ly/1SlSxH1