The 10 Biggest Business Transformation MistakesRead through each of these mistakes and then take an honest look in the mirror to see if you are making these same mistakes. If you are,

The 10 Biggest Business Transformation Mistakes

And How to Avoid Them

Pete WiniarskiCEO, Win Enterprises, LLC

David TweedtPresident, Win Enterprises, LLC

It seems crazy that so many companies fail to reach their full potential, especially when there are plenty of success stories you can find about companies who transformed their results, their business models, their processes, their cultures, and their capabilities. The frightening truth is that up to 90% of business transformations fail to deliver the results they predicted. But why?!?!

We have studied different companies and their transformation stories (both the successful ones and the underperforming ones), and we observed some patterns. We have summarized these patterns when transformations fail to deliver expected results as the top 10 mistakes that companies make that lead to their underperformance or failure.

We want you to know what these mistakes are and have some ideas about what to do so you don’t make the mistake or learn what doesn’t work the hard way. Our goal is to raise your awareness, starting with this special report. While awareness is the first step, you must also TAKE ACTION to avoid these issues. This report will help you know what to do.

Read through each of these mistakes and then take an honest look in the mirror to see if you are making these same mistakes. If you are, go easy on yourself, because lots of other companies are, too. The main thing is that you commit to doing something about it.

We want you to succeed – you deserve it! Read through this report, take notes, and let’s help you to achieve your full potential!

The 10 Biggest Business Transformation MistakesAnd How to Avoid Them

Pete WiniarskiCEO,

Win Enterprises

David TweedtPresident,

Win Enterprises

Win Enterprises, LLC is the leading consulting firm to support business transformation to enable your company to maximize its profitability and enjoy long-term success.

This special report is for you to quickly understand the risks and mistakes companies commonly make when striving to achieve huge results from company transformation programs.

[email protected] 860.651.6859 www.CompleteBusinessTransformation.com©2017 Win Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved

Placing too much emphasis on short-term financial targets at the expense of what is right long-term

While we might think this one is self-evident and one of the mistakes where every business leader in the world would agree, it is unfortunately prevalent. Decisions are made to “make the month” even when the behavior to do so is clearly wrong. Think of the common action to pull orders with due dates for the first week of next month forward to ship this month to get your revenue numbers up. Now you’re in an automatic hole next month and to hit that month’s target you’ll need to repeat the exercise. Seems silly when you read it here, but why do so many business leaders allow it in their companies?

Look, any company can achieve any goal that is set. If you don’t have processes in place that deliver a higher level of performance, then you’ll achieve the goal with what we call brute force. You might decide to defer maintenance or other longer-term investment, cut price to move higher volume in the short term, defer training for your team, and the list goes on and on. All which puts your business at risk, by the way.

The solutions to this mistake start with the decision to not fall victim to the pressures to meet short-term numbers, and instead focus on building for the longer term. You need to believe that if you have solid strategies and you’re putting processes in place then the results will follow. Too many companies don’t trust themselves and fall back on brute force to short-term goals. Resist the temptation!


“Business as Usual” is the same as the well-known definition of insanity: doing the same thing but expecting a different result. You will need to do things differently – processes will need to change, people may take on new responsibilities, and new resources could be added to your team.

In order to inject new thinking, you need to regularly expose yourself to new thinking. Read articles and books, go to seminars, and visit other successful companies. As you hire new team members, make sure they are progressive thinkers who have different experiences that can add to your journey. Decide to work with expert consultants who can mentor you and your team.

Avoiding this mistake starts with challenging the status quo. If you’re happy with your current performance then your team will not have any incentive to look for new, improved ways. Set goals for your performance that are slightly out of reach for your existing processes to achieve, which will therefore require new thinking in order to get there, and watch carefully that brute force does not creep into your team’s approach.

Allowing “Business As Usual” rather than injecting new thinking


Not soliciting guidance from advisors

The most successful people have advisors who help them achieve at the highest possible level of performance. Success is a team sport and it’s critical for you to expand your senior team of advisors to give you all the help and support you need for your long-term success.

It’s easy to think of professional athletes who have coaches to help them improve various elements of their game. The same is true of business leaders. Look, as human beings, we have to live our lives 24 x 7 x 365. We have challenges at home that demand our attention and affect our focus on the aspirations we have for our companies. We can all use help here. Or, we have very specific problems in our job responsibilities that have us stumped.

But it’s more than just getting help when you’re stuck – you can also use help from advisors, mentors, coaches, and consultants to get you where you want to go much faster. In today’s competitive environment someone will come along and threaten your business’ survival. Hire an expert consultant, get help, and get ahead of them!

[email protected] ©2017 Win Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved [email protected] 860.651.6859 www.CompleteBusinessTransformation.com

©2017 Win Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved

Delegating ownership and responsibility

Delegation of activities is an important success principle for leaders. To hold onto all the tasks would make progress impossible, as the leader becomes a bottleneck for work getting done, not to mention the missed opportunity to have more people help out. Delegating tasks is different from abdicating responsibility and it’s critical you understand the differences.

When the senior leadership team delegates ownership and responsibility to people lower in the organization, it has a negative effect in two ways. First, this communicates that it’s just not an important enough priority for the senior leader, and so why should you give it your all? Second, there is a missed opportunity to accelerate results.

As you delegate tasks, be sure to communicate that “the buck stops here” – that you are ultimately the owner and responsible for the results and how the results are achieved. The team members you enroll to support you are working as an extension of you, toward the goals you are excited to achieve. They are helping you by driving initiatives and completing projects, and in turn you are helping them by removing barriers, providing resources, giving advice, and rewarding them for their accomplishments.



If everything that you decide and want to achieve is in your head and not shared, it is nearly impossible for people to know what you expect. You’re driving changes in your organization, swapping people and altering processes that may have been in place for decades. You risk looking like a crazy madman who doesn’t really know what you’re doing. In the absence of communication, your people will fill the void with their own stories about what’s going on –and they will rarely be accurate with what your intentions are.

The biggest thing to help your people understand is “Why”.Why are you making the changes, and how that will end up creating a better situation than the way things are today. Your team will hold on tightly to today’s current methods because they understand them better. Only after they have more faith in the new way as the path to meet their personal needs (which hopefully align with the company’s needs) will they then support your changes.

You need to communicate your “Why” often using different styles to send your message. Different members of your team will respond to different types of communication. For example some respond very well to verbal communication. Others resonate with written communication, and so on. It is also very important to communicate in a way that resonates with the different ways your team members think.

For example, your technical folks will want to see a written schedule and action plan with a step-by-step unfolding of the details. At the same time, your visionary team members will respond to an overview that contains a conceptual framework and supporting idea chunks. When you factor in your communication style to relate to the different ways people think you will engage your entire workforce and minimize the risk of accidentally alienating a group because they could not connect with your message.

Not providing adequate communication to meet the needs of your people



This mistake is related to Mistake 4 about delegating ownership and responsibility. Before someone can step up their level of responsibility to drive projects and initiatives, they need to be capable. Too often leaders shove work down to the next level and expect their team will just run things, even though they might not have the full skill sets required to do the job. It’s not that they don’t have the competencies required; it’s just that they need a little guidance to develop their competencies into skills and abilities.

Sometimes leaders give assignments and hold expectations about what they want to have their people achieve, but then don’t actually step out of the way to allow them to drive the projects to completion. They might hold onto all the decisions rather than give the team or team leader latitude to move more quickly.

Both of these elements of this mistake can be addressed when you have a mentoring component to your leadership style. Think of how to tailor your interactions with the different individuals on your team to mold your approach to match the style and needs of each individual. How you interact with and what you provide to one person should not be identical to the next. As you raise your awareness level of your team members’ needs, you will naturally develop and empower your people appropriately. Remember to help your team members navigate their emotions as they are stepping outside their comfort zone. Understand the change process, and tailor your support to each person.

Not developing or empowering your people



Culture is a supremely powerful, invisible force in your company. Pretending it doesn’t exist just because you can’t see it could be the kiss of death for any of your major change efforts. In addition, most times there are the sub cultures within teams, locations, divisions that must also be recognized and factored into your change strategy.

We define culture as the sum of all your employees’ beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors/actions. The issue is that only their actions are visible – you can’t see their thoughts or their beliefs, although you can get some clues about what they are by observing what they do and say. The reason we incorporate culture-shifting work into our business transformation engagements is that culture has the power to stop your progress in its tracks and you won’t get any sustainable improvements.

To avoid having this mistake end your progress, first understand how critical it is to have your culture support you. Next, you can evaluate what your culture is today versus what you would like it to be. Lastly, you can launch initiatives to shift your culture to what it needs to be for you to be successful. While this sounds straight forward, you’re talking about shifting beliefs and thought processes so you might need help with this one – it’s that big and that important.

Ignoring the importance of Culture when driving change



Not taking action – looking for more information before moving forward

Not taking action means nothing will change. For many business leaders, staying put seems safer than launching initiatives until they have more information. The problem is that you might not know everything that you wish you could before it’s time to act. And, if you don’t have a strategy and actions moving you forward, you’re likely moving backwards, at least relative to your competitors or to customer expectations.

There are two ways to avoid this mistake: get more information (quickly), or trust your instincts. If you choose to gather more info then we implore you to move fast, because lack of action means you are inviting your competitors to beat up on you while you’re sleeping. You might conduct a quick diagnostic to evaluate where you are, where you could be, what you need to do, and what steps to take first. We suggest you do a diagnostic exercise as part of your annual planning process.

Learning to trust your instincts is a highly desirable state for you and all your leadership team. As you continue to develop yourself and your team, you will sharpen your instincts and intuition. So will our advice above to work with advisors and inject new thinking into your business. Trust your advisors, mentors, coaches, and consultants and then move aggressively to implement their advice.



Fear can be a crippling emotion. But it can also be an empowering one. For you conservative, risk averse people, who would rather let things play out before jumping into new territory, you do have a role to play – which is to balance the more aggressive team members who want to throw caution to the wind and run full speed ahead.

This mistake comes into play when you allow risk aversion to stop any initiatives before they have an opportunity to get off the ground or to prove themselves. Some initiatives are building blocks within an integrated set of new principles that work best when you allow the elements to be fully implemented. Until then the risk is that in isolation some initiatives will not deliver maximum benefit until other supporting parts of the integrated system are implemented as well. The trick is to get enough benefit as you keep moving forward.

If your fear is directed more at what will happen to you if you allow your competitors to get ahead, then you might find that fear is the most positive thing on your side to get your team to gel as you define a “burning platform” that gives your team clarity and focus. Find a way to productively use your fear in this way and keep moving forward!

Letting fear get in the way –too conservative or risk averse



Confusing improvement activity with targeted, strategic initiatives

The best way to address this mistake is to lead with your strategic goals and the initiatives that will deliver those goals. These initiatives will certainly have tons of sub-projects and supporting activity to make sure they are successful. These are the candidate projects for your improvement activity, rather than just any improvement project for the sake of improvement.

Business transformation is an elaborate set of integrated activities that will involve intense focus and support. Many companies fail on this point, and instead fall into the trap to believe anyactivity is good toward our future. The mistake comes in two shapes. Either the company doesn’t recognize they are working on the wrong things, or it doesn’t realize that the resources that are working on improvement projects and initiatives are actually pulling resources away from the most critical strategic priorities.

Use a structured strategy execution process to ensure the improvement activity and projects selected are focused on the highest strategic impact. The bottom line here is to have a method to filter the projects and decline to start the ones that won’t yield significant improvement or support your strategy.


Your Business Transformation Mentors

We want to see you thrive and be in the top 10% of companies that actually achieve the results you set out to accomplish.

We are a team of business mentors who revolutionize your people and processes so you can maximize your profits for the long term as you create a meaningful impact in the world.

Our framework for helping you drive transformation is called The Win Holistic Transformation Model™. Once you align the elements on the outside circle, you can then work to shift your culture. The five points of the star represent the implementation elements to have in place to drive transformational change in your people and processes.

[email protected] ©2017 Win Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved CompleteBusinessTransformation.com

Using this model, we help companies in all areas of their transformation, including:

• Gaining Purpose, Vision, Mission and Goals alignment at the senior team and then through the entire organization to eliminate confusion and wasted time.

• Defining Core Values and shifting your Culture to be one that accelerates your progress and enables long-term sustainable results.

• Focusing and executing your strategy, using our structured strategy execution process, SEE™, so you hit your strategic goals quickly.

• Learning Science of Success principles and embedding these principles and methodologies to everything you do.

• Creating high levels of productivity and flexibility across your organization thru the Lean / process improvement initiatives we lead.

• Improving your leadership teams’ effectiveness, to establish practices where engagement and team effectiveness the norm.

• Ensuring your organization structure is built to support the performance you desire and raising the capability of your teams.


MAXIMIZE Your Profit AND Your Impact

If you want to learn more about Maximizing Your Profit AND Your Impact we have a webinar for you. In this webinar we share the 5 Critical Actions every leader MUST take immediately to maximize profits.

[email protected] ©2017 Win Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved [email protected] ©2017 Win Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved [email protected] 860.651.6859 www.CompleteBusinessTransformation.com


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Documents

The 10 Biggest Business Transformation MistakesRead through each of these mistakes and then take an honest look in the mirror to see if you are making these same mistakes. If you are,