Transformation requires courage as change is never easy and it will face resistance. Human beings like their comfort zone and it needs a good change management strategy and execution to transform businesses.

We look at great entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs who transformed a whole industry, but it is a myth that only founders can transform companies. The capability of being a leader does not require to be a founder. Even paid managers can turn into great leaders. When John Legere started as the CEO of T-Mobile US and announced his ‘uncarrier strategy’, some people at the HQ in Bonn may have thought this is crazy – the rest is history - John and the team changed one of the largest mobile markets globally. No worries, not everybody needs a slow cooking channel on social media.

A transformation strategy can be driven by different fact e.g. digitization or turning from loss making to profitable growth. 

Just saving cost may be an option if you restructure a company and you run out of money but it is not a strategy, it’s a measure. Saving cost or financial cosmetics may generate short term wins and profits but if you miss the development of the business, the restructuring case will be even bigger on the long run. In contrast efficiency and effectiveness might be strategic goals, achieving the same result with less resources but it does not replace the overall strategy on developing the company it can be just one component. 

Transformation means that the business model, the people, the processes or the products change to develop the business to the next stage and striving for a bright future aligned with the market and serving customer needs – and yes – there is always a customer.

Changing the business model impacts the organization and customers, changing people will have an impact on your whole team and some may like it and some will not. The same applies for product and process developments. 

You will go through the typical phases of change: forming, storming, norming and performing (proposed by Bruce Tuckman already in 1965). Depending on the stage of your organization the change can take longer and the resistance may be bigger, the amount of measures is larger. 

Hence a leader of a transformation requires the right skills to do a transformation. It requires courage as the resistance may be tough and people who do not want to or cannot change could be hard to deal with. Politics can kick in to avoid change and form opinions to slow down the transformation. The leaders of such a transformation require support for their journey towards the desired stage. If your stakeholders have never been exposed to a transformation or miss the right understanding of the business, they may fear the noise around such a transformational journey in absence of a better approach. 

You need courage to move a whole company from the comfort zone to the high-performance ambitions required to be a leader in the industry. People will struggle with speed as e.g. IT product life cycles in the good old days have been two years and today, they are three to six months. Sales needs to move from wining and dining towards digital marketing strategies to generate business. The world around most business has become faster, more uncertain, less predictable and not having only one road to success. Read about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) in leadership theory (see leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus in 1985). The world changes hence companies and businesses need to too. 

The adoption of newest technology, different customer expectations and the new way of working is a given to succeed in most businesses hence you need to transform your business. Special leadership skills are required to do so. Communication skills, industry expertise, strategic thinking and the ability to execute are few of those to transform a business. But courage is a capability transformational leader defiantly need as it is not ‘a walk in the park’ at the beginning – you push to leave comfort zones and the team which goes along with you, needs to change as well in the way they work. 

Transformation strategies normally fail if 

• you try to make everyone happy and compromise on the execution of the strategy too much as transformation is not a small incremental change, 
  
• you as the leader are not empowered to take the measures needed and have complex decision-making processes which slows down the execution. People may loose motivation if they feel like fighting against windmills,
  
• you do not communicate the purpose of the transformation to understand the why.

At the end you need a team which loves challenges and takes as many people along as they can. People like the successful transformation stories but they have little confidence on the journey – transformational leaders must have the right skill set, being emphatic, sensitive to change and the impact but have the courage to execute the strategy for the better despite resistance.