Archive for the ‘overcome inertia’ tag
Create a Sense of Urgency
Strategy Management: Overcome Inertia
Create a sense of urgency. The first tactic for helping your team overcome inertia is to convince members that their survival and success depend on their ability to act now to make dramatic improvements in their performance. The importance of creating a sense of urgency can’t be overestimated. It’s a key tactic applied by some of the world’s best organizational change strategists.
The difficult question is how to generate a sense of urgency within a team that has become complacent. I don’t think that this can be done by passing along the latest executive memo on the state of the organization or by the use of thinly veiled threats and intimidation. Threats and grandiose statements about the need for greater productivity are not effective motivators. Instead, try the following tactics:
- Give team members the opportunity to discover for themselves how important it is to meet the organization’s rapidly changing perfor¬mance expectations.
- Make use of the close-call phenomenon. Perhaps you know of another group or division that has already experienced considerable difficulties (staff or budget reductions, loss of management positions) as the result of performance problems like those just beginning to plague your team. If so, put your team in touch with these groups to discuss their lessons learned. Afterward, pull your team together and discuss how to avoid these problems.
