When faced with organizational change, most decision makers have to assess whether their organization has sufficient expertise, experience, and resources to ensure a seamless transition. At some point, even the largest enterprises in different industries require specialist external expertise when dealing with organizational change.
As a result, change management consulting services are becoming incredibly popular in the corporate world to help businesses increase their reach, grow their customer base, and create new revenue streams.
Unfortunately, most startups and small businesses remain blissfully unaware of why or when they should opt for change management coaching. Therefore, this article will focus on five top reasons modern businesses hire experts to help plan, execute, and/or accelerate their change management strategy.
5 Reasons Modern Organizations are Hiring a Change Management Consulting Service
The core function of change management is to enable and drive the successful adoption and usage of change within organizations. The modern workforce needs to understand what’s happening in their workplace and how the changes will affect them. With this knowledge, they can better commit to the shift and improve their capabilities in the process.
Since 2020, change management has become one of the important professional fields in the market due to the exponential increase in demand for professionals specializing in organizational change and transformation.
Here are the five top reasons businesses from every industry and niche are opting for change management consulting services:
1. Lack of Expertise or Experience
Many organizations struggle to handle change because of the lack of expertise and/or experience in a particular area. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of businesses from every industry have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives to modernize legacy processes, improve workflows, enhance security, and integrate cutting-edge technologies and solutions.
However, maintaining expertise in every ‘change’ area can be challenging considering the rapid pace of transformation. Therefore, many businesses are hiring partners with deep expertise in change management and other areas to help them quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively build key capabilities.
2. Lack of Change Management Skills
Many organizations have the expertise, skills, and resources to carry out their day-to-day activities efficiently and seamlessly handle every other aspect of their operations.
However, just because leaders, managers, and employees know how to perform their core duties doesn’t mean they have the competencies and skills required to manage organizational change on their own.
Thus, another reason businesses hire change management consulting services is to make up for the lack of essential skills required to ensure a seamless transition – adaptability, strategic thinking, measurement and analysis, advanced communication, etc.
Change management coaches can also help teams build these capabilities organically instead of merely offering their expertise on demand. This way, organizations can manage this crucial business function without external intervention every time.
3. Change Enablement and Acceleration
In some cases, many organizations have the expertise, experience, and leadership to manage organizational change and transform without professional intervention. However, they usually lack the time and resources since their teams are focused on managing their day-to-day responsibilities.
As a result, change management experts provide more hands on deck and ensure organizations have enough capacity to ensure smooth execution. Many experts simply provide external support through active consulting to accelerate the rollout or improve the quality of execution.
4. External Perspective
In the modern business landscape, many companies have failed to keep pace with industry changes or consumer trends. We’ve seen giants like Nokia, Kodak, and Enron fall from grace. At their peak, these companies had everything – capital, resources, expertise, etc. However, their leaders’ perspectives quickly became clouded by traditional knowledge.
Unfortunately, many modern leaders continue to err on the side of “This is how we’ve always done it.” This approach may have worked in the past. However, there’s no guarantee it would work in the future. Due to the rapid socio-economic, technological, and environmental changes, many leaders find it challenging to keep pace with the changes in their industry and market.
Therefore, they’re hiring change management consulting services for new perspectives and challenges. The goal, in this case, is to challenge conventional thinking, burst any bubbles, and look outside the box to unlock innovations or ensure continuity.
5. Cost Saving
In the post-pandemic age, many businesses are looking for ways to reduce their expenditure while maximizing efficiency, productivity, and bottom line. Traditionally, many organizations have opted for in-house capabilities and expertise to ensure they don’t have to outsource any core business function. This approach has proven to be more expensive and difficult to maintain.
Therefore, many small and medium enterprises are looking for the expertise and capabilities they need on demand instead of hiring full-time professionals. Since change management isn’t a core business function, companies leverage consulting only when they need to.
Hence, they can continue to reap the benefits of external change management experts at a percentage of the cost. Moreover, by hiring a consulting service, businesses get a team of professionals specializing in different areas, including IT, strategic planning, supply chain, finance, digital transformation, and more.
Therefore, they can get more expertise from a single source than by hiring multiple individuals in-house.
Summary and Conclusion
The modern business landscape is becoming more difficult to navigate with the influx of new technologies, socio-economic changes, and consumer trends. As a result, many business leaders seek outside expertise to help them plan, execute, and manage organizational change.
Hence, change management consulting services are becoming incredibly popular in the modern age to help organizations fuel, embrace, and take advantage of change. Of course, you need to consider many things when hiring external experts.
For starters, you need to understand why you need to change and what you’re looking to achieve. From this point, you can move on to other factors, such as cost, area of expertise, timeline, etc.
Ultimately, getting external advice and help will enable a quicker and more seamless transition from where you are to where you want to be.