For business leaders, the many responsibilities that come with the role can feel overwhelming at times, especially if your company is underperforming. It may leave you seeking how to create successful change.
A good place to start is with your team, as employees can make or break business success. If there’s a lack of care and attention regarding this aspect, it can lead to decreased engagement, which can ultimately trickle throughout the entire organization. For both the business and its people to thrive, they must work together so they can thrive together.
Hanaa Jimenez specializes in helping organizations achieve this. The Virginia native is the CEO and owner of Gold Cardinal Consulting, a woman-and-minority-owned small business that offers coaching services such as leadership development, training and enablement, strategic communication and more.
As someone with a background in change management, Jimenez says Gold Cardinal Consulting’s approach to consulting organizational leaders is a top-down, bottom-up framework designed to help manage change effectively for the long term and achieve the best outcome both for the business and for the people involved. She believes with the right support, successful and sustainable transformation is possible.
Here are three change management tips Jimenez recommends for building effective organizations where businesses and people thrive together.
1. Align business outcomes with people outcomes
Think of business and people as two halves of a whole, with the whole being successful outcomes. If one half is being neglected, the overall outcome will be affected—something that often pushes leaders to make drastic decisions like cutting back on people-focused programs.
“A lot of times to get that ideal business output, whether it be revenue, customer engagement, etc., organizations will make cuts to things like learning development or some of those more people-focused programs or approaches,” Jimenez says. In her experience, eliminating one half to change the outcome will not result in successful, sustainable change. Rather, it will just be a “quick fix” to a larger problem—like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
What Jimenez and her team do with their clients is build an understanding that to achieve desired business outcomes, it’s imperative to look at people outcomes, too. “Not looking at it as an ‘either-or’ type of scenario, but really a ‘yes, and’ in a way that is efficient and makes sense,” she adds.
2. Integrate learning and development from the beginning
There’s a better way to avoid this type of situation from occurring in the first place, and it starts with the interviewing stage, according to Jimenez. As a leader, it’s important to ask yourself: “How integrated is learning and development from the start of someone’s interview with the company before they’re even formally part of the company?”
The CEO believes it’s essential to link what learning and development will look like to the competencies and capabilities you’re looking for from candidates during the interview process. With this method, the “expectations and overall employee life cycle are consistent and clear and understood, but also supported by programs and opportunities for growth and development,” she adds.
But that’s not all. Jimenez sees another piece to consider: the link between your overall end-state vision and the role that learning and development play in getting the organization there through your employees.
“Sometimes, learning development programs or courses can be very siloed and not necessarily cohesive or get people somewhere on an overall learning path,” the CEO says. “And because of that, they sometimes will fall short when it comes to the impact.”
It’s one thing to incorporate learning and development programs into an organization, but it’s another to ensure what employees are learning is being applied in their respective roles. While working with clients, Jimenez and her team frequently notice people taking a class or participating in something but then not having the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned to their role.
Before hiring new employees, building learning and development programs into the overall process and ways of working will make sure the individuals can apply those skills to their work and continue to build on them—and ultimately contribute to the company’s success.
3. Implement DEIA initiatives
Based on her own personal experience, Jimenez believes every organization should prioritize DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility).
“I am a first-generation American, so both of my parents were immigrants here. My mom was the first person on her side of the family to even graduate from high school,” the CEO shares. “The thought of owning your own company, let alone as a woman, was not something that was seen as possible in my family.”
Growing up impoverished and raised by a single mother, Jimenez recalls working hard every day—and it only became more difficult after she, too, became a single mother just before graduating from college. “I had so many people who told me they did not think I was going to even graduate because I was having a child and doing it on my own,” she says.
Today, Jimenez is a wife, mother of two, business owner and an example of why DEIA is crucial to embed in workplace culture. When employees are able to show up authentically, share their unique perspectives and voices, and have equitable opportunities and resources to achieve their fullest potential, they thrive. And when an organization’s employees are able to thrive in an inclusive, equitable environment that recognizes diversity as a valuable asset, the organization thrives as well.
“I’m a big believer in the idea that people will more often believe what you do rather than what you say,” the CEO adds. “I realized that I can’t tell my children that they can be anything that they want to be and be sitting in my comfort zone. I needed to show them that as well. That’s essentially what I did.”
Organizational change doesn’t happen overnight, but Jimenez and her team believe you can get your company on the right track with the proper support.
“Our philosophy is we’ve done our job if we’ve essentially put ourselves out of business, meaning we have addressed the root cause of whatever is causing challenges that are popping up for our client, and we have enabled them to address those and also sustain it themselves, too,” Jimenez says.
