Nearly every organization is grappling with huge strategic challenges, often with a need to reimagine its very purpose, identity, strategy, business model, and structure. Most of these efforts to transform will fail. And, in most cases, they will miss the mark not because the new strategy is flawed, but because the organization can’t carry it out.

The Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly presents the biggest challenge institutions of all types have faced in over a century. Leaders will have to reimagine their strategy and values in the context of the “new normal” we are entering, requiring organizations to fundamentally transform their systems of organizing, managing, and leading to enable effective execution of the new direction — and do it quickly. In this crisis speed is essential.

My experience in working and studying corporate transformations points to the six common interrelated reasons for failures — I call these hidden barriers. Leaders often don’t know — and sometimes do not want to know — about hidden barriers that stand in the way of their institution’s transformation. People do not speak up about these barriers, fearing career derailment and even firing (think Boeing, Wells Fargo, Volkswagen, and many others). That in turn makes it impossible for senior teams to learn about barriers and change them.

To survive this pandemic, leaders must confront the reality of their competitive environment and the hidden barriers that make their organization ineffective. Let’s look at the six barriers.

[Here are the first two.]

Hidden barrier #1: Unclear values and conflicting priorities

Often, the underlying problem is not this or that strategy, but rather the process by which the strategy was formed — or the lack of any such process. In these cases, strategy is often developed by the leader along with the chief strategy or marketing executive and only then communicated to the rest of the senior team for discussion. If the whole team is not involved clarity and commitment are not possible.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs:

• Lack of clearly defined and articulated direction — strategy and values — to guide organizational behavior.
• Conflicting priorities, conflicts over resources, and poor execution of strategy, due to functions and businesses each championing their own priorities.
• People feeling overloaded, due to everything being labeled a priority.

Hidden barrier #2: An ineffective senior team 

Top-team ineffectiveness was reported by lower levels in almost all the organizations we studied. Most of the time, this ineffectiveness comes from the top team not speaking with a common voice about strategy and value. The organization-wide consequences of this were low trust, low commitment to strategic decisions, and different and sometimes conflicting understandings of what the strategy even was. In all these cases, the leaders and their senior teams had not solved the fundamental problem of getting everyone on the senior team in the room to talk about the right things in the right way — honestly and constructively.

Your organization is suffering from this barrier if you notice any of these signs among the senior team:

• Most of the time spent in meetings is spent on information sharing and updates on short-term operational details — sometimes known as “death by PowerPoint” — rather than on confronting and resolving tough strategic and organizational issues.
• There is little constructive conflict in meetings. The real decisions get made outside the room.
• Members of the senior team don’t speak with a common voice about strategy and priorities.