Many companies embrace logistics transformation strategies, but not many achieve expected results.
Supply Chain Digest Says...
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| Leadership engages the most-resistant team members to better understand the hurdles in the way, or to interpret the broader team’s change appetite. |
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That was the key takeaway from a recent research on the topic by Gartner.
A recent Gartner survey found that 76% of logistics transformations never fully succeed, failing to meet critical budget, timeline or key performance indicator (KPI) metrics.
The good news: the survey found that effectively responding to team resistance to change and incorporating strong feedback loops increased the odds of transformation success by a significant 62%.
The Gartner research was based on a survey of survey 306 logistics professionals from organizations with revenue of $500 million or more in. The global survey was conducted from November to December 2023.
The survey also found that more than 80% of respondents had attempted four transformations in fewer than five years, averaging almost one a year.
The greatest obstacle to success? The survey found that “competing logistics priorities” was the most cited barrier, followed by “lack of capacity in the logistics teams” changed with executing the transformations, as shown in the chart from Gartner below.
The survey findings also showed that 81% of logistics leaders believe that transformation is critical, yet only 20% adopted the approach of using resistance as a resource to leverage the collective wisdom of their teams to improve transformation outcomes. Adopting this less common approach dramatically improved the odds of transformation success by 62%.
Source: Gartner
"Leaders often respond to resistance by ramping up urgency and adopting a directive leadership style, which is not only ineffective, but actually counterproductive," said Snigdha Dewal, Senior Principal Researcher in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice. "Instead, leaders should engage their teams from the start of the process, embrace the areas of resistance as a resource, not a problem, and act on feedback to adapt transformation plans and how they are implemented. Harvesting the collective wisdom of their teams can lead to dramatically improved odds of success.”
Dewal added that "Resistance can be productive or unproductive, but leaders must shift from viewing resistance as a barrier to seeing it as a source of valuable insights and learn how to leverage it. This approach not only enhances project management outcomes, but also boosts staff morale and can help unearth new competitive advantages."
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CATEGORY SPONSOR: SOEON |
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How to use this approach? Gartner offers three recommendations, as shown below:
Leaders demonstrate listening: Leadership knows the objectives, but also stay open-minded to changes or evolutions based on what they learn during the process.
Resistant stakeholders are involved: Leadership engages the most-resistant team members to better understand the hurdles in the way, or to interpret the broader team’s change appetite.
Leaders maintain an adaptable mindset: Leadership recognizes that transformations have many setbacks, so often will focus on only a few aspects that will be mission critical. Failure can be viewed as an indicator of where not to currently focus efforts.
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