Leadership has to be one of the key critical factors for the successful implementation of the Benefits Realization Plan (BRM) in any organization. Delegation of responsibilities as well as delegating the needed rights to carry on the successful implementation of the BRM needs flexibility; trust & faith as well as blessings of leadership on all levels. A benefits champion ideally should be a group of individuals from various departments who are more involved with the strategy and business side of the organization. A benefits steering group can be formed which should be directly responsible for not only the BRM but also effective execution of the same with the project management office (PMO) and/or portfolio management teams.

I think both autocratic and democratic leadership would both more or less fail in such an endeavor. Autocratic leadership will be immature to make any kind of relevant information since the information flow would be hampered. And democratic leadership will be simply too busy trying to achieve consensus at various decision points.

A mix of strategic and transformational leadership is the need of the hour for a successful BRM execution. Strategic leaders anticipate future needs and steer the organization in the present so as to meet those future needs. Similarly, transformational leadership allows one to drive the change in the organizational processes and motivates the organization to transform into a high performing asset.

It is very hard for any other kind of leadership to achieve the goals for the BRM and align with the BRM core principles. Higher maturity and higher delivery capability are indeed achieved by the right leadership from top to bottom. One more important thing regarding organizational change is to make sure that leaders don’t frequently restructure the organization based on half-baked or half-thought-through plans.

I had been working for a company where organizational change every 6 months was the norm. The changes would happen in the name of restructuring due to financials, agile implementation, redundancy management, decreasing product turn around times, etc. That organization literally suffered from productivity issues and all the projects were behind schedule most of the time. The best and talented employees in this company left their jobs. These were replaced by fresh engineers without any industry experience. The people who were left in the organization viewed these fresh engineers as fodder for the near future layoffs which were a norm. Worst of all, the managers were revolving like a constellation managing one team to another every 6 months without giving any stable environment to the teams.

Leadership in this particular organization were initiating changes every 6 months, half-implementing them and hoping that things would work out this time. The organization in question was saved after a dramatic drop in its share price, losing almost 100% of its previous market valuation and a change in the very top management with a new CEO (and of course Donald Trump). Now you probably know who I am talking about but the point remains, leadership is an important skill and the top leadership defines the path with mid and lower-level management will follow.

Whats your view?