Do organisations grow as a result of organisational changes?

Yes! Of course they do! However, the focus shouldn’t be whether they grow, but how they grow. Most changes have goals in mind of how the organisation should grow as an end result of the new system or process. What I have consistently found in my work is that most goals are related to things like financial growth or customer growth. However, equally, and potentially more importantly, how our people grow as a result of a change is the most important thing and is often not measured at all! These are the people that will be selling the products or building the customer base, so without them growing in the right way we potentially won’t achieve financial or customer base growth, and we aren’t measuring if they are growing at all!

So when I talk about know-learn-grow, it is about having good quality knowledge available for people during a change, learning opportunities for them to apply the knowledge to ready themselves for the change and measuring whether this knowledge and learning has been effective to enable the overall organisational goals. It seems pretty straightforward but it is often where organisations fall down. I have seen technology solutions being implemented where the measure of success was going live. Any system can technically go live without an organisation being ready to use that system. So measuring people's readiness is what change management is all about! 

Overall it is ok to have a guiding measure of success for financial or customer growth. We just need to look holistically at this measure and find all of the metrics that may impact and influence this guiding success measure. Ideally you would identify them all, take a baseline measurement and then you have a clear comparison. A quality change manager can help you to build success metrics for your change and your change readiness to make sure that the growth of your people and your organisation are on track and aligned.