In an organization, senior leadership may resist a strategic development. This resistance may be based on several justifications. The first is that this leadership may note that a strategic change may constraint their organization in financial terms (Morrill, 2013). Therefore, instead of threatening the solvency of their organization, such leadership may decide to abandon a strategy. Reasons may include heavy expenditure on equipment acquisition and high staff training costs, for instance.
The other reason is that the senior leadership may find a strategic change as unsustainable. Given the need for complementing resources and additional dedication, substance of a strategic change may prove difficult over the long term (White, 2012). Therefore, instead of committing funds and dedicating organizational efforts to a program that is expected to fail, the management may abandon it in full. Thirdly, senior leadership in an organization may fail to accept a strategic change due to its negative impact on the competitiveness of an organization. If a strategy increases bureaucracy and inefficiency, it may not be adopted. For instance, a strategy to supervise and follow up on operations may decrease operational efficiency (White, 2012).
In order to deal with these issues, senior leadership must employ strategies to ensure that talent is retained. The action that can be taken is the application of the balanced scorecard. With this tool, the management may determine the potential impact of a strategy change on an organization (Freeman, 2012). Rather than resisting change due to intuition or uninformed judgments, the balanced scorecard can match their objectives and strategy changes. Through it, the senior leadership will retain talent in their organization without compromising on their staff costs (Freeman, 2012). The additional output from the top talent will be evaluated against the additional labor costs. Through this way, the senior leadership will retain talent since it will compensate for it competitively with matching productivity.
References
Freeman, R. E. (2012). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Morrill, R. (2013, November 19). Collaborative Strategic Leadership and Planning in an Era of Structural Change: Highlighting the Role of the Governing Board. Retrieved from https://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi13/Morrill.cfm: https://www.aacu.org
White, F. (2012). Why People Resist Change. The Wall Street Journal, 73-78.
