It’s notoriously hard to drive change in large companies. Being at the top of the heap with steady earnings doesn’t sound like a burning platform for change. However, with the ever-accelerating speed of emergent forces in competitive markets, a company’s position can change seemingly overnight.
Under these circumstances, ambivalence towards change is easy to understand. However, whether it is leadership’s desire to be first in the market with an industry-leading solution or to respond quickly to competitive pressures in a fast-paced environment, the critical decisions about what must change are not always self-evident. As a group of consultants in the heart of the storm, we learned that latching on to an event where people expect change, in our case a product launch, makes it easier to initiate a bit more. This initial measured step was an unexpected lesson. We also learned bigger lessons that we’re sharing here:
Establish Guiding Principles to keep teams anchored to company values during change.
Different from business strategy and goals, a set of clear guiding principles willlink the change to the company’s culture, and its values to the change. The team decides what key values it cares about most and sets them as guiding principles, providing the philosophical framework for future behaviors, actions, and decisions.
Disagreements and decision-making stalls are inevitable when changing the status quo. When an impasse occurs, guiding principles help reframe the discussion, gain common ground, and move forward. Setting the course with guiding principles for change is much easier if a company consistently communicates with a clear tone and voice.
For the large transformational change we embarked on, the guiding principles provided an instrumental, philosophical framework that helped people move from their existing norms to a new way of working. The guiding principles included:
- See the bigger picture to align towards the greater good;
- Share knowledge without boundaries;
- Embrace feedback as a catalyst to change;
- Get things done with agility and accountability;
- Step in someone else’s shoes with empathy.
An agile decision-making process, supported by real-time, actionable intelligence reduces strategic risk.
As articulated in consultant Gaye Clemson’s book, Agile Strategy Execution: Revolutionizing the How!, this process must include:
- Aspirational goals with clear strategies, supported by detailed strategic plans, aka ‘the Big Picture” or ‘North Star’ that all participants can align and relate to in a personal way;
- A sensor system with leading indicators to collect proactive and predictive trend and variance data aids strategic and tactical learnings and contributes to a learning culture;
- Leaders and sponsors engaged in real-time decisions, like strategy course corrections, resource allocations, and subject matter led issue resolution Sprints;
- Available capital for individual and team creative experimentation and innovation at low risk.
Cross-functional teams that are empowered and self-sustaining strengthen accountability.
This can be accomplished through:
- Consistent leader affirmation of strategic intent and their direct engagement in all initiatives;
- Proactive assessment of the ‘people climate’ with context-based rewards and recognition programs;
- Institutionalized learning, including experiential data.
- New roles that orchestrate, rather than facilitate, help model desirable leadership behaviors, shift mindsets, and improve the stickiness of desired change to generate healthy social dynamics.
Attentive Leadership© practices improve key skills for delivering leadership responsiveness.
In Daniel Coyle’s 2018 book, The Culture Code, one of the dynamics of culture that is essential for effective cross-functional teams is when leaders are authentic by showing their vulnerability, and acknowledging their need for the skills other team members provide. This can be counterintuitive to many leaders.
Additionally, transformational leadership practices must focus on envisioning, energizing, and enabling a behavioral-based set of skills. These practices and the associated mindset can be characterized as a pragmatic dance between being visionary and tactical, which we call Attentive Leadership©. It starts with a leader appreciating that understanding self, both one’s strengths and weaknesses, and then using that insight to understand others is a principal advantage when driving change. The Attentive Leadership© skill and practice set promotes empathy, the generation of trust, giving and receiving effective feedback, while also understanding and cultivating the organization’s culture. Thoughtfully intertwining the learning and execution of these skills with agile business agendas and their execution is central to driving nimble transformational change. By design, this approach respects the time and resources of all stakeholders while institutionalizing these leadership behaviors.
Bring people closer to transformational change with a clear voice that emotionally connects all stakeholders.
People don’t see change in the same way. People bring their own stories, experiences, and feelings to any organizational change. When leaders frame the change initiative with a consistent voice and an authentic tone, while communicating the guiding principles as shared values, people can personally identify with, and contribute to the movement. An emotionally-connected narrative builds trust quickly and helps establish a shared vision of what the future change holds for all stakeholders.
Conclusion: Small transformational changes add up to a big difference in huge companies
What we learned was that our elephant-sized client turned best through small steps. The initial call for change was an impending product launch that required the various functions to work together differently to successfully bring it to market. In a company that introduces thousands of products to market every year, this new way of working was limited in scope, so people were willing to give it a shot. In the next several months, small incremental changes occurred.
A small group of people working across functions began to have conversations and trust in ways that weren’t natural to them, which opened pathways to work together differently. As a result, using the lessons shared here, the launch was tremendously successful. People in other areas of the company learned of our success and became curious. Different pockets of the company developed an appetite for change and were willing to experiment with our new ways of doing things to solve bigger, systemic issues.
What started as a push strategy became a pull. Now, we’re taking this new way of working to other parts of the company. The big picture remains the same. The market moves fast and companies, large and small, must be agile and adaptable to compete. But, when a big company decides to move in the same direction through small transformational steps, its velocity can outpace the market.
Co-Authored by Gaye Clemson, Dana De Nault, Psy.D and Jeannine Vaughan.
For further insights, feel free to reach out to any of us via email Gaye at gclemson@globalinkage.net, Dana at dana@attentiveleadership.co , or Jeannine at jeannine@vaughansf.com.
