Starting a Transformation? Don’t
Change Everything!
Some time ago, I was consulting a senior director of a government
agency who was two years into transforming his organization to be more
customer- and results-focused. He had restructured his 200-person team,
launched a few key initiatives, coached his staff on changing mind-sets, and
made some difficult personnel decisions. Then, just as these investments were
beginning to show results, a new governor was elected. His mission? To
transform my client’s organization to be more customer- and results-focused!
What could the senior director say? “We’re already doing that” would have come
across as resistant or worse. He simply sat quietly as his new boss laid out
his plans for shaking things up.
As organizations of all types — in both the public and private
sectors — strive to be more agile, they reorganize more often. Executives are
asked to take on new teams, merge related teams, or pivot to a new set of
priorities. Such challenges can be exciting: As a leader, your mind may be
buzzing with ideas, questions, and possible solutions. The pressure is on, and
you are eager to put “points on the board.”
Yet, for your team, a reorganization may involve a reset as much
as a new direction. When things are in flux, people naturally tend to slow down
on special initiatives — they don’t want to risk marching in the wrong
direction. As new players are assigned, processes can easily become muddled,
handoffs dropped, and best practices forgotten. Individuals are not yet
familiar with one another’s quirks and talents, and may be feeling the loss of
their former teammates.
Moreover, even after you
set the direction and clarify roles, your team may still hesitate until they
trust that new commitments will persist over time. In a 2014 study of a Fortune 300 company, published by Harvard’s
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Kellogg School of Management professor Maryam Kouchaki and I found that employees lost
confidence in all major corporate commitments when there was a significant
leadership change. Of course, you cannot afford to have your team stuck in a
holding pattern. How do you get them mobilized and into action as quickly as
possible?
The trick is to recognize that your team is already in motion. In
one form or another, initiatives are under way, ideas are being discussed,
processes are in place, and relationships have developed. Even if your charter
is to radically change course, chances are there is much that you can repurpose
or redirect. By taking the time to uncover what is happening on the ground now
and affirming explicitly what you want to continue, stop, or start anew, you
can dramatically reduce the reset effect. To put this in practice, consider
holding three types of conversation early on in your tenure with a new team.
1. The “team story line”
conversation.
Although it is very
tempting to focus only on the future, take some time to learn about your new
team’s journey. Ask them: What have been your priorities and goals over the
past year? What have you accomplished? What have been the biggest breakthroughs?
Where are you focused now? Try drawing the journey of each of your inherited
teams or team members on flip charts on a wall. As you listen, you will hear
best practices and breakthroughs you can leverage, and you will gain insight
into how the team thinks and interacts. In one company in which my colleagues
and I ran a two-hour session like this, the new leader reported that it was
more valuable than 30 days of orientation.
2. The “new challenge”
conversation.
This is where you share the
larger opportunity or need the team is being asked to address. Get creative,
and try to bring this new challenge to life as vividly and concretely as
possible, building on what your team already knows and understands. Do they
recognize that service needs to improve, but don’t realize by how much? Bring
in customers to talk about their experiences. Share benchmark data or go on a
field trip or two. Because you know how your team is already thinking, you can
focus these experiences on exactly where you want to expand their view and
spark new ideas. By starting with the story line above, you can activate your
team’s confidence while still being clear about what needs to change.
3. The “realign the work”
conversation.
Now, with shared
understanding of direction, you and your new team can outline what you need to
change in practice. Review your goals, roles, processes, team commitments, and
the dashboard of measurements you use to track progress. Then, determine together
what you need to continue, stop, or start to deliver. To show you are serious
about follow-through and to provide time for people to internalize the change
of direction, I suggest having a team off-site followed by a series of weekly
working sessions. The working sessions should be long enough to make progress
on realigning the work, while allowing time for big-picture questions and
getting to know one another. (In general, two to four hours per week for six to
eight weeks will work, after which you can shorten the meetings to a one-hour
check-in.) Be sure to make time for regular one-on-one meetings so you can get
to know each individual and address concerns privately.
As satisfying as it is to generate your own ideas, you and your
team will get to results most quickly by tapping into efforts already under way
wherever possible. You may be surprised by how flexible your team is if the new
focus is clearly articulated in ways that directly relate to their prior goals.
For their part, team members can help new leaders by highlighting work they can
leverage. For example, the senior director above eventually invited the new
governor to review the current initiatives and the impact they were having,
then asked his input on how he would like them to be more customer- and
results-focused. The new leader was pleased to see so much had already been
done, and — rather than reinvent the wheel — could focus his attention on a few
clear directives to help the team accelerate progress.
Elizabeth Doty
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Starting-a-Transformation-Dont-Change-Everything?gko=302aa&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20180118&utm_campaign=resp
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