Organization Transformation – Demystifying the Brew – Part 1

Today’s leader has to focus on multiple dimensions of change while running the business. Dimensions that are key to success of business remain traditional:

a.      Growth

b.     Margins

c.      People Retention

d.     Customer Engagement

In addition, there is now the new success measure:

e.     Digital Adoption

The vision and mission for any organization therefore needs to take in mind each of these four levers of success. Marrying these together is the real recipe for change and growth. The challenge is to integrate these into a rock solid vision and draw also from the mission of the organization. Clarity of thought is one of the key attributes for a transformation leader. Clarity not just as to what the outcome should be but also on what should be done in the short term, medium term and long term is necessary. It is also necessary that the vision not only resonates with the vision of the organization and the executive leadership, but makes sense to the majority of the employees in the unit.

Based on my experiences, the following would be the key steps that would lead any leader to a vision that will lead the organization to eventual success:

a.      Study the organization and draw out an unbiased SWOT for the same.

It is important that the leader first understands the current and potential business of the organization. The SWOT needs to draw both an inside – out and outside – in view. One of the ways of doing this, is through doing interviews, informal conversations with the various stakeholders, including customers. Conversations of this nature should definitely include your peers, your customers and members of the executive team.

In addition to this, it is important to do round tables, coffee corners and lunch sessions with a diverse set of colleagues from your organization representing all the roles, functions and areas of expertise. For example, in a product engineering organization, it is important to talk to the developers or engineers, testers, architects, knowledge workers, etc. Similarly in a professional services unit, it is important to talk to the customization colleagues, to the data migration experts, to the consultants – both solution and technical, to the presales support colleagues, etc. (While we will cover execution in the next blogs on the same, it is important at this stage to be vigilant and make a list of all promoters and detractors. This information will be very useful when executing the change).

Once the SWOT is ready, it is again necessary that the same is shared with the leadership and management of the organization. It is a good idea to socialize this either through a day long workshop or offsite and take a buy in of the same. The reason for the same is that once the promoters of your organization are aligned with this, the next steps would be far easier and simpler to drive through.

This step leads you to define the current state.

b.     The next stage of this process is to define the grand end state along with defining the intermediate milestones.

The end state of the organization needs to be inspirational and motivational. It needs to have a definite touch of the unknown and a dream to it. It is altogether fine if this end state looks un-achievable right now.

However, while defining the “dream” it is also important to define the next milestones. Lets assume that the end state is an 18 month change cycle. It is important for the organization to see immediate and small successes and hence defining measurable, immediate success measures is important. The leader needs to be very consciously set out milestones that will be achieved in a month, in a quarter, in half a year, every quarter till the timeline and change is achieved.

The dream must play on the existing set of strengths in the organizations. It must also aim to work on the opportunities that exist. Linking the dream to the SWOT becomes very essential for a buy-in from the leaders and managers in the organization.

The dream then needs to be socialized for acceptance. It is a very good idea to check out the dream with the internal stakeholders like your peers and executive leadership team. If you can, please also go ahead and validate the same with some of your key customers.

In the process of defining the dream, please also ensure it has space for failures, for course changes and process differentiators. It is possible and very likely that in your change of organization renovation, some pictures will need to be re-painted.

Again, its best to validate this with your own leadership, do an offsite and use it to build further on your thoughts. This could be a two step process – a two day offsite in the beginning of this phase to define all what is needed to be achieved. My experience tells me that design thinking is a very apt tool / methodology to run such an offsite. The collective wisdom, experience of the group will yield a far more achievable “dream”. It will also accentuate the ownership in the team and will lead to far more concurrence during the execution phase.

And since, the entire team cannot be spending time in this activity, a half a day validation workshop in the end is also crucial to signoff the phase of vision creation.

c.      The last part of this phase is communication.

Communication is an integral part of any change and will be the single thread that will be common across of phases of change. Communication should be strong, it should be contiguous and use various forums to spread the message. Posters, hand-outs, all hand sessions, coffee corners by various leadership members is crucial to ensure the right socialization of the new vision.

In the next blogs in this series, I will aim to detail the execution and reporting frameworks & various channels and frequency of communication that is needed. Feedback is much appreciated.