Are you wondering how best to support your teams through significant transformation?
Transformation must happen from the top down. Business leadership cannot just endorse change and sit back to watch others make it happen. They must champion change in their actions and behaviours, day in, day out, in every meeting they attend. Encompass has worked on many transformational programs across multiple industries and business types. We have seen and experienced the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to transformational leadership. We’d like to share with you the best elements of transformational leadership that we have seen.
We have broken them down into three key themes – Competency, Clarity, and Culture.
Competency:
- Large turnarounds/ transformations do not just rely on the talent and conviction of a single leader. The executive leadership as a whole need be the right people to embrace and enforce change and new ways of working. This often means feeling comfortable in the uncomfortable.
- Once transformational change is committed, good leaders look around their table and acknowledge the reality of the leadership team capability for this future state. Do they retain, re-train or retrench?
- For those on the leadership team that will remain to support the transformation, stamina is key. The leadership team must be able to sustain performance not only during the transformation activities, but beyond to ensure that new ways of working are fully embedded.
We have seen that when a leader has lack of willingness to take difficult decisions or assume that their leadership team will change easily/ willingly, this can lead to an executive that is unable to drive clarity or belief in new culture and ways of working.
Clarity:
- Clarity of transformation and change is fundamental to success and we will spend a bit of time going into detail on this point.
- Whilst transformation and change can be complex, the best leaders are able to distil what is required into simple goals and targets and able to effectively communicate why these targets are important.
- Measuring performance during the life of the transformation is key. To achieve this, leaders need to ensure that processes are aligned across the organisation. Performance at each level can be measured – Identification and use of LAG indicators (what needs to be achieved) and Lead indicators (what needs to be developed).
- Ensuring the right enablers are in place - is the structure supported through reporting / risk & issue management, underpinned by a solid RACI?
From a practical perspective, how is this clarity implemented consistently across an organisation?
- Creating an annual multi-year integrated operating plan (IOP) across all executive areas is key. The initial plan takes effort, focus and resources to establish, but will pay back multi-fold once used and maintained. This IOP would include strategic enablers to underpin future BAU, be owned at the executive table and disseminated from there. Importantly, the plan would be measured at each level where appropriate.
- Given the effort and time to create an IOP, good leaders provide strong, ongoing endorsement and communication of the plan throughout their teams and do not introduce ambiguity once the year plan is set.
- Whilst the goal and targets are set and well communicated within the supporting IOP, good leaders will allow a level of flexibility to re-point effort and resources based on data. Note, this does not mean changing goals or targets, this is about efficiency in how to achieve them.
- Communicate, communicate, and communicate – this is not only done through existing leadership and management forums, but the executive leadership must be communicating the change in every meeting, through their language and actions.
In large transformational programs that lack an integrated operating plan across the executive, we have seen planning horizons too short or too long to meaningfully support goal and targets. These organisations also lack the ability to effectively measure performance, which in turn does not support predictable outcomes – pull a level at the top, what happens?
Culture:
We have written previously on the topic of culture, and it goes without saying, get this wrong and you are almost certain to not achieve all your goals and targets, and if you do, it will take more time than you probably have a good leadership team will respect and support each other on the execution of ‘clarity.’
Leaders generate culture through personal actions; awareness of their leadership shadow and how to leverage it for successful change is paramount. It is important to acknowledge that bold leaders will create doubters until people see evidence. Therefore a culture of ‘change at all costs’ needs to be tempered with small steps taken well, as this builds credibility and trust in the leadership from the broader organisation.
We all know that changing culture can take time. As leaders, if we lack clarity on goals and targets, during a period of change, land grabs can occur, respect is eroded and chinks in behaviour at the top are replicated and amplified through lower levels.
Compromise in any of the areas (competency, clarity) depletes culture. Leadership fragmentation causes doubt, which causes lack of clarity.
Are you ready for transformation?
Encompass Consulting Services partners with state government, federal government, and corporates to develop tailored solutions that turn strategy into results. Successful organisational transformation begins from the top. It requires executives to lead by example and embrace the behavioural traits needed to effect change.
Encompass provides truth to power, drawing on data and experience to help leaders gain a true understanding of transformational challenges and the skills required to effectively lead through them.
If you want to chat about facilitation of executive strategy days or broader executive coaching reach out to James Alderson - jamesalderson@encompassconsultingservices.com
