3 Ways Top Teams Make (Or Break) Transformations
Transformations don’t fail. Top teams fail to deliver transformation.
Originally published Nov 7, 2024 on Forbes
Transformations need smart game plans to succeed. But game plans don’t drive success; they’re mere table stakes. The business landscape is littered with smart transformation plans that fell apart in execution. The biggest difference between transformations that succeed and those that fail is the behavior of the top team.
Top teams are rarely prepared to lead transformations at their outset. They have to learn how to do it together. They tend to underestimate how deeply their behavior must change to make it happen. They can’t simply set goals and step away, delegating the work of transformation. They have to stay intimately involved from the start, modeling new behaviors and new ways of working while relentlessly focusing on building momentum for something that is constantly at risk of derailing.
Effective top teams do three things to drive successful transformation: (1) create an unequivocal sense of shared ownership, (2) build strong internal team practices, and (3) embody visible and engaged leadership in the organization.
1. Create an unequivocal sense of shared ownership
Early in a transformation we ask members of a top team a simple question: What are you individually responsible for? The usual response is a subset of initiatives. The question is a trap. The right answer is the full transformation, even if they’re nominally responsible for certain workstreams. An organization can’t achieve sustainable success with a siloed sense of ownership at the top. Here’s a simple analogy: Imagine four leaders are on a boat that springs four leaks. They divide up to repair them. Asked what they felt responsible for, it’s unlikely any of them would say a single leak. They’d say doing whatever it took to keep the boat afloat. Division of labor is necessary in complex situations, but if it devolves into division of ownership it creates blind spots and gaps that significantly increase the risk of failure. The top team is responsible for the seaworthiness of the boat, not just fixing individual leaks.
Own the vision of success. A top team should be on the same page on key questions and have the data to back it up. Where are we now? Where are we headed? Why are we going there? How will we know when we get there? How should we prioritize and sequence efforts? And what things should we stop doing so we can focus on what matters most? These are hard choices that can only be made by the top team working together. Answers to the questions above should form a clear and compelling story that every member of the top team tells with insight and enthusiasm.
Own execution. A top team can’t hand off execution to teams below them or external consultants. While internal and external teams can play critical roles in a transformation, they can’t be the ultimate owners. They don’t have the right incentives, positional power, or insight into the politics of the organization. A top team has to stay sleeves-rolled-up involved, have their finger on the pulse of progress, and show up to solve problems and remove roadblocks.
Own talent. A transformation is a unique, not-to-be-wasted opportunity to develop talent. It provides a context within which to stretch and showcase people at every level who have the capability to take the organization forward. It allows the top team to visibly demonstrate and celebrate “what good looks like in the transformed organization,” rewarding the talented people who deliver it.
2. Build strong internal team practices
Much has been written on effective top team practices. We won't rehash it here, but do want to point out a few pieces of advice we've found to be particularly important in building a strong top team operating rhythm to drive successful transformation.
See the top team as your first team. It's common for an executive to see their divisional or functional team as their first team and the top team merely as a group that shares information. The underlying assumption is that the real work of the organization happens on the team they lead, not the team at the top. During a transformation, nothing could be further from the truth. The top team has to do the challenging cross-enterprise work of debating paths forward, building the story, allocating resources, monitoring progress, and shifting course as needed.
A telltale sign that a top team is acting like a first team is that members engage in work outside of their immediate “lanes.” They aren’t afraid to ask probing questions without waiting for the CEO or someone else to do so. We saw a great example of this in a recent meeting. A Chief Digital Officer was discussing technical investments to improve operational efficiency. The Chief Marketing Officer raised questions about the sequencing. The CMO could have easily said nothing. But the CMO saw something that both the CDO and COO had missed. The question opened a series of conversations that shifted the investment schedule. Her value didn’t come from technical expertise, but rather being a fresh pair of eyes with a systemic mindset focused on a bigger goal than the success of her silo.
Build a dashboard and let it lead you. A transformation is a set of strategic, operational, and behavioral shifts across an organization. The work is inherently complex. If a team isn’t careful they can get pulled into whatever fire is raging. We recommend building a dashboard of key measures to continually bring the team back to the full story. They should use it to revisit three core questions: Are we allocating appropriate resources to the work? Is the work sequenced optimally? And are we moving at the right pace?
A global life sciences company took their dashboard a step further and created a dedicated transformation space—a command center or control room of sorts—that became a magnet for meetings. The story of the transformation including current indicators of progress covered the walls. Teams across the organization used it for work sessions. The CEO used it for executive meetings and even board meetings. Working in the room, the company’s transformation journey inevitably became part of the conversation, whatever the agenda.
Expect members to bring challenges to the team and learn together. Overly positive progress reports are an early signal that a transformation will derail. Transformations are inherently messy and confusing. The idea that everything is on track never rings true. Green boxes everywhere is success theater. Strong teams expect red flags and support members in raising them.
We facilitated a meeting where this dynamic explicitly came to light. The top team was gathering to discuss progress on five workstreams. Four of them were filled with green boxes. One was seventy percent red. We asked the sponsor with the predominantly red report to explain his thought process. “Red is good,” he replied. “I find it more useful than green. It gets stuff on the table and forces real conversations.” “Red is good” became the mantra for subsequent team meetings and helped shift the culture to more honest dialogues.
No meetings after the meeting. Top teams must find a way to have the tough conversations together in the room. They can’t shy away from conflict. Change doesn’t happen without tension. Too often the real debate takes place outside of the room and with the wrong set of people. Whole cultures are built this way. Venting about issues with team members who can’t do anything about it is one of the fastest paths to dysfunction. It also undermines the work of the top team. Meet this challenge head on, acknowledge the tendency, develop the muscle to get good at hard conversations, and create an open environment to raise dissenting views on tough topics.
We worked with a CEO who tried a novel and effective strategy for disrupting this dynamic. With ten minutes left in a meeting he would ask everyone to privately jot down what “meeting after the meeting” was at risk of occuring. If it involved complaining he suggested they find a more productive strategy to deal with it. One day he took a risk, sharing what he wrote with the full team. It forced an uncomfortable but productive conversation. As trust on the team strengthened, others followed his lead in subsequent meetings to useful (and sometimes humorous) effect.
3. Embody visible and engaged leadership in the organization
People in an organization take cues from the top team. Does the top team have an aligned story or disjointed perspectives? Are they committed to the transformation or going through the motions? Are they “on the ground” and intimately aware of the work being done or removed and disconnected from progress and challenges? A top team’s level of engagement has a direct impact on an organization’s engagement and ultimately the transformation’s chances of hitting its objectives. Following are some suggestions on how to strengthen a top team’s visibility and engagement in the organization.
Show up together. It’s common for employees to work in an organization for years and never see the top team together, especially if the organization has a strong silo mentality. It’s important to shift this during a transformation, presenting a united presence, both in person and virtually. Doing so sends a powerful message that the work of the transformation is important and requires everyone involved. People should see the full team together as often as possible, but at least two to four times a year. To take it a step further, the CEO in one organization required each member of his team to lead presentations on a workstream they didn’t directly sponsor. This required them to pay attention and come equipped with relevant and compelling stories demonstrating collective effort at the top. It also helped shine a spotlight on which executives had more of a knack for enterprise leadership, a useful input for succession planning.
Stay involved and actively troubleshoot with teams below. One of the more significant risks to a successful transformation is top team leaders losing touch with the actual work. They look for progress updates on it, but spend little time with the teams executing it. They don’t spot problems early and so can’t troubleshoot them early. They don’t dedicate enough resources to the work. This slows progress, increases costs, and adds to frustration. But it’s more problematic than that. Distant leadership creates a cultural challenge. When teams see those above them “checked out” they lose motivation, performance slips, and teams stop learning. When teams stop learning it further entrenches the very behaviors the transformation is targeting to change. This is why every organizational change philosophy over the past forty years has at its core an imperative for leaders to spend considerable time “at the coalface,” strengthening relationships and gaining a greater understanding of what’s really going on.
Over communicate every aspect of the transformation. Members of a top team often fall victim to what we call the communication blind spot. Once something becomes clear to them, they quickly forget that it’s not clear to those below them. They fail to repeat key messages often enough to deepen understanding and have them stick. In survey after survey of teams and organizations involved in transformation, poor communication is the number one frustration. Start with the assumption that communication probably stinks and plan accordingly.
Transformations have a spotty track record to put it mildly. An oft quoted statistic suggests seventy percent of them fail. We don’t know if that’s accurate, but it’s likely not far off. Why so much failure? We’d argue the answer lies in how failure is framed. Transformations don’t fail. Top teams fail to deliver transformation. They fail when teams don’t create shared ownership. They fail when teams aren’t aligned. They fail when teams don’t stay actively engaged in the work. They fail when teams sweep uncomfortable situations under the rug. Ultimately, they fail because teams leave failure on the table as an option.
Everything listed above is hard work. The best teams expect it to be difficult but don’t let that stop them. They fight through the messy middle together and use it to make them stronger. Teams who figure out how to succeed despite the challenges deliver something more valuable than a transformed organization. They deliver a transformed top team who's ready for anything.
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