An important part of transformation is the ability to get the flywheel moving and like the name implies, the initial cycles are really hard. Here are the strategies that I use to get teams aligned, organized and moving in the right direction.
Ask a lot of questions. Listen deeply as you talk with people. Ask them who they admire and why. Ask them what is going well and why, not just what needs to change (in my experience that will be offered freely). Have them reflect on recent organizational accomplishments and share what they believe was pivotal to the success. Your goal is to not just gather a point of view, but to get a better sense of how people feel.
Listen to the language choice of the responses and look for patterns. Where does emotion emerge and what does that sound like? Where do you notice pride or fear (or both). Look for patterns by function, org, region, etc. What is held as universal and what is tied to a subset. Build a set of theories and test them to help refine not just what you action, but how you communicate.
Find the core strengths. What is the group already good at? What creates action and what behaviors generate a sense of pride. What examples are held up as worthy of admiration? What comes easily and consistently? What actions are celebrated? What actions are shunned. What words are used to describe the best of the culture, and what examples are held up as proof.
Get grounded on the big idea. To align on your compelling why it’s best to have an exciting shared goal. It’s possible you don’t have enough information to have this idea fully formed. In my experience, here you cannot waiver. Define the hard target. If you want to build sustained agility you need to help build confidence doing hard things.
Hard things are the foundation to pride of achievement. Get comfortable with the reality that you will need to nudge your target a bit as you get more information. Move with confidence knowing the momentum you build with your first flywheel cycle will help build the agility for required course corrections. Don’t fret about perfection, just make sure you have something directionally right.
Employ your change agents. Recruit internal team members eager to join the mission, and leverage their followership. Equip these change agents to facilitate feedback loops to learn what to celebrate and what to correct. The right change agents can help you establish credibility and build empathy, you need both.
Do the Work. This is probably the hardest part. You need to build the confidence and clarity by being consistent in your communication and your actions for a long time. Make sure you share your learnings and your thinking regularly, to help people see what you see. I find this the hardest bit for me personally as I tend to overestimate what people understand and need to remember to break things down so people have better context.
Build a multi-channel approach for communication and employ it every day. Repeat the vision well past when you are sick of talking about it. Tailor your communications to each audience focusing on what matters for them, while helping them to understand the destination. Recognize that driving change requires you to not just talk about the future, but to help people visualize and recognize it. This includes celebrating early wins that connect the dots between vision and task. Invest in communication proficiency at all levels of leadership. You will know you are making progress when you observe people communicating the vision to each other without your prompting.
Focus on the Tipping Point. You need north of 25% of the organization on board before you will feel like you are making any progress, so the most important piece is your own endurance. If you do not have the emotional reserves that you can sustain until the behaviors have shifted, you are going to struggle to achieve escape velocity. To keep myself confident in the beginning, I spend a lot of time clarifying why the change matters bringing external proof points and adding my own color commentary to connect the dots.
I also invest time in visualizing and thinking about what will be different once the transformation has reached the tipping point. Lastly, I remind myself of past projects, and how great they felt once we had collectively galvanized action to do hard things. When I lean on my remembering self I can’t help but get excited to realize what is possible when you get the flywheel moving.
In the end, the conventional wisdom of over communicating is important. The key for using this tactic effectively is taking the time for perspective taking. Individualizing communication and aligning intrinsic motivation toward the new and away from the known, removes cognitive dissonance that comes from heading into an unknown territory.
In the end, your job as a transformational leader is to remove fear and elevate learning. You do this best when you start where people are and build from there.
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