At Adeptation, our body of work spans 25+ enterprise transactions, three IPOs, multiple corporate rebrands, product launches and repositionings and dozens of technology implementations.
Our experience in transitions, transactions and transformations gives us a unique, cross-sector point of view on why so many great companies flounder or fail outright at transformation:
The wrong type of leader was placed in key transformation roles.
The people selected to be transformation leaders exude gravitas and authority, but all too often are underweight on authenticity and approachability. Many companies like to hire a Chief Transformation Officer (or VP) who is known for getting hard things done. It is important to consider how that leader’s profile and presence resonates with the typical employee, so that the leader can effectively inspire and influence people to get hard things done well. Approachability can be subjective but it is non-negotiable. Directness and dominance intimidates, especially team members who are less accustomed to BLUF (bottom line up front) style communication. When a senior transformation leader’s impatience is evident, it unwittingly suppresses the risks and issues an analyst or associate might otherwise escalate – especially intricate technical, data, and business process concerns that require more than a sentence of explanation. We know through firsthand experience merging CRMs and other enterprise systems that seemingly minor things, like whether discounts are entered with a decimal or field-level input controls are lacking in an upstream process, can cascade into millions of dollars of revenue at risk.
Hierarchical leadership was not paired with equally-senior lateral leadership.
All too often, key roles are underqualified for the transformation work to be achieved. The people expected to work laterally – through conviction, communication, trust building, listening, relational authority, motivating, and influencing – are often in roles at N-3 or more from the transformation sponsor. Organizations that fail at transformation budgeted and hired a “program manager” when they needed a “strategic owner” who can keep a 360-degree view while operating at different altitudes and levels of detail across the extended transformation teams to identify risks and unblock issues as they arise during execution. Give them the appropriate authority and autonomy to initiate and shape what must be done, bridging across teams to enable them to work together more effectively. Frequently, we find that fundamental alignment to the vision exists across Sales, Revenue Management, Data Science, Merchandising, Marketing, eCommerce, Supply Chain, Distribution, Logistics, Technology, and Compliance teams, but execution of the shared vision is impeded by differences in communication styles, tendency toward brevity or depth, and the time pressures associated with each role.
Transformation communications was treated like a project instead of a strategic value creation lever.
If the transformation is truly important to an organization and its investors, then they need a “communications leader”, not a “lead.” A communications leader can initiate and orchestrate an integrated C-suite narrative to all hands that conveys the vision and transformation imperative in a way that a communications manager typically is not empowered to do. A leader who has experience in high-stakes situations knows when to tell rather than ask senior leaders what communications are needed and obtain details that must be finalized for inclusion in critical stakeholder communications. Ideally, this person has broader exposure to the business and support functions and can effectively marshal resources through informal channels and lateral influence beyond formal newsletters, emails, and town halls.
Frontline employees benefited from training, change management, and enablement – but the global business services (corporate) teams driving the transformation did not.
Over the course of any transformation, there will be turnover of roles in the extended team. There will be people who are new to the initiative, new to their role, or new to the business entirely. How will they be onboarded and brought up to speed quickly on a transformation that they are joining mid-stream? Where will the directors find the time to develop their strategic post-launch roadmap when they are above capacity already working toward launch – and who will be accountable for integrating the different versions created by each team? How can the process be improved to make cross-functional dependencies more evident?
Linchpin roles involved in the transformation did not get targeted capacity augmentation or strategic support.
The Director level is an oft-neglected chokepoint in M&A-driven and tech-enabled transformations. Consider the director of financial planning & analysis (FP&A) in a carveout and migration to a new cloud-based ERP. This individual is juggling designing, documenting, and rolling out processes within their team and to the business functions they support, learning the new system and workflows themselves, and dealing with how the ERP integrates with other new systems. In a divestiture where the systems remain the same, IT directors are laser-focused on executing a total tech stack separation and migration to the new instances of each system. At the same time, these directors must enroll in the new benefits plans, approve timesheets, submit performance reviews, and everything else required of them as individuals, people leaders, and process or capability owners.
What differentiates the few that succeed?
In our experience, the two essential elements that have enabled “the most successful transformation in company history” at multiple organizations are these:
- Relentless focus on the transformation objective.
- Strategic use of finesse, not force.