December 2023 – By Greg Burns, Meredith Marshall and Bill Hector
In our first blog entitled "Organizational Transformation and the 100-Foot Wave", we discussed how the depth, breadth and speed of systemic change requires new strategies, tactics and commitment levels to join the short list of the 22% of successful transformations.
In our second installment, “The Power of Partnerships”, we tackled how successful transformations are equally about shifting the culture and developing its people.
In this third and final blog, we are going to share 5 secrets from our Power of Partnerships experience for two of the biggest challenges in creating successful organizational transformations:
- How do we accelerate the pace of change or “bend the curve”?
- How do we sustain the transformation over time?
Two Tips for Accelerating the Pace of Transformational Change
#1 - Measure and communicate the progress that your team is making with qualitative and quantitative metrics
- Create and deploy a set of meaningful metrics that show your team is making progress. This will help demonstrate what John Kotter referred to as the “compelling evidence over a 12-to-24-month period that the journey is producing the expected results” that will drive sustained commitment for the effort.
- We routinely surveyed the Enterprise Risk organization along five key program performance indicators (KPIs) such as: “In ER, we are ‘silo free’ and work together to think broadly about the interconnectivity across risk types and functions.” Within the first seven months of the program launch, our POP KPIs improved between 19-90%.
- In the first year of the POP program, Enterprise Risk’s Employee Engagement favorability scores also showed the greatest improvement across all divisions increasing in 12 of 13 categories.
- Interview feedback from senior stakeholders (e.g., CEO, Board, and Senior Business Heads) we interviewed prior to program launch and again after the first year provided rich and compelling evidence that real change was happening at all levels of the organization.
#2 - Cascade the transformation launch programs level by level and keep the momentum going for at least 6 months after each cohort.
- Rollout of the POP Learning Journey began with the senior leadership team and systematically cascaded level-by-level across the organization. Each cohort-based training session was followed by six months of peer coaching and micro-learning sessions to integrate and deepen the learning and sustain progress.
- Peer Coaching was a critical part of the POP learning journey. Groups met for 3-6 months and provided a positive, supportive forum to build deeper relationships and practice and transfer partnership, collaboration, and influence skills based on their “One Big Thing Commitments.”
Three Tips for Sustaining Transformational Change Over Time
#1 - Build in learning journey feedback loops to course correct
- Facilitated cross-functional peer coaching focused on progress, as well as, getting supportive questions, feedback, and ideas on what they might do better to overcome the challenges they faced. These common potential opportunities were then incorporated into the design of microlearning follow up sessions.
- These feedback loops also revealed that the frontline managers wanted to deliver some level specific feedback to the senior leaders. A series of inspired feedback sessions were created to highlight their challenges. The insights were widely shared with the senior team to increase awareness, and many were embedded in future sessions.
#2 - Promote exceptional leadership involvement, support, and future-state behavior modeling.
- The CRO kicked off every POP session explaining “the why” and answering questions about the intention and need for the program. The Executive Sponsor ended every POP Learning session by listening to every One Big Thing Commitment draft and commented positively on the themes he heard.
- Every microlearning session had a high potential or respected leader listen, answer questions and offer insights on their own POP learning journey.
#3 - Keep the program going long after the initial launch and continue to communicate success stories and refine and evolve the program.
- Success stories were continuously highlighted in Town Halls, monthly meetings, and internal social media sites.
- The overall transformation effort continued with all new hires from 2020- 2022.
- During Covid, we switched to a fully remote approach which required new learning approaches. We evolved the microlearning sessions to also help with stages of stress self-awareness and coping more effectively in a crisis.
In conclusion, as the Chief Risk Officer describes the Power of Partnerships:
"POP is about building effective relationships with everyone — it entails working collaboratively and in partnership to ensure safe and sound risk management practices within our company. We are changing our relationships by having different conversations. It's about building trust, becoming better listeners, asking better questions and being open to different perspectives."
One of the best tests to see if you were able to embed and sustain an organizational transformation is how it feels to a new employee. It should sound something like this: