Sustaining business transformation: Building and maintaining momentum

Winning is a habit. Sure, it is a jaded statement. But all cliches originate from something that had a kernel of truth once. They get overused and become jaded over time. That does not negate the truth that gave birth to them in the first place.

Part of the reason why transformation efforts do not endure is that they do not focus enough on the culture, the why of the change effort, and focus too much on how or what. I tend to agree with Simon Sinek that it is important to focus on why rather than how. If your people are motivated enough, they will figure out how. And the best why for doing anything is “this is who we are”. You want to win because that is tied with your worldview and identity. Culture of an organization is this very sense of identity that drives performance (or lack of it).

What is the role of momentum in this? I have long maintained that momentum is the most underrated element of strategy – more on it later if I ever get to do a series on strategy. Suffice to say that humans have a terrible recency bias, and you are as good or as bad as your last deal or last win or whatever other paradigm fits your situation. Losing a few bets or games can put a spanner in the wheels of the best poker players or sports teams, no matter how good they are. Organizations are no exception.

Your challenge as a leader is twofold in your transformation gambit. You not only have to deal with alignment and other challenges inherent in creating a strong why, you also need to worry about managing things in a way that your team gets a string of wins that create and sustain a winning momentum. Easier said than done. A few things might help.

1. Align the Transformation with the Company's Vision and Strategy

Does this sound like another jaded statement? Try instead – align the transformation with the identity of the organization and people.

If you are mathematically oriented, it means your vision and strategy equals your identity for this formulation to work. If you agree with this statement, this tells you straightaway what will work and what will not work in your context. A vision + strategy combination that strays too far from the current identity of the collective is bound to fail. There is no heart and soul in it, and it does not compute.

It does not mean an organization cannot change. They do, just that shifts in identity take much longer to happen than most leaders have patience for.

2. Develop a Change Management Plan with Concrete Milestones

The mechanics of change demand that people see evidence of the shift along the way, and evidence of winning or world class performance comes post facto, not when you have barely started on the journey. An Olympic gold medal does not fall into your lap 10 days after you have decided to train in a sport. If you are a parent or a coach motivating a talented young person to take on a decade of gruelling training, workouts and deprivation of all ‘happy’ impulses, you are better off relying on the current evidence of potential and celebrating small wins along the way. That is the hard truth about business transformation.

The basic steps stay the same – outline the steps, tools and metrics, identify stakeholders, choose channels of communication, manage resistance, address concerns and ensure everyone is onboard. It is important to add a carefully orchestrated sequence of initiatives that produce the evidence you need to build the new identity of the organization. Expectations need to be set and managed and failure needs to be defined in terms of what is well within the capabilities of people involved. The more wins your team racks up, the clearer the new identity.

Does it mean that you should set the bar low and declare anything as a win? Literature on motivation is crystal clear on this one. A task, to be motivating, needs to be within your set of capabilities, but barely. Pick up something too easy and it breeds complacence (and yawns). Something too difficult would breed frustration. In organizations, fake “wins” run the additional risk of derision, apathy and loss of credibility as a leader.

Getting this right is an involved process. Your results will vary, but mostly in line with how much care and sincerity goes into the effort.

3. Encourage Employee Engagement and Ownership

The only point of caution – people respond to incentives. Not just monetary incentives, but all incentives. Their sense of identity, their need for social approval, their hopes for a better future, their ambitions and petty rivalries, and ‘what is in it for them’ – all included. Your ‘package deal’ for them would need to create two or three overriding incentives that allow them to suspend some of the harmful ones (petty rivalries, for instance) and go for the ‘big prize’, be it professional pride or career ambitions or just a big pot of money.

Ownership is a tricky concept – I asked this question in a company meeting with 30 people and ended up with 300 answers. One construct I like – ownership means accepting the consequences. It also means the person whose neck is on the line should get to make the decision. Nothing breaks ‘ownership’ like leaders laying the consequences of their decisions at the doorsteps of people down the line. Don’t be that leader.

4. Measure and Monitor Progress

Keep score and be rigorous about it. KPIs can sharpen focus like nothing else – Pacman and Angry Birds are proof enough. To make an addictive game out of it, try to create a single KPI that people can rally behind. People don’t fight and die for a ‘balanced scorecard’ or a laundry list of 30 KRAs. Militaries around the world understand it.

And don’t be stingy in celebrating success. Nor make a mistake in recognizing the true heroes of the battle.

5. Continuously Improve and Innovate

My favourite strategy writer is Erwin Rommel. In ‘Attacks’ or ‘Infantry Attacks’, he wrote that during the war, he would not let his soldiers rest after a full day of marching until they had dug trenches and secured their bivouac, no matter how tired or hungry they were. They would probably thank him later when shells started raining on their position and they had a place to duck into. Put simply, resting on your laurels at any point would expose you to the risk of annihilation at the hands of your nemesis – complacency in this case.