Leading and Managing Change: Align, Equip, Sustain

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The Best Uses of an Executive Team’s Time in Leading and Managing Change

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Leading and Managing Change: Align, Equip, Sustain By Allan Ackerman, Don Ruse and Paul Dinan

After months of hard work the new strategy is set. It appears the senior management team is on board. But for most leaders the sense of accomplishment is short-‐lived as they fully consider the implementation challenge. A common gut reaction is that the journey towards a new strategy brings months or years of hard work filled with uncertainty, fear and ambiguity. If the journey ends short of the destination, is too slow, or costs too much, the consequences can be career-‐limiting.

Is there a way to increase the odds that a change in strategy will actually be executed successfully? Yes, but it requires purposefully leading the organization through orchestrated activity and skillful conversations that focus on three fundamental components of leading and managing change. We describe these as Align, Equip and Sustain.

In our experience, leaders successful at executing a new strategy gear every activity towards 1) aligning everyone towards the new direction; 2) equipping the organization and its people with the required capabilities and skills; and 3) sustaining the change through formal shifts in measurements and rewards, and through leadership that is both supportive and steadfast as the change unfolds. Each of these is absolutely necessary, although not sufficient on its own. Each must take place in parallel at all times, albeit each to varying degrees at different stages of the change. Together, they provide the means to manage risk and execute a new strategy with greater confidence.

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The Case fo r a Bette r Way o f Lead ing and Manag ing Change Research cited in the Oct. 2014 Harvard Business Review indicates that only a fraction of strategic plans are effectively executed and that “firms deliver just 50% to 60%, on average, of the financial performance their strategies promise.” We believe that most changes in strategic direction fail because leaders fall short in three key areas.

1. Lack of alignment to the change—Senior management underestimates the time and effort required to achieve clarity about the new future, and to translate that clarity into urgent commitment throughout the organization. Too much emphasis is put on forcing compliance; too little on earning commitment. Too much energy is put into hammering hard on facts and rational arguments to the exclusion of the dialogue that can transform fear into heartfelt commitment.

2. Lack of success in equipping people with competence, and the organization with capabilities—Even many of the most seasoned executives can count on one hand the times they have been called upon to contribute to a major change initiative. Executing a new strategy calls for significant attention to building the organizational capability and individual competence to lead and manage change. Band-‐Aid approaches—required reading of an HBR article, a one-‐day seminar, or a CEO webcast—will not suffice here.

Even if clear and committed, the people expected to lead the change cannot succeed if they are depending on an outdated organizational design, and lack sufficient skills and experience to lead and manage change confidently. The resulting uncertainty among key managers drains the energy of those who look to them for leadership.

3. Lack of focus on sustaining change—You can’t declare victory at the starting line or tell people they’ll be running a sprint when the finish line is 26 miles away. The temptation for leaders to return to habits that work during stable operation is strong, and doing this too soon will snuff out the fragile early attempts at the new way, and poison any glimmers of ownership among key people. At the same time, as the change moves past the middle stage, lack of toughness in rooting out people and processes that are in the way will destroy momentum.

Leading and managing change is very different than running the business. Pulling off a significant change requires first that leaders—especially more senior leaders—clear 25 to 35 percent of their time for leading and managing change.

This reprioritization immediately raises the question: If the leaders of a change in the business spend big chunks of their time aligning, equipping, and sustaining, who is going to keep the existing business running as the change occurs? Something we have learned to emphasize with leaders early and often is the need to give away some of their “day job” at the outset. This has a dual benefit: first, it frees senior leaders to focus on the change, and second, it builds leadership bench strength.

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1 . Al i gn : Creat ing C la r i t y and Commitment Alignment includes both clarity and commitment. Clarity without commitment gives you informed resistance. Commitment without clarity gives you blind loyalty. The work of alignment decreases across the change, but never ends. Creating alignment also includes repeated two-‐way conversation to translate the strategic plan into action at successively increasing levels of specificity to every person, their unit, and the company as a whole. Keeping these three things in mind will help you stay the course:

• Effective communication is not efficient—Count on having to repeat your message several times. Why? At least two reasons. You don’t yet communicate with perfect clarity or in a way your listener can hear. Second, your listener will hear what they want to, even if they listen well.

• Be prepared to re-‐align people weeks and months into the change—When people finally understand what the strategy really means to them, you are going to hear something like “I didn’t know that’s what this means to me. I am not on board.”

Be aware that changing habits takes time—encourage even the smallest signs of people doing things in the new way.

At the early stage of a change initiative, the work of alignment can include any and all of the top team listening to final input from key stakeholders inside and outside the organization, making the few big choices needed at the outset, and holding the first meetings to engage the organization in conversation about the change.

At the middle stage, alignment becomes the work of translating the strategy into increasingly detailed answers to these questions: “What does it mean to me?” and “What does it mean to us?” Here the first instances of “Oh, well, if that’s what this means, then I’m not so sure.” begin appearing and must be engaged. And, at this stage, effective change leaders begin to widen the circle of communication to include other groups inside and outside the company.

At the late stage of the change, alignment is a continuous reinforcement of the key aspects of the strategy, thus ensuring new employees consistently hear the right messages. However, the majority of late-‐stage alignment is the work of aligning customers, suppliers, joint venture partners and other outside groups with the new direction.

P U R P O S E F U L A N D E N G A G I N G C O N V E R S A T I O N S

Skillfully having the conversations that change requires is at the core of leading and managing change. Here are three proven techniques for conversation that leaders can productively apply across the stages of Equip, Align and Sustain to engage and persuade others effectively throughout the change journey.

n Asking better questions—Communicating to lead change is more about asking the right questions than delivering the right speech. Open-ended questions, of course, are more effective than closed-ended, yes or no inquiries. But the most fruitful “high-gain” questions engage the participant’s imagination. Example: “Imagine our situation a year from now, once these changes have been implemented. Why do you think it will have worked so well? What will our customers experience then?”

n Framing and re-framing—Successful leaders help others see each situation in the most truthful yet positive light. Here’s a common example. If someone objects to a new role in a restructured organization, they may be “framing” their new role as a path to less power. If you listen carefully and understand the person’s “frame,” you can look for an opportunity to “re-frame” it as a decision that will free the person up to use their unique skills more effectively in a position of greater responsibility.

n Giving and receiving feedback—Change leaders and their teams encounter both setbacks and successes on their journey. The ability to deliver difficult messages as learning opportunities and to acknowledge individual accomplishments in ways that motivate the larger team is a powerful asset. Leaders typically underachieve when giving feedback; it’s overly negative, insufficiently specific to be useful, and delivered not nearly enough. Effective feedback touches on observation, impact, and consequences. For example: “The enthusiasm and facts you brought to that presentation inspired everyone in the room. Imagine if everyone approached those kinds of assignments the way you did. Could you offer to give your colleagues some detail about just how you pulled that presentation together? Sessions like those are really positioning you as a leader.”


2 . Equ ip : C los ing the Gaps Between What We Shou ld Do and What We Can Do Today The purpose of the second stage—“Equip”—is to close gaps the new strategy has created between your, and your company’s, aspirations for tomorrow, and what can be achieved today.

As alignment increases, people become willing to go to the new place, and to be part of the required re-‐tooling and re-‐engineering of the structures, processes, and policies of the organization. As individuals, they also become concerned about their own skillset gaps and their ability to survive, never mind prosper, in the world of the new strategy. They may be excited or concerned about the change in behavior required by the new culture. Whether leaders or individual contributors, they now become more willing to invest time in the learning and organizational re-‐tooling they and others need.

That said, when it comes to the competence that people need to achieve a new strategy, we have found that the leadership group, however it is defined, must be the first to acquire a toolkit for leading and managing change. In addition, a mindset of curiosity, patience, passion, empathy, and tough-‐minded determination is required. After years of trial and error and increasing success, we believe this mindset has three essential components:

1. Recognizing that the distinction between leading and managing is less about optimizing scarce resources within a known business model (managing), and more about getting people to follow to a place they have never been before (leading).

2. Accepting that everyone has three choices in the thousands of conversations that lie ahead—to fight, to flee, or to engage. When in doubt, engage.

3. Embracing specific skills that are required to stay engaged in conversation with those they lead—to keep others from fighting or fleeing, to increase and cement their alignment, and to use the full power of all their people (see sidebar, page 5).

Danger: if any of these seem obvious, elementary, or skills relatively senior leaders would have acquired years ago, then prepare to be surprised. Leadership of change fails not because leaders cannot practice advanced and sophisticated analytic and strategic thinking, but because they cannot demonstrate the fundamentals of engaging another person in a way that results in the other person following them with determination to an unfamiliar place.

By ensuring leaders acquire and apply these individual competencies first, while helping others get on board, they show others what it looks like when someone is learning to do something new, and that it’s not just okay to be imperfect. If you aren’t making mistakes during a change, you aren’t risking enough.

The remainder of “Equip” is the action required to understand, plan, and implement shifts in two areas: 1) the rest of the company’s talent, and 2) the wiring of the formal and informal organization itself. As to talent, we will not go into detail here. Many executives are experienced in choosing and implementing necessary shifts in the workforce and their redefined competence. What is “strategic” competence has been redefined, and that fact affects every talent process, from recruiting to development. (For additional detail, we recommend, “Ten Workforce Planning Practices that Leading Companies Use to Their Competitive Advantage.”)

As to the formal and informal organization, current clients of ours are addressing such issues as:

• The definition of and consequences associated with acceptable daily behavior.


• Governance and decision rights and the way work is done, particularly across organizations.

• The division of work among full-‐time, individual contractor, and significant external providers.

• Sales coverage, pricing, and incentive models.

• Process and role changes to shift from an organization that is national to one that is global enough to provide “follow-‐the-‐sun” service to its clients.

• Shifting from a low-‐value, transaction processing model to a value-‐creating service provider.

In our clients’ experience, during the early stages of “Equip” the leadership team is comparing the organization and its talent to the strategy, establishing the size and importance of the gaps created by a different strategy, and conceiving, triaging, staffing, phasing, funding, and launching the initiatives required to close the gaps.

In the middle stages, initiatives are underway, and the extra work is beginning to take its toll, as leaders further down in the organization feel the additional load above and beyond their day jobs. In addition, in the middle stage, designs are approved for implementation, and suddenly conversations shift from “I’m on board!” to “Oh, I didn’t know you meant that.”

In the later stages of the implementation of a new strategy, those leading the “Equip” initiatives face the fact that many of the original plans for accelerating the development of new competence, and the designs for the new organization that sounded so good at the time, are not fulfilling their promise. A second effort is needed, or people will return to the original ways of getting things done.

CASE STUDY : Equ ipp ing 125 New Change Leade rs to E xp l a in the Change

Here is how one company undergoing an organizational overhaul helped its people be more adept at leading and managing change. One hundred and twenty-‐five people needed to be clear and motivating in “explaining the change” in conversations with hundreds of their direct reports whose support was needed to execute a new strategy.

Six distinct elements are important in explaining any change:

1. What “it” is. What you are asking people to do, and not do. 2. Why the change is important and why the consequences of business-‐as-‐usual are unacceptable. 3. Where we are going, how we will get there, and what could be in it for you. 4. What I’m sure of, what I’m not, and how we will fill in the blanks together. 5. What you can expect from me/us and what I need from you. 6. Next steps and how you will play a part.

Simply “telling” people how to explain change is insufficient. A multi-‐pronged approach is required to embed this new leadership competence within the team, including:

• Formal training, including practice in simulated situations taken from their business reality;

• Regularly scheduled global conference calls where leaders tell stories and ask for advice from their peers about how to be even more effective in explaining the change;

• As the change progresses, leaders are required to teach this new competency to their peers, and ultimately the managers who work for them, so that those people are also effective in explaining the change.

• Surveying the entire workforce to measure the actual alignment being achieved, and taking actions required to improve alignment where necessary.


3 . Susta in : Mak ing Change S t i ck How do successful leaders sustain momentum during times of change? The foundation for sustainability is laid in the early stages, when leaders agree on what success looks like in all areas of the change. This clarity is needed to mark changes in financial, customer, and employee outcomes. It is also needed to see, understand, act on, and learn from both the changes in formal mechanisms such as redesigned processes, and shifts in the stream of daily behavior and decisions that make up the informal organization. No surprise here, formal metrics and the regular forums to consider, interpret, and act on them are needed.

Just as, if not more important, however, are the countless informal moments among people where leaders can—if they are not careful—avoid issues of underperformance, tolerate wasteful practices and structures, move too fast to take time to praise first efforts in new ways, or worse, extinguish the fragile beginnings of self-‐confidence in the new world.

Instead, leaders can stop, look a team or a person in the eyes, and have a conversation that makes them stand up straighter and smile, change their ways, or—in some cases—start to consider moving on to another place to work.

The essence of these leadership actions in sustaining a change is a difficult but powerful combination of 1) encouraging well-‐meaning and imperfect efforts by people moving in the new direction, and 2) especially as everyone enters the later stages of the change, pulling no punches with those who can do what’s needed, but won’t.

Incidentally, that’s one half of “sustaining” leadership action. The other half is that effective leaders treat processes, structures and policies just as decisively as they do people, based on whether something is helping or hindering the change. Our clients have learned that leaving what isn’t working in place—whether a person or a process—poisons progress and demotivates those making good-‐faith efforts in the new direction.

W H A T E F F E C T I V E C H A N G E L E A D E R S K N O W A B O U T T H E E M O T I O N A L J O U R N E Y F R O M “ H E R E ” T O “ T H E R E ”

Laced through every day of a significant change for every person in the organization, starting with you, is a predictable emotional journey on a tightrope across a chasm of certain loss and uncertain gain. Effective leaders understand that change creates some internal combination of fear and excitement, and threatens each person’s ability to succeed.

Change creates three kinds of gaps, each of which, fortunately, can be understood and addressed: 1. The skills required to succeed; capabilities that give people pride in what they know and know how

to do. 2. The personal network of others through which everyone gets things done and gets a sense of

belonging and support. 3. The power and influence each person feels, both formally (their title), and informally (what

respect, regard, importance, and authority others place on their opinions and decisions). In the worst case, a person loses sleep, certain that the change will make their skills obsolete and put them in a new job where they don’t know and trust people well enough to get anything done, where no one will care about them, and where their opinions won’t count. They may even fear that they won’t count at all. In the best case, a person is excited because they imagine they will finally be able to do the best work of their career, join a group of people they like and respect, and be heard, honored, and even followed. In short, their contributions will count. Of course, each person will really be somewhere between the worst and best case, and effective leaders do the work required to understand each person’s situation, and show them a path forward that can work for that individual. This is not about coddling—the effective leader of change points out the path, offers support and insists that each person takes ownership of his or her own journey.


Conc lus ion No two major change efforts are ever exactly alike, even within the same organization. Going in, a leader never fully knows the risks ahead, or how and when priorities will shift over the life of the journey. However, what is certain is that successfully executing new strategic initiatives in any organization demands leaders who are adept at leading and managing change. In summary, before undertaking major change, ask three fundamental questions:

1. How will we create the necessary alignment around our new goals and what it will take to achieve them?

2. How will we equip the organization and its people with the capabilities to operate in the new way, and how will our leaders learn the skills required to get them there?

3. How will we ensure that our peoples’ efforts will be sustained until we attain a more durable state in the new world we want?

Once you and your team can definitively answer these questions, you have dramatically increased the chances that you will look back on your journey with pride, and will be even more open to further strategic change, knowing next time will be even better.

Austin § Brussels § Chicago § Dublin § New York § Washington, D.C. © 2014 Axiom Consulting Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

About Ax iom Consu l t ing Pa r tne rs

At Axiom Consulting Partners we work side-‐by-‐side with leaders to deliver pragmatic solutions that drive results. Our services help clients clarify strategy, focus on the highest priority sources of value and align their capabilities, processes and people to deliver sustainable, profitable growth. We always look at a client’s challenges through the lenses of business strategy, organization design and talent management–it’s why they choose us over firms that operate in just one of these disciplines.

To learn more visit www.axiomcp.com

About the Authors

ALLAN ACKERMAN, an Axiom partner, works alongside client executives to design and implement strategies that create a competitive advantage. In many cases, he helps clients develop the specific organizational design and leadership skills needed to achieve permanent improvement in results. Over the course of his 30-‐year consulting career, Allan has led projects and advised executives in a range of industries across Europe and the Americas, serving both large global firms and smaller rapidly growing organizations in the consumer, industrial, technology and higher education sectors. To reach Allan by phone call 312.202.3005 or via email to [email protected].

PAUL DINAN works with leaders to achieve their strategic and operational goals by helping to clarify strategic direction, build leadership and organization alignment, lead large-‐scale change, and enhance execution capability. Over the last 15 years Paul has partnered with diverse organizations in the public, private, and government sectors. And having worked extensively in Europe, the United States, and Asia, Paul brings unique insight into the challenges and opportunities facing international organizations. To reach Paul by phone call 312.202.3026 or via email to [email protected].

DONALD H. RUSE brings over 30 years of experience and insight to helping C-‐level executives and global organizations align their strategy, organization, talent, and culture to achieve desired growth and profit. Don has developed and implemented corporate strategies, organization redesigns, business process restructuring, and culture transformation initiatives for clients across the globe, utilizing a blend of consultant and client teams who made data-‐driven, collaborative decisions that led to significant operating improvements. Don’s global experience is extensive having spent considerable time working in Asia (China, Japan, India, Taiwan), EMEA (UK, Germany, France, Netherlands) and North America (US, Canada, Mexico).To reach Don by phone call 512.531.9205 or via email to [email protected].

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