When significant change needs to happen in an organisation, a big question to address is how to involve the middle management.  Transformation models will be on a spectrum ranging from a central push to a divisional pull.  A centralised effort would have the advantage of defining a common transformation scope, putting together a comprehensive solution, building an integrated plan, formulating a consistent communication and progressing at pace, at least initially.  Yet, because of its reliance on external support to make things happen, such an approach would bypass line management at the risk of either threatening the sustainability of the changes or weakening the position of line managers in the long run. Moreover, the divisional tolerance for central initiatives has to be gauged as it could derail any well-meaning effort. 


Turning the approach on its head, a collaborative model would bring commitment from all corners of the organisation, and leave the second and third layers of management in charge of the narrative for the change and the realisation of its benefits.  However, such an approach presents the drawback of different speeds and courses across the organisation, multiple solution definitions, unmatched levels of ambition, and the risk of slow incremental progress.  It can also be daunting for managers to take charge of their remit’s transformation as a side activity to their day job. 


Where should you start?  Much will hinge on the corporate culture in your organisation and the related ability of your middle management to lead change.  As often, it is sensible to consider combining the two extremes and only keep their respective upsides.  The diagnostic of a problem and the definition of its solution could be shared across the organisation, while the deployment would remain local. 
The ability to generate a cross-divisional solution will always be preferable to local specific fixes.  That common approach requires a significant contribution from all parts of the organisation to reflect the needs for change and create commitment to the solution.  In the end, the recommendation should define expectations of outcome, and tools to achieve them, shaped in a framework that can be applied to all parts of the business.  The local ownership of an implementation would then defy most operational challenges, at a rhythm reflecting the divisional ability to commit to change. In all instances, facilitation should be the only central contribution. 


Finally, some change enablers should be pooled centrally to maintain the transformation pace, like a PMO to act as a broker of current and relevant information between the transformation teams and the governance structures in place, common core activities requested for the overall success of the  transformation, or a challenge of the divisional ambitions when required. 

So, when you consider launching an ambitious transformation of your organisation, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions to ensure that you mobilise properly your middle management:

1. How would you orchestrate the transformation?  Who would be accountable for its success?
   
2. What is the ability of your middle managers to lead change?  What kind of support would they need to be successful?
3. What role should the management team play to enable a local implementation to be successful?
   

It is striking to observe how asymmetrically set up reward systems can be.  In spite of the deep impact they have on how management teams acknowledge risks and adjust for them, the remuneration systems seem to be only designed to capture the upside of business performance.  Anything deviating from a full set of objectives will create winners and losers within the management team.


In a way, executives know that being in charge is a lonely and transient job.  In the race to the top, people see each chapter of their corporate life as another opportunity to assert their claim for higher responsibilities.  If personal interests are best served with decisions that favour their part of the organisation at the expenses of the whole, some might see such steps as a convenient option, even if it weakens the cohesion of the management team. 


Yet, a lack of cohesion at the management team level will produce all sorts of strains across the organisation.  Who has not seen a centralised procurement control identifying low-cost global outsourcing partners at the expense of operational flexibility at the plants, cost cutting in repair and maintenance driving high levels of customer dissatisfaction, finance keeping costs under control by starving product development initiatives, or sales contracts impossible to deliver at profit?  Quite soon, these diverging agendas will clash and members of staff in the different functions will lose the goodwill towards colleagues from the opposite faction.  Where processes worked through common sense approach, things will start to grip and productivity to drop.


Developing a team from a set of direct reports is therefore a stern challenge for a CEO.  It entails managing the tensions between the different functions to avoid situations where zero-sum games are at play.  For that purpose, the members of the management team must be aware of the impact their function has on others, what their interfaces and interdependencies are, and how these can be worked at together rather than in isolation.  Risks linked to these interdependencies can then be factored into what the management team wants to focus on, and how it will achieve it.  Only then will a reward system align agendas and better support a meritocracy across the organisation.


So, when you think about how your organisation deals with conflicting internal objectives, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. Are friction points between functions discussed and resolved at the management team level?
2. How well documented are the trade-offs behind decisions to follow a given direction?
3. Are these trade-offs explained to staff as part of their objective setting?

Many voices can be heard telling how to successfully crank transformations.  Their contradictory insights can be confusing.   Top-down approach or bottom-up initiatives, undisputable business case or charismatic leadership, competing initiatives or razor-sharp focus; all have got their merits and examples abound to illustrate how any of these approaches has brought success in transforming a business.  Yet, something else is at play; something that is easier to notice when absent, that turns intentions into reality and plans into implementations.  Commitment.   

When circumstances force an organisation to change, it can be tricky to acknowledge what the right thing is for the greater good.  Vested interests can seem threatened, former internal tensions can resurface, or people might not feel the pain and ignore signals as mere noise.  As decisions are taken to move forward, people will have to commit and deliver.  The quality of their commitment will depend on their ability to make the choice to commit.  Sure, people can fulfil a task because of an implied threat if they do not, but coercing people does not lift their performance.  It just ensures compliance.  The challenge in leading a transformation turns then into ensuring that people across the organisation have an opportunity to choose to commit before they are allocated to a task.

That opportunity will naturally be offered to members of the management team.  Reaching consent could be more challenging than ensuring commitment, even if support for the transformation is revisited periodically in light of progress.  After all, a management team is geared to reach decisions and stick to them.  As the need for commitment move down the chain of command, ways to manufacture choices become more challenging.  The communication about change will already have defined what needs addressing and where the organisation is expected to go.  It is still possible to define space for people to choose how they would go about it.  Offering such freedom can sound counterproductive, but this would only be true for a short while, as visible progress achieved by committed peers should force doubters to reconsider their involvement.  This is not advocating for a corporate democracy, where every staff’s view on a change can help or hinder its progress.  Rather, the aim is to seek full commitment by establishing a culture of straightforwardness and trustworthiness.

So, when the time comes to revisit the way changes are implemented, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. What track record do we have in successfully implementing change in our organisation?
   
2. How do we approach staff impacted by a transformation?  Do we look for collaboration or for compliance?
   
3. Does our culture value being straightforward and trustworthy?
   

The difference between corporate intent and implementation often boils down to capability gaps.  Many strategies are stillborn because the distance between blue sky thinking and tangible achievements is too big.  It is not that leadership teams are not aware of these gaps; more that they choose to ignore them.  Yet, when asking staff in an organisation with a poor track record of implementing its strategy, what will come out is a sober analysis of what was required to get over the line with these aborted initiatives.  So, why is it that organisations tend not to tap into this pool of talent to achieve success?

There are many ways to influence people and get things done, and they all boil down to four capabilities: the ability to create a vision, to convince and mobilise others, to control how they effectively deliver on their commitment, and to trust people.  Of these four, trust is the most powerful, and the most difficult to unleash.  It is possible to hone visionary skills, to fine tune ways to beat the drum, or to develop unintrusive checks and controls.  All the focus there is on improving personal leadership skills.  The major hurdle to trusting people is that it brings uncertainty about the response staff would have to unexpected problems.

Yet, it is through the test of difficult decisions that people can develop their judgment and adjust their thinking.  The amount of preparation required to coach staff cannot be underestimated, and the temptations to revert to command and control have to be resisted many times over.  Give your staff enough time to make mistakes and you will develop sooner than you think capabilities that were only latent.  From that point on, the nature of information exchange will evolve profoundly.  As staff become autonomous decision makers, line managers need to shift from giving instructions and checking their execution to sharing wider corporate information and provide their staff with the context in which their prospective decisions need to be taken.  With teams made of thinkers and decision makers, expect more challenging discussions about objectives and the art of the possible, instead of relying on the input of a manager effectively acting as a bottleneck.
 
So, when you assess the ability of your organisation to embark on new challenges, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. How do you take decisions?  Are there bottlenecks caused by excessive controls?
2. What is your tolerance to failure?  Is management meddling with people's work?
3. What is the level of engagement of staff?  Do leaders surround themselves with cheerleaders? Are there pockets of high attrition?

Despite huge efforts to improve operational processes over the past 20 years, critically important management processes are left at the discretion of individual managers, who are expected to define them themselves. Without consistent management practices, an organisation will evolve sub-optimal methods for making and executing decisions in operational processes like sales, finance and operations. Often, this results in an increased number of meetings that onerously consolidate information for upward consumption, with little useful direction or feedback in return.
 
Perversely, more meetings often weaken the speed and quality of decision-making, and therefore operational process performance. As more ad-hoc meetings are called in reaction to problems, decisions are no longer taken at the right level in the organisation. Executives call all-hands gatherings to understand the underlying issues and take quick action. In doing so, they are likely to instigate decisions for which they lack the required expertise. Conversely, people with the right expertise will feel demoted and will duck their responsibilities by systematically delegating decisions upward.
 
Ad-hoc meetings are also inefficient. Without proper structure, they produce decisions of inferior quality. Meeting notes are unlikely to be captured, causing a loss of the decisions’ rationale and eliminating a mean to hold people accountable for agreed actions in subsequent meetings.
 
Few firms or leaders anticipate emerging complexity and new management requirements, to put the right management control processes in place and avoid the upward delegation trap. This is precisely what a management control cycle (MCC) brings, through a precisely designed hierarchy of meetings with clearly understood frequencies, structured agendas and carefully selected attendees. During MCC meetings, issues are discussed by those closest to them, with the skills, competence and authority to make the right decisions. KPIs supporting the meetings allow participants to quickly spot issues, identify problem root causes, and timely implement fixes.
 
A Management Control Cycle is built on three principles. First, meetings have a scope such that attendees are accountable for all items discussed and resulting actions are logically allocated. Second, the MCC allows escalation of decisions only for justified exceptions, when remedial actions are not delivering the expected results. Third, the MCC’s rhythm of regular follow-up prevents issues from festering or going undetected. Meetings on operational issues are the most frequent. Quick feedback loops validate actions and demonstrate control on issues before they need to be escalated.
 
Management Control Cycles are often set-up with three distinct layers, each with a remit of increasing scope. In this way, the mid-level MCC acts as a buffer between operationally driven meetings involving front-line managers and strategically oriented meetings involving executives. Adding more layers slows down decision-making, while reducing to two levels risks micro-management and excessive escalation.
 
Putting efficient management processes in place is not easy. In the absence of established standards, managers will typically resist change. Yet, best practice management processes exist in each function, and they are best implemented with a bottom-up approach, combining agreed procedures, KPIs, templates and rituals to shift management behaviour. For those organisations ready to rise to the challenge, and transform their management processes, the MCC is a powerful lever to shift performance and anchor one of the last sustainable competitive advantages: the ability to collectively execute and move fast.

So, when you begin to have the sense that your business lacks traction in taking and implementing decisions, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. How many members of the management team are working under their paygrade?
2. How often are all-hands-on-deck meetings organised to address crises?
3. How many internal meetings do members of the management team attend?  What is the quality of these meetings’ outcome?

When an organisation faces difficult times, many wish to see sales pick up as a way to buy the organisation time to address its other problems.  While it cannot be done in isolation, an attempt to profitably lift sales figures is hard to sustain, as it means selling more and, more importantly, selling better.
 
Many businesses find themselves trapped in the delivery of long-term contracts with thinner and thinner margins as successive contract revisions have dented the profitability of the original agreement.  It can be partly explained by the change of actors around the table, with sales people being swapped for operational delivery managers on one hand, and the supplier relationship remaining with purchasing staff on the customer side.  As a consequence, there is no match of commercial capabilities between the two parties, and it becomes very easy to pick on itemised topics, restricting the discussion to unit cost and volumes.  A way to slow the margin erosion over the lifespan of a contract is to start from a higher point than what would be attained with a cost-plus model.  The trouble of value pricing is that it takes much more effort to sell, and it brings the fear of being outbid on price. 
 
Selling for value rests on a deep understanding of how your products are generating value for your potential customer.  The challenge is to identify the pain points of your potential customers and to quantify them.  Everyone will have a different narrative, and figuring it out has become easier with the wide range of data publicly available.  Beyond fact finding, a granular quantification of what is at stake requires a strong business acumen and an understanding of what the currency is for a specific client.
If you client has a high churn rate of its customers, and needs a strong marketing presence to even maintain market share, the value you can offer will be in your speed of service rather than in its real cost.  You will help your client to be more responsive to its customer base, which can become a competitive advantage and relax the need to spend as much in marketing.  If your client does not understand well enough your product and rely heavily on it to create its customer experience, you can offer services to bridge that capability gap. 
 
Aware of these pain points, the art of selling for value is to craft a solution together with the customer.   It takes the ability to drive the conversation in order to mutually agree what the real problem is, how this could be addressed, and why a commonly defined solution would fit with your delivery capabilities.  At some point during the conversation, the framing of the solution and its matching with your delivery capabilities will be owned by your customer, and then – but only then – time is on your side.  Strengthened by the belief that its specific issue can be addressed, the customer will be ready to buy from you a solution that is uniquely crafted and therefore cannot be replicated.
 
So, when you begin to moan the low profitability your current sales practices are generating, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. Do sales mostly happen through tenders or are there instances when you do not face competition?
2. What depth of understanding have your sales reps of the business challenges faced by their prospects?  How is it documented?
3. How commercially minded are your sales reps when framing the discussion about your offering?
   

The struggle to see an implementation through is a daunting task.  Attempts to change how people work and interact call for much more than a refresh of their operating procedures, or even the definition of a new rationale for their connectedness to the rest of the organisation.  Pretty much all implementation projects look like a failure midway through, as what they have achieved is too incremental and not transformational enough.

This implementation black hole is fuelled by a shortage of transformation capabilities in many organisations.  It is hard to strike a right balance between the executive sponsorship and the transactional content that will make a transformation look credible in the eyes of the majority of players.  Legislating from the top has little mileage lower in the ranks if it is not anchored in meaningful activities for all people involved, expressed in ways that resonate with their view of their world.  It is not enough to tell an organisation what it needs to change.  Staff have to be told exactly how their daily activities will be impacted.  Too much high profile support without in-depth coherence of activities and interfaces will raise cynicism like a wildfire.  Alternatively, too many specifics about particular functions will disqualify the change in the eyes of other parts of the organisation and limit the power of its executive sponsorship.

A lot of success can be achieved by testing new ways of working, under the auspices of good sponsorship.  Call it sandpits, trials or pilots, as long as they bring a protected environment of restricted scale, where methods can be adjusted fast, and where hiccups is accepted as long as it quickly leads to significant step changes in output.  The sponsor must acknowledge that obstacles and difficulties are the reward, as much as the final outcome.  After a few iterations, the organisation will find itself with completely different ways of doing things.  As they are proof of concept, these pilots rely on low-cost solutions and manual management; looking at scalability will come later.  Staff involved in these trials can then act as trainers for an enterprise-wide roll-out, something that can happen very quickly, with lower risks for the going concern than with a big bang approach.

Such an approach can only work if the pilots demonstrably address the problem they were set up to solve.  The issue had to be serious enough, and the step change in performance indisputable.  As pilots are asking for staff to transform their ways of working on top of keeping delivering their contribution, they clearly bring an additional workload.  Only very motivated and very apt staff should therefore be considered for such an approach, and their contribution should be acknowledged in front of the entire organisation when time comes to celebrate success.

So, when the time comes to address issues in your ways of working, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. What track record do we have in successfully implementing change in our organisation?
2. How comfortable are we with failure as a way to learn and develop better working solutions?
3. Have we got movers and shakers spread across the organisation to support a piloting approach?

When a business needs to change its ways of working, what often delays the decision to do so is the inability of the executive to drive that transformation.  Reaching the top of the pyramid, how flat it might be, requires sound functional excellence.  The trouble is that becoming an accomplished administrator and being a change leader are at opposite ends of the managerial spectrum.  When a well-oiled organisation is confronted with step-changes in its activities, genuine leadership qualities to motivate and win hearts and minds are a real gap.

Enters external help stage left.  There is an array of external solutions to pick from, which focus on the different elements of the transformation, from its case for action, to its plan of execution and finally to its implementation.  The first two steps are relatively easy to get from external support, their timeframe depending on the level of ambiguity with which the executive is ready to acknowledge the need to change and give the implementation a green light. 

All it takes then is a safe pair of hands to drive the implementation and get the change nested.  This is where consulting support is likely to fail, as the transformation is left to client’s staff with little experience of operating at an enterprise level.  Interims have an edge as they can use their past transformation experience throughout the implementation.  Working as a chief-of-staff with the executive, a freelance can nurse the transformation with the management team from beginning to end, acting as a beacon for the change, coaching the executive to keep the right mindset, and bringing meaningful content to all interventions across the organisation.  By adding a change professional to the management team for the duration of the transformation, the skillset is moved slightly towards the change end of the spectrum.  When the transformation has truly happened, the chief-of-staff can take a bow and leave the business behind in better shape, with a management team energised for having gone through the change together.

So, when you begin to have the sense that your business reaches a crossroad, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. How much time has the organisation on its hands before its current ways of working start impairing its success?
2. Has the executive team the cohesion and the bandwidth to drive the transformation that looms?
3. Is it possible to free a member of staff capable of framing and implementing this initiative?
   

It is when you think that change has become unstoppable that it will face its most acute resistance.  Picture this.  You have realised that something in your business was not quite right anymore.  After a period of sluggish performance, you have come to admit that your business was not fit for survival and have thrown a lot of effort into analysing and understanding what needed fixing and how to do it.  You even had your entire management team to acknowledge that the path for transformation was sound and would promptly lead to recovery.  Yet, three months after putting changes in place, no sign of improvement is visible.  What could have gone wrong? 
 
Leaving aside a lack of preparedness of the transformation, one of the most likely pitfalls would be a unilateral communication.  Most of the material supporting a transformation is framed in positive terms.  It is all about how the change will turn the organisation into a better one, and how there can only be upsides to consider.  This viewpoint reflects the beliefs of the project team and its sponsor, who have battled sceptics in and around the boardroom and have won the argument.  However, such content will only resonate with staff who are easily sold on the merits of the change, because they either benefit from it or are not affected by it.  For all people having something to lose from the transformation, a reinforcing message will generate passive resistance in the hope that this transformation is not there to stay.
 
In addressing this problem, acknowledging that staff in the organisation have different goals, beliefs and perceptions linked to their work is a first step.  Identifying how the change will impact whom is a second.  And developing narratives to address legitimate concerns about specific interests is a third.  It requires the agility to reframe the message in order to mitigate the fears caused by the change.  These fears can be wide-ranging, going from responsibilities of a new role to new tools and techniques to master, to changes in reporting lines, and redundancies of colleagues.  Staff are unlikely to tune in on a brainwashing communication that leaves them with more questions than answers.  As a collateral, the management will not be fully trusted and all stops will not be pulled for the transformation to be a success.
 
So, when you plan to communicate about things that are about to change in your organisation, ask yourself the following questions to ensure that your messaging will reach all parties with the desired impact:

1. What are the constituents of your organisation?  How will the change affect them?
2. What is their currency?  How should you express the merits of the transformation to gain them over?
3. Are there mechanisms in place to establish a two-way communication between the programme office and the different constituents?
4. Are you able to reframe the message to factor in the reactions from the impacted constituents?