High Expectations....of Change

On this ceremonious day (for a few of you out there), I'm left thinking about a recent experience on a digital transformation project I had.

The beginning was wonderful. Big "hooray!" meeting and pulled everyone together with a very sleek and motivating PPT deck. Seemed the upper management team was very engaged and in support of the changes to be made.

Not to say things went downhill fast, but the reality quickly sunk in that the beginning of the change was actually giving up an old way of thinking/doing/managing... and spending. Spending not just dollars, but also how the organization spent its time and spent its energy.

About three months in after the initial afterglow wore off, I remember the team wanting to know more about the phase after this initial 'streamlining' and 'savings' phase. The "reset" phase was well underway, and it was time for growth. The issue was, the growth plan wasn't quite clear, specifically the how of the plan. I found myself thinking that most people in the organization were mistaking a 'plan' for a 'strategy', and that the 'plan' of "grow the business" wasn't really armed with any definition of an over-arching narrative in decision-making, or more importantly a clear framework to determine what not to do as part of the strategy.

What started out as high expectations of change and a motivated "art of the possible" quickly changed to a degree of cynicism and doubt.

What I learned from the expectation setting, lack of change management and approach to the transformation were a few things:

1. Change management isn't an event that happens. It's not a meeting, and it's not a series of meetings or messages. It's a change in thinking, in communication, in partnership, and in execution... it's sustained, and everyone's responsibility, not just a 'Transformation Office'.
2. Plans aren't Strategies, and vice-versa. A plan is a series of steps. A strategy is an over-arching framework for achieving an end goal. Objectives that lack measurable and actionable methods are useless. "Grow AOV by 10%" is the objective, so there have to be Key-Results to achieving that. My hot-take is that most people don't understand OKRs and substitute them for goal-setting and don't put in the effort to really think them through.
3. Not everyone is cut out to lead or be led. I saw a lot of mistakes, and I made a few of them as a leader of a team, in picking the people I had already as leaders of the change vs. spending the time to find the right people (even if they were not yet in the organization). I think the pace of wanting the change to happen overrode the need to be intentional about the changes. In short, doing the change seemed more valuable than actually seeing a change in thinking / in performance / in collaboration.
4. Leading a transformation effort is a full-time job. The common miss is that, outside of a 'Transformation Office' or some of the PMO team, leaders do not set clear expectations on the degree of and % of the time needed by Directors, VPs and above to simply be there for the team. At the onset, I did not put enough time in for my team, and part of that reason was that the pace of the transformation at times seemed more important than whether we were actually achieving the goals (more than just $$'s saved).

What I'll leave you with is that the difference in expectation vs. reality is in part what leads to a high degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and in the case of a large-scale transformation having unclear and lofty expectations is a disaster for the company and most importantly for the team & culture.