Managing Change: A Playbook for Mid-Level Managers

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

One of the delights of my advisory practice in recent years has been moving beyond doing strategy and positioning work with executive leadership to connect with the teams in the core of the enterprise who get charged to execute on all our bright ideas.  Usually, these workloads take the form of cross-functional initiatives with a team leader drawn from mid-level management.  If no one has been designated as the Single Accountable Leader (SAL), that is always my first item of business.  No SAL, no dice.  Once that role is assigned, however, it is a wild and crazy ride to the finish line, and one I always learn from. 

I have been on enough of these now to propose the following playbook, and I want to dedicate it to SAL’s everywhere, wherever that might be.

Step 1: Start with Why. 

Give a vote of thanks again to Simon Sinek because this is a step we often take for granted, particularly if our first answer is because the boss said to.  That is true enough, just not good enough.  If you are to engage and enlist the other members of your team, all of whom are going to cope with extra work on their plates thanks to this new initiative, there needs to be a strong motive to do so. 

Here let me suggest using a play I use in my advisory practice called trapped value analysis.  The mission of a cross-functional initiative typically is to create or reengineer a process that releases value trapped by the current status quo.  The goal of the analysis is to review the current state to identify what value is being trapped where and then describe a future state in which it has been released.  The trap might be that customer feedback collected by the customer success team is not being incorporated into the roadmaps of the product team.  Or it might be that marketing-qualified leads are not converting to sales-qualified leads.  Or it might reside in empty shopping carts or aborted log-ins to your website.  The point is, it is not enough just to identify the problem.  You also have to explore its consequences as well.  We know this thing is holding us back, but we also know it is going to take a lot of work to change it, so why bother?  What is the size of the prize?  The team really needs to know if it is really going to care.

Step 2: Get clear about When. 

Most change management projects fail because they run out of steam.  They end, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”  And the reason they do so is because the SAL lost control of time.  There was nothing wrong with the forward plan to get from the present to the future state.  There just was no companion backward plan to get from that future back to now.  Every forward plan, that is, needs a backward plan as a reality check.  The backward plan begins with a commitment to an end date.  When does this change initiative have to be complete in order to fulfill our mission?  Whenever is not an acceptable answer, nor is however long it takes.  Both are preludes to failure. 

Here, you need to borrow a page from the VC playbook.  No funding is given that is not attached to a milestone to be achieved before the funding runs out.  Entrepreneurs have to calculate how much runway that gives them and revise their plans accordingly.  You, as the team leader of this initiative, are an entrepreneur, like it or not.  Face it, if the ELT knew how to get this change done, they would have simply mandated it.  They don’t know.  For that matter, neither do you.  But you do have to get it done, and the sooner, the better because the amount of energy and focus you have at your disposal is finite and consumable.  So set a date, and then build a backward plan that, month by month, shows you where you have to be in order to get to the finish on time.  Oh, and don’t be surprised when your backward plan shows you are already behind schedule.

Step 3: Now that you know why and when, you can worry about What. 

This is the job you and the team have been hired to do.  You must map out the current state, then do the same for the future state, and then build a roadmap to get from one to the other.  It looks and sounds easy, and so it is—until you turn over your first rock.  Trapped value, it turns out, is surrounded by landmines.  Specifically, there is a vast network of dependencies that holds the current state in place, and as soon as you disrupt it in one place, some unintended or unanticipated consequence pops up in another.  Complaints ensue, followed by escalations, which will eventually get resolved, but by then, you’ll have lost a bunch of time and be even further behind than you planned.

Here, you want to take a page from the Agile Developer’s playbook.  You know where you want to get to, but you don’t know exactly how to get there, so you need to run local experiments to either win or learn and, in either case, to iterate quickly.  In this context, failures are data—don’t discard them; learn from them.  The four questions you must always ask of any failure are:

1. What did we think was going to happen?
2. What did happen?
3. What have we learned?
4. What we will do differently now?

You can also take a page from the Crossing the Chasm playbook as well.  At the outset, engage with early adopters, people who are happy to go first and are inspired by your mission and willing to lean in to help make it a reality.  Once you get some traction here, then look for what we call pragmatists in pain.  These are the people who are being held back the most by the value traps in the status quo, the ones who can help you showcase some quick wins by getting to the future state.  Tightly focus on them, and overdeliver if you must to make them a success, as they represent the “head bowling pin” to help you knock down additional use cases on your way to a “tornado” of mass adoption.

Step 4: Get everyone on the same page by clearly articulating How.

You do not want to over-specify here.  The whole point of agile development is to learn as you go.  That said, there is a great playbook for getting people aligned around any quest, one developed by the cofounders of Salesforce, Marc Benioff and Parker Harris.  It’s called V2MOM, and the acronym stands for the following:

• Vision.  This is a crisp articulation of the outcomes you want to achieve and the trapped value you expect it to release.  You will maintain a laser focus on these and only these outcomes.
• Values.  These are the values you and the team will use as True North when it comes time to making critical trade-offs.  You will need these frequently to work through the challenges ahead.
• Methods.  This is a list of the things the team will do to get the job done.  It needs to be comprehensive.  More importantly, the list needs to be stack ranked in priority order.  Socializing the prioritization of this list, and getting everyone’s buy-in on the right priority order, eliminates a host of meetings to settle differences later on.  It is the single greatest accelerator of change you have at your disposal. 
• Obstacles.  This is a “get real” opportunity where you drop all the political correctness and look at what are likely to be the biggest hold-ups.  You don’t need to demonize obstacles.  You just have to get everyone prepared for where they are likely to show up.
• Measures.  These are observable objective data points that you and the team will use to track progress and assess results.  They will also be the basis of your report-outs to upper management. 

Your V2MOM should not be long.  Marc and Parker’s first one fit on the back of a napkin.  Keep yours to one page and it will help everyone on the team fly in formation.

Step 5: Half way through, take a second look at Who. 

You are well into the initiative, and things are progressing, but your gut tells you, not fast enough.  Something is slowing you down.  Except it is not something.  It is someone.  Interestingly, who that may be is not always obvious, but as the team leader, it is your job to figure this out and then take action before it is too late.

Let’s be fair here.  No one on the team trained for this job.  You are all making things up as you go along.  Not everyone can get comfortable with this, and when that happens, there is a natural tendency to slow down.  But time is the single scarcest resource at your disposal, and you cannot afford to wait things out.  Once you know who is creating the hesitation, you can and should connect with them to see if you can get them over the hump.  After all, they are on the team for a reason.  They have expertise and relationships you want and need.  But if that fails, then you must fall back on one of the earliest pieces of mentor advice I ever received: When you can’t change people, change people.

Final Thought

Being a Single Accountable Leader is a ton of work, especially because it sits on top of your day job which, if you have been nominated to be an SAL, is also not small potatoes.  Why would anyone in their right mind ever agree to do it?

Two answers come to mind.  On the practical side, it is a great experience and a fast track for advancing your career.  The work is important, you get visibility with the executive leadership team, and a chance to build cross-functional relationships that will serve you well in the future. 

But the real reason, I hope for your sake, is that you think it would be fun.  Not easy, and not always enjoyable, but fun.  If you don’t think it would be fun, find a way to pass the baton.  But if you do think it might be, go for it.  It’s a game changer.

That’s what I think.  What do you think?

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