The People Side of Business Transformation

Featuring: Fred Jewell and Tracy Reznik

Today we’re talking about the people side of business transformation, which is the cornerstone of any successful transformation effort. To discuss what works and what doesn’t, we’re joined by Fred Jewell, senior strategic advisor at Jabian Consulting, and author of the people strategies book “We Can’t Do It Alone.” We’re also joined by Tracy Reznik, director and human capital lead at Jabian Consulting.

Robert Amberg:

This is Strategy That Works, where we discuss practical solutions to companies’ most complex challenges. I’m your host, Robert Amberg, Chief Marketing Officer at Jabian Consulting. Let’s dive in.

Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. Today we’re talking about the people side of business transformation, which of course is the cornerstone of any successful transformation effort.

To discuss what works and what doesn’t, we’re joined today by Fred Jewell, senior strategic advisor, Jabian Consulting, and author of the people strategies book titled We Can’t Do It Alone. We’re also joined by Tracy Reznik, a director and human capital lead at Jabian Consulting.

Fred, Tracy, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Fred Jewell:

Thanks for having us.

Tracy Reznik:

Glad to be here.

Robert Amberg:

You bet, all right, so let’s dive right in. When we say the people part of a transition, what are we really talking about?

Tracy Reznik:

We focus on the people part, because it’s the people that transform. Organizations change their operating model, they change their business strategy, but it’s the people that are fulfilling those things. If you don’t focus on the people side, the business won’t change.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah, the habits of everyone in the organization, how they think about their work, how they go about their work every day need to change with any major change within an organization especially.

Robert Amberg:

So it’s kind of like when people say, “Oh, this is a great company.” It’s not actually the company, it’s the people inside the company that are great?

Fred Jewell:

It’s the collection of the individual behaviors that make up what makes a culture and what makes a company great.

Tracy Reznik:

Exactly.

Robert Amberg:

Awesome. So when a company decides to go through transformation, what makes people embrace that?

Fred Jewell:

There’s got to be something in it for them. We hear that all the time, of course, in any big change. But you have to look at what’s driving those people, and what’s important to them. And how what’s important to them aligns to both the change and the culture of the company.

So you need to look at everything from how is it helping me grow in my career, how is it helping me learn new things, develop as an individual, to build the relationships with my coworkers and get that done a little bit better?

How much does it help me make decisions, and control the way that I get to do my work? Those are some of the things that are important to people that need to take into account when you’re looking at any change.

Tracy Reznik:

And it’s not only those individual things for each person, it’s also the collection of the greater “why” of why the company is going through the change, and does each individual identify with that.

Also, is there a purpose? Is there a greater purpose that individuals and collection of individuals can identify with and believe in, so that they want to make their individual changes?

Robert Amberg:

So with regards to the why, can a company successfully transform if they don’t understand their “why”?

Tracy Reznik:

I don’t think so.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah, no, it’s really hard to make a difference and to get people on board with something if they don’t understand the rationale for it, right? And there’s got to be a meaning behind it for them, and for the company.

Tracy Reznik:

And communicating that “why” and the meaning behind the transformation, what the company is looking to achieve by the transformation is so important to communicate early and often, to get the buy-in from the employees. Or else it just takes longer and longer to change.

Robert Amberg:

And you’re talking about the “why” of the transformation, right? If you don’t understand the “why” of the company to begin with, if your employees don’t understand why you’re in business, and you’re going to say, “Oh, we’re going to do this transformation,” it compounds the problem.

Tracy Reznik:

No, it won’t connect.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah, absolutely. And the more those things are aligned with each other, the better. So the why are we doing, why are we a company to begin with, and why do we exist? And then why are we doing this transformation, and how does that align to why we exist? And then, what am I interested in as an individual? What’s my team all about, and how does that align to what the company is all about?

If I can get all those things lined up, you sort of supercharge the energy behind the transformation and make it work. The more you have a disconnect there, the more cynical people get, and it starts to fall apart pretty quickly.

Tracy Reznik:

And it’s more likely that the employees are in it just for a job, not for making their lives better, their coworkers’ lives better, the organization better.

Robert Amberg:

Okay. So one could argue transformation starts much earlier than when someone decides to do a transformation?

Fred Jewell:

Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean I think you’ve got to get it right from the very beginning with a company. It’s really hard to … A transformation is about taking what we’ve been doing at some level in the organization and making it different in some way.

If you try to change at the very top the entire direction of the company, the entire why behind the company, that’s really hard to do, right, without wholesale transformation of everything. You’re looking at different customers, different suppliers, different employees.

So the further you get down in the organization with the transformation it’s a little bit easier, as long as you can align back up to the company. But when you start to look at changing the entire culture, it gets to be really difficult.

Robert Amberg:

What percentage would you … I mean you guys have both seen a fair amount of change efforts as well as transformation efforts. What percentage of the ones that don’t go well would you say are a result of the poor lack of understanding with why?

Tracy Reznik:

Majority of. Definitely high majority of companies that don’t transform well or don’t transform as easily as they could, it’s because either senior leadership team does not know and understand the why, or they’re not able to clearly articulate it and cascade that message down in a way that others can understand the why for them.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah. You got to turn that purpose into sort of the direction that we’re headed, and communicate that in some kind of a strategy, to be able to get people on board with the effort that they’re about to take on.

Tracy Reznik:

It’s all about changing the behaviors of the employees, and you can’t do that without driving their behavior in a different way towards a different purpose.

Robert Amberg:

Okay. So what kind of things cause people to push back and maintain status quo? They don’t want to change.

Tracy Reznik:

The unknown. When a company announces that they want to transform, they want to change, they want to do something different, all of a sudden you don’t know what your role is or what it could be. You’re insecure. Will I even have a job going forward? And so the tendency of all employees, of human nature, is to grab hold of what you do know and hold it as tightly as possible.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah, and then changing the way people work. I used to do things a certain way and now you’re going to make me do it some different way. So that creates some, perhaps, loss of control, some maybe doing things that I don’t know how to do yet. And things that I can’t make decisions on, that I used to be able to make decisions about. Those are also some of the things hit people.

And then, you’re talking about, Tracy, the uncertainty around that. But you also hear about, you’re thinking about the organization structure, right? Who am I going to be working with, right? I’ve got all my friends here that I’ve been working with for years sometimes.

And now you’re going to somehow mess that up, right? Some of us might be here, they might not, or I might be reporting to somebody different than I was before. So all that stuff is important.

And then, if you’re after true transformation, where you’re looking at new parts of the organization and new opportunities for everybody, what does that mean for my own career path? How am I going to fit into that broader picture in a way that’s going to help me grow in my career? And that’s especially important for the younger third of the workforce in looking at their careers overall.

Tracy Reznik:

And taking a hard look at your career and what you want to do to grow, to succeed, is a conversation that we don’t have with ourselves as often enough. And so transformations can also force you to decide what you want out of your career, and whether or not you have a place in the new organization.

Robert Amberg:

So if you find yourself as the one driving the transformation, or responsible for driving the transformation, or one of those, what tools do you have at your disposal to really go attack that?

Fred Jewell:

I think Tracy hit on one at the beginning, really important, and you did too, Rob, with just the purpose, right? Why are we doing this? Get that right, understand what it is that we’re doing and why, and then you move into more of the sort of traditional tools that you might think of from a business perspective that we have to use.

We can create new processes and revise those to make changes happen. We can look at making work a little bit easier with better technology. We could teach people new things, and teach them new skills, so that they can get work done in a different way. So some of the things that you can do.

Tracy Reznik:

The policy one is very important. If you’re transforming to a more innovative, more flexible organization, make sure all of your underlying infrastructure or policies support that.

Tracy Reznik:

So if you want to be flexible, but your employee handbook says that you have no work from home policy, you’re not being that flexible. So even if it’s not enforced, if it’s still written down, you need to take a look and update those things so that they’re in line with the purpose and the vision of where you’re going.

Fred Jewell:

And as you look at the roles that people are playing, you’re going to start to look at what their role descriptions look like, what their career paths look like, like we talked about, what their compensation looks like. All that’s going to be part, has to be part of the equation.

You need to start looking at how are people evaluated in this new environment? If we’re trying to change the organization, but we forgot to change all of our HR processes. So people are being evaluated on the old criteria that used to be really important, but they’re not anymore. So how do we make sure that all that stuff lines up with the goals of the change?

Robert Amberg:

So really, you can have the best laid plans, but it comes back to an engaged workforce, and how you manage that engagement?

Fred Jewell:

Yeah, and it’s, the engagement of the overall workforce in the company is important. But the engagement in the change, in this transformation is also important, right? How much are people behind it? How interested are they in it? What are they getting out of it? How excited are they?

Not everything is going to be great, in any transformation. People are going to lose some things. But they’re also going to gain some things. So where they might be having some uncertainty, like Tracy talked about, maybe there’s new opportunities that they never really thought about from a growth perspective for them that’s going to be really exciting. And that kind of cancels out the negative that comes along with that difficulty in the security piece of things.

Tracy Reznik:

And do they fully understand those growth opportunities, or the new expectations upon them? And something that leaders can do is communicate those. Be very upfront, very transparent about what is needed in the new operating environment. What is needed for the employees to transform. And the more they know, the more likely it is that they will change their behavior and do that.

Robert Amberg:

Both what is needed and what’s also available to them as an opportunity and kind of, colloquially say, paint the picture for them, but?

Tracy Reznik:

Yes.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah, and give them a chance to sort of give you feedback too. One of the tools that we’ve used the past that’s really engaging for people is, instead of just a straight-up town hall, we actually broke it up into smaller chunks and had 25 to 30 people meetings where people would … We’d have a presentation of talking about the transformation, and then we’d have a list of questions.

Are we moving too fast or are we moving too slow? Gotten a lot of feedback, just anecdotally, before these meetings, that things were going too fast, you know. But then other people would be like, “Oh my God, this is taking forever.”

And so we asked people. And when you put that question up in one of the polling tools and show people the results, it was really interesting, because we had a bell curve. We had lots of people saying we’re going too slow, lots of people saying that we’re going too fast, and a lot of people said we’re kind of going just at the right pace.

So that really quieted down the people that were on the fringes, saying, “This is not going great.” Well they’re like, “Okay, maybe it is for everybody else. It’s just me.”

And then that kind of direct feedback and that kind of direct conversation that that forces, it puts leaders at a little bit of a, you got to have leadership kind of coordinating these sort of sessions. But you never know what’s going to come up.

But if you’re wise, clear, you’re on-board with the change as the leader, and you’re willing to be authentic and listen to the feedback the people are going to give you, you can score a lot of points in terms of your authenticity and the respect that people have of what we’re doing, by just being honest and saying, “Well, we don’t know.” Or, “Here’s what we’re doing right now. What do you think? And could it be different?” And that feedback conversation and that communication can be really valuable.

Robert Amberg:

So companies that are going to go through a transformation, is it better to change everything all at once, or just focus on the part you want to transform?

And what I mean by that is, if you’re a leadership team that historically does not communicate proactively, they’re not very transparent, and you’re going to now reinvent your business process or business model and kind of go in a different direction. If you decide, we need to be more transparent, we need to be more open, do you just go full force and do everything all at once and try and transition everything? Or is it better to just take it one step at a time?

Tracy Reznik:

I think it depends. The answers is less whether you do big bang or one change at a time in order to transform over the long term, and more about the commitment of that leadership team to be transparent, to be communicative, to ask for feedback and to act on that feedback.

Whether or not to go big bang or not depends on the why, the purpose, and what they’re actually trying to do. In some cases, I’ve seen clients where it makes sense to go big bang. In others, not so much.

Fred Jewell:

Most of these are such big changes that it takes time. And so, you have to get the leadership team on board first. They have to be getting along. They have to understand what the change is all about. There can’t be any dissension within that team, and if there is, it trickles down and destroys everything.

Tracy Reznik:

It has to be a united front.

Fred Jewell:

So they have to be united at the top, and then from there on down you’ve got to get each layer on board to the change before you can really go for the masses. Because if people don’t see why, it’s gets really, really hard.

Robert Amberg:

So transformation, obviously big topic. It’s not their day-to-day job, this is something additive. So how do you maintain focus during transformation?

Fred Jewell:

It’s a really good question. Because it is, these kinds of changes, most organizations forget that it takes a huge investment to drive the transformation itself. And they think that everybody’s just going to sort of carve out a couple hours a week to go do this. Well, it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way at all.

And so you have to have a team dedicated to making sure that the transformation is on track. And then you have to govern that. There’s got to be a process in place for tracking the plan, what we’re trying to do, measuring the behaviors of the take-up of each step along the way, to know that we’re getting there. And to be able to adjust on the fly.

If you don’t have that team dedicated to it and the governance model in place to make sure that you’re staying on track, things will easily just fall apart.

Because people are going to revert back to what they do every day. They’re going to go back to their operating kind of mode and not their project kind of mode. Because projects, for most people in their roles, are nonexistent, right? They’re just kind of cranking the wheel and doing what they do very well, but they don’t have time to pick up a project. So making sure that you’ve got the people dedicated to that’s key.

Tracy Reznik:

Yeah. Giving leaders and individual contributors the permission to transition and let go of some of their day jobs so they can focus on the transformation is key.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah, pulling people out of their … The key people, the biggest influencers in the organization, are often the best people to take out, despite the fact that they’re usually your best performers in whatever it is that they’re doing. If you really are truly dedicated to the change, you got to show that you’re getting the best people tied into this.

Because if you, typically leaders will ask, “Who can we put on this?” And so if their leadership team is not on-board, they’re going to say, “Well, I’ll give you this person, I’ll give you this person, I’ll give you this person.”

Well those people are not necessarily the A players. They’re going to give the people that are least valuable to them meeting their goals in the current structure.

And so you really need get people on board to the change, and then say, who’s your best? They’re the one that’s going to come do this. As painful as it is for you right now, we’re not going to change without having the best people as part of this.

Tracy Reznik:

And another advantage that comes out of doing that is giving who you may not think of as your A players the chance to prove themselves and give them the stretch assignments so they can grow and develop.

Robert Amberg:

So if you’re a leader, and you have one minute to think about operational needs, or you have one minute to think about the people side of the transformation, what’s your argument to say, you need to focus on the people side?

Tracy Reznik:

You won’t transform if you don’t bring the people along. If the people, if your employees don’t help you drive the organizational changes, the company will stay as is.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah. And the leader of any organization is, if they’re in transformation mode, it’s not about operations at that point, right? It’s about the change. And it’s about where we’re headed.

And so it’s being much more strategic, much more motivating, much more painting the vision. And saying the same stuff over and over and over again, which can get really tedious for the people that are truly visionary. They get tired of it. They want to move on to the next thing.

But you’ve got to stay consistent with the message and consistent with the why, you’re talking about it over and over and over again to get people on board.

Tracy Reznik:

And then say it again.

Fred Jewell:

Exactly.

Robert Amberg:

So expand on that. The role of the leader in the transformation. You’re saying it’s not doing … It’s maybe driving home that message, being repetitive, being …

Tracy Reznik:

It’s communicating, but it’s also being that charismatic leader who is instilling the why and a sense of purpose, and the need for the transformation. It’s giving people, giving the employees the reason to want to change their individual behavior. That’s the role of the leader.

Fred Jewell:

Yeah. And they’re responsible for all that stuff up front, and getting the purpose right and the why. But they’re also responsible for putting the right people in place to get the right processes and technologies and org structures and everything else that goes along with the transformation in place, right? And making sure that somebody’s making sure that it’s getting done and we’re staying on track.

All that stuff influences the other things that are sort of the feelings that everybody’s going to have in the organization about, is this going to help me grow? Is this going to help me make better decisions and have more flexibility in how I do my work? All the things that you’re going to see as benefits as an individual are going to come from all of those things that the leader’s going to be able to do.

Robert Amberg:

Cool. Any big piece of advice for a leader getting ready to go through this?

Fred Jewell:

I think the biggest thing that this type of transformation requires is a lot of reflection by the leadership team itself. And so spending time with your team to talk through, where is it that we need to head? Why? Have the data, have all the things that are going to be necessary to get everybody on that leadership team on board.

And that may mean spending a lot of time in the same room together. Rarely do these things come from one person saying, “This is where we’re going,” and everybody goes, “Aye, aye, here we go.”

There’s going to be plenty of sabotage, there’s going to be plenty of discontent if they weren’t involved and they didn’t get a chance to put their two cents in.

Tracy Reznik:

I agree with that. And to add to it, it’s the commitment to be that united front as a leadership team, that if there is any discontent or grievances, that it is behind closed doors only. And you work it out, and you move on.

Robert Amberg:

Awesome. All right. Well, Fred, Tracy, thank you both for being here. Really enjoyed it. Hopefully everyone’s learned a lot about why focusing on the people matters as much or more than on the operational side during a transformation. Meaty stuff. Thank you very much.

Tracy Reznik:

Thank you.

Fred Jewell:

Thanks!

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