Are You a Transformational Leader?

Most senior leaders find themselves in a position where they need to establish and execute a change or transformation program. It’s almost expected that when you take on a new role that you bring change… and we all like to stamp our mark on a new role.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype… consultants running around everywhere telling you what needs to be done, people drowning in PowerPoint decks that explain the change, and a whole bunch of traffic light reports to convince you that what you’re doing is working.

I find that there’s an important indicator that few leaders look at – how much push back are you getting from the old guard – those long-standing employees who want the world to stay exactly the way it was before you turned up?  

There are a few different types of transformation that senior leaders attempt to execute.

Of course, there is “strategic transformation”. This term covers a lot of ground, and often there’s very little about it that’s strategic. Sometimes, it signals a change in direction for the company. A different focus, where you try to do things in a fundamentally different way. 

This can involve bringing new products to market, or expanding into new customer segments, and these types of decisions often arise as a reaction to competitive or industry forces.

Then, there are simple “restructures”, which are often mislabeled as strategic transformations. Restructures are expensive and highly disruptive. And, unless layers of people are being effectively removed (and you manage to do this without klling essential work) they rarely yield benefits, even in the longer term.

Then there are “commercial transformations”. This is probably how I’d categorize the work I did as CEO of CS Energy. Commercial transformations seek to increase the long term value that’s created for the company investment and returns, and they often involve a shift in focus… for example, from engineering excellence to commercial excellence. 

The basic toolkit of commercial transformations includes things like capital efficiency, supply chain and procurement overhauls, inventory rationalization, and workforce productivity.

Then there’s my favorite… “Cultural transformation”. Man, the number of leaders who have said to me after a very short stint in a senior role, “I transformed the culture, and my job was done, so I moved on”. That’s almost never true… rather than changing the culture, it’s much more likely that the culture chewed them up and spat them out!

Culture change is the catch cry of every board and CEO from New York to Geneva to Auckland. It’s the trickiest type of transformation to execute, and the hardest to measure. 

Many leaders believe their own bullshit, when they talk about how they transformed a business, but the truth is often quite different. I’m always skeptical when a leader tells me that they changed a culture… unless they can also detail the hard work they had to do, and can show me the deep scars that only come from this type of leadership work.

The best indicator I ever came upon for measuring the change was how much pushback I was getting. If everything is quiet, and everyone nods and smiles, and they tell you things are going swimmingly… it’s probably not true. 

If things are genuinely changing, then the resistance to that change will be palpable. People generally don’t handle change very well… and when they are looking down the barrel of major change, you should expect a heap of resistance. The change I led at CS Energy generated a hell of a lot of noise, in the parts of the business that most needed that change.

I developed the rule of thumb that, if people were entirely comfortable with what we were asking them to do, then very little was being done that was different from what they’d been doing for years before my arrival.