CHAPTER 11

MOBILIZING THE ORGANIZATION

Large, transformative change programs only succeed when leaders are able to earn employees’ trust, engage them, and mobilize them into action. Digital transformation is no different. However, surprisingly, our survey shows that 64 percent of employees still do not feel that senior leaders have adequately shared a vision for digital transformation with everyone in the organization.¹ So, what can we learn from Digital Masters? To mobilize your organization and achieve high impact, ask yourself three fundamental questions:

• Signaling: Are you marketing the ambitions and the benefits of digital transformation sufficiently clearly to the organization?
• Earning the right to engage: Are you building sufficient momentum with employees by co-creating solutions and involving those who will have to make the change happen?
• Setting new behaviors: Are you actively encouraging a culture shift by using digital technologies to change the way people work and collaborate?

Crafting programs to answer these three questions will substantially increase the chances of success of your digital transformation efforts. Of course, the effort is not just up to you. The entire leadership team should be on board for this journey.

FIGURE 11.1

The digital transformation compass: mobilizing the organization

ARE YOU SIGNALING YOUR AMBITIONS EFFECTIVELY?

In chapter 9, we discussed the need to both mobilize your top team on the impact of digital transformation and align around a future vision. But there is a tougher crowd to get on board—your entire organization. You need to become the marketing manager for your transformation ambitions. How? Send clear signals to the organization early. Make sure the value proposition you craft is clear and has meaning for individuals and functions. And then, market the ambitions at scale using all channels available.

Send Signals

Put your transformation process in motion early by sending unequivocal internal and external signals about the importance of the digital phenomenon and the resulting changes that are expected. The signals can take several forms. Some are metrics- or performance-driven, such as the CEO’s declaration that Pages Jaunes would shift from having roughly 30 percent of its business online to more than 75 to 80 percent within four years.² Some signals can also be organizational. We’ve seen the COO of a large division within a global company be appointed for the CDO role within the same unit, sending a strong signal throughout the firm. Other signals relate to visible branding of the transformation to all the firm’s stakeholders—as L’Oréal did when the CEO announced 2010 as the “digital year.”³ You can send signals in many ways; what matters is that you do it visibly to start mobilizing your organization.

Explain Benefits Clearly

But sending signals to employees is not enough. To market your ambitions effectively, you also need to explain the benefits and make digital transformation meaningful to key individual constituents. Put yourself in their shoes, and ask yourself, “What’s in it for me?” Traditional financial and competitive logics are important but not sufficient to engage employees’ hearts and minds. You need to articulate how digital transformation will improve the way people do their jobs—making their work easier, better, faster, or more fulfilling. You also need to adapt those messages for your different organizational communities. For example, explain to your finance department how digital tools will increase the visibility and accuracy of financial reporting; show your marketers how to get a more refined, data-rich view of their customer segmentation. Position the benefits of digital transformation in terms that make sense to the individuals who will be critical in making your vision a reality.

Facing a sharp decline in market share because of new competition, a global mobile operator redefined its vision: to become the first truly digital brand in the mobile market. To mobilize the organization, the company produced and distributed a video program on all its internal platforms. Board members and the top 150 executives then engaged in an open dialogue with employees and individual functions—using an internal social network—to explain the scale of change, the resulting customer benefits, and how work practices would improve and to solicit employee feedback and ideas.

Giving your digital transformation a meaning for each constituent and function will substantially increase people’s engagement. As employees understand which part of the digital vision they can actively contribute to and how it can benefit their work, they will become advocates.

Use All Available Communication Channels

To mobilize at scale and ensure that the change is understood by all employees, use all available digital platforms within your organization—video, enterprise social networks, webcasts, intranets. Use your traditional channels as well. And encourage open feedback and dialogue. Reaching out to all employees in this way will create the scale, but remember, these tools are only carriers of the message. You also need to work on the message itself. What counts is authenticity. Show that you care about people’s contribution to making the vision a reality and that you value the increased dialogue. Your internal communication and HR departments can be great allies to ensure the success of the mobilization. Enroll them in putting a two-way communication plan together. Then craft the right messages, and design a process to analyze the feedback.

HAVE YOU EARNED THE RIGHT TO ENGAGE?

Creating organizational momentum at scale is not a given management right; you need to earn it! How can it be done effectively? Do four things consistently. First, encourage the leadership of the company to become role models—actively promoting the behaviors that represent the new vision. Second, co-design a detailed implementation plan of the transformation with the people responsible for its success. Third, identify and engage early the true believers, those transformation champions who are willing to take risks in making the change a reality. Finally, find early quick wins of how digital can visibly improve the business, both internally and externally.

Walk the Talk

Mahatma Gandhi famously stated, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” This holds true for leading digital transformation. As a leader, you can influence the transition to digital by becoming a role model for the most important managerial decisions. An executive at Pfizer put it this way: “The way we are approaching it is to say ‘Think digital first,’ so everything we create, every piece of content, every piece of information we have, should be accessible digitally.”⁴ By acting as a role model for the desired change and encouraging your colleagues to do so, you take the first important step in earning the right to engage your employees. As described in chapter 6, Coca-Cola faced huge challenges when it deployed its internal social collaboration platform. Only when Coke’s executives became engaged on the platform did the community become active. “With executive engagement, you don’t have to mandate activity.”⁵

For some tech-savvy business leaders, the act of being a role model will be obvious; for others, it might feel unnatural. But it is worth persevering. The benefits of executive engagement far outweigh the effort over the long run.

Co-create Your Transformation

Digital technologies allow you to co-create your transformation with people up and down the organization more easily than ever before. Pernod Ricard opened up the dialogue with its employees to co-create its entire digital roadmap. Not only is crowdsourcing a good way to generate new ideas and increase the quality of your transformation design, but it is also engaging.

In June 2013, Société Générale, the French-based global bank, mobilized sixteen thousand employees in nineteen countries to shape its detailed transformation plan.⁶ The bank focused the exercise on the three core streams of its transformation roadmap, namely, improving customer experience, changing the way employees collaborate, and investing in the right IT systems to support the change. Using its internal social network, the bank gathered more than a thousand initiatives, which were reviewed and analyzed concurrently by thousands of employees. The most promising were presented to the CEO and the top team for final validation and integrated into the bank’s transformation plan. Little buy-in was needed by the business after that. As Frederic Oudéa, Société Générale’s CEO, explained, “There will be no overnight revolution in our digital transition; we must encourage business-led initiatives from the front line.”⁷

Identify Your Digital Champions

Identifying your true believers within the organization will help scale your mobilization efforts and multiply their impact. Digital Masters leverage their digital champions through both formal and informal roles. These individuals have bought into the vision, the strategy, and the resulting need for transformation. They are essential to connect the top-down digital initiatives with the various dimensions of the organization—regional, functional, business lines, brands, and the like. They ensure that the part of the organization they champion remains engaged and that its specific needs and contributions are represented at the corporate level. No matter what their age or tenure in the company, digital champions are both technology savvy and business savvy. They network well and create horizontal influence to help you implement the transformation across silos. Look after your champions well. They will, most likely, be your organization’s future digital leaders.

But why should middle management not lead the digital change? This is a tricky issue in many firms. As conversations move online and information is transparent and more freely available, middle-management roles in traditional hierarchical structures may need to evolve. Some middle managers may become great digital champions, but many others won’t. This is particularly important in firms where the digital divide—the gap between digital-savvy managers and those who aren’t—is important. You will have to tackle this leadership challenge early. Digital champions are essential to the success of your digital transformation.

Identify Quick Wins

Finally, earning the right to engage the organization is about getting results fast. You will need to stop telling, and start showing, early. Quick wins are a good way to motivate believers and to silence naysayers. But you need a formal process to identify the wins, to elevate their visibility, and to celebrate them.

This is where pilots and experiments can help. Luckily, digital technology allows for very effective and low-cost targeted experiments. Unlike celluloid films, digital photography allows you to take multiple shots and experiment with different angles and lighting conditions with next to zero risks. Similarly, digital technology allows you to experiment with the business and iterate more effectively. Find a pocket of efficiency gains in operations, make a better decision through an analytics pilot, or generate better sales results in a regional retail experiment. Quick wins like these will speak volumes and help mobilize your organization. And if you can scale those quick wins, it will also generate huge benefits to the organization.

ARE YOU SETTING NEW BEHAVIORS FOR THE ORGANIZATION?

Digital technologies are transforming our traditional ways of working. New ways of collaborating, communicating, and otherwise interacting are changing the moral contract between companies and employees.

Michelle Pattison, global agile workplace director at Unilever, explained:

How employees receive communication and interact with their colleagues and employers, in a company like Unilever, has been changing fast, enabled by the technology we have at our finger tips today. In our traditional ways of working, as with so many businesses, time and attendance were the key measurement of employees. There was no argument about where you worked and when you worked. At Unilever, we have introduced our “Agile Working” program, which values the performance and output of our people. For us, time and attendance are artificial barriers that can be removed allowing employees to have a far greater say in how they work. It builds our capability around the world, it safeguards business continuity and keeps a far more diverse pool of talent in our business. It is a win-win all round.⁸

The exact shape of the future digital organization is not yet clear. What is evident is that new ways of working, powered by digital technologies, are evolving the cultures and work practices within organizations. And over time, they will also change how organizations are structured and function. What are the drivers?

Digital technology is fostering a more transparent sharing of information up and down, but also across the organization. Forums, communities, and new data flows are improving collaboration and decision making. Online meetings, webcasts, and video communications are allowing employees from all functions, and regardless of location, to come together to solve problems or innovate. Traditional internal processes have gone self-service, giving flexibility to employees to arrange their work at will—whether people are booking a flight, filing expenses, or updating the weekly sales forecast.

We’ve seen many Digital Masters actively evolving their culture toward building such high-performing digital businesses. It does not happen randomly; it needs leadership. Your organization will have to adapt to these new ways of working and the resulting cultural evolution. How do you start? First, it’s about driving new behaviors—what you reward and what you don’t. Second, it’s about encouraging adoption to ensure your technology investments benefit the business as intended. Third, it’s about tolerating failure and learning from it. And finally, it’s about making new ways of working become the routine.

Make Visible Changes to Work Practices

Adapting work practices and evolving culture involve a multitude of small changes in behavior from the top. Top-down communication, no matter how inspiring, is not enough. There is no silver bullet, but action and role modeling speaks louder than words.

Question your intuition—ensure that your most important managerial decisions are based on the power of data and analytics. Fight against organization fragmentation and silo-based thinking. Encourage the transparency, core process standardization, and operations efficiency that digital technologies provide.

Conversely, lead from behind, and adopt an encouraging style, to allow self-organizing teams to solve problems, innovate, and further your vision. This is management innovation powered by digital technologies and committed leadership. Do this successfully, and you will start to weave a new cultural signature within your organization.

Most CEOs talk about the need to be customer oriented. But Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group, was proactive about it. He invited his 2.3 million Twitter followers to pose questions about his company using the hashtag #AskRichard. By inviting the outside world into a dialogue, he sent strong signals externally but also internally.⁹

To advance your culture, sometimes you need to accept a level of risk. Peter Aceto, CEO of ING Direct in Canada, did just that. Using the company’s internal social network, he encourages employees to vent their frustrations about the company directly with him. He explained: “We may not have solved major business issues by having this bitch session, but with my support, employees know that it is safe to be heard, and that dialogue is encouraged and feedback is actionable. And my senior team is reminded of the power that resides in having real conversations, honesty and open debate. Whether it is the Pandora’s Box or a big can of worms you’re opening, the point is the cans exist, the conversations take place and there’s always room for improvement.”¹⁰

Encourage Adoption, Not Deployment

A great way to fail in your digital transformation is to focus on the deployment of technology rather than its adoption by business users. Sound obvious? Yet how many millions of dollars have been spent on analytics technology with no visible improvements—or even any changes—to the way decisions are made within a business? How many companies have deployed internal social networks with great fanfare only to see a slow take-up or a huge slowdown after a few months?

The way some companies typically introduce these platforms to their organizations is partly to blame. Implementations that measure success in terms of live sites or licenses focus only on deployment, not adoption. They miss the true value of their digital investments: collaboration among actively engaged users, smarter decision making, increased sharing of best practices, and, over time, sustained behavior change. The result is often widely deployed internal applications that no one actually uses effectively. Why does that happen?

There are three main reasons. First, these kinds of digital programs are all too often treated as technology implementations. Poor technical leaders may measure success on deployment metrics, while considering true business adoption as someone else’s job. Second, platform vendors often oversell the promise of instant change through digital technology. They make their money selling products and software, rarely by getting them used at scale. And finally, user adoption programs cost money.

Your true ROI will come from embedding new work practices into the processes, the work flows, and, ultimately, the culture of organizations. Even when the value of adoption is understood, cost containment often takes over. Faced with limited budgets, companies focus on the most tangible part first—deploying the technology. The difficult training and organizational change required for full adoption is left for later, and often, “later” never comes.

This partial implementation drives negativism and can potentially threaten a big part of your digital transformation program. Business users do not see the value and fail to engage in the new digital platforms. The platforms are themselves blamed for the failure. Cynicism sets in. Every additional digital investment is negatively scrutinized, and the whole digital transformation program slows down.

Encouraging employees to adopt digital tools and technologies, and doing so visibly, through role modeling, gamification, rewards, or any other methods, can have a significant impact on behaviors. When adoption programs are well implemented, the benefits become obvious.

Bayer’s material science CIO, Kurt De Ruwe, explained how the introduction of a social platform created an irreversible movement: “You can’t stop it. Once you make it available to people on the right platform the magic happens … Why do I participate? If you don’t do it then your internal employees will find a way of leading themselves. Micro-blogging is basically engaging with just anybody in the organization that wants to engage with them. That is totally creating a different culture environment in the organization. Sometimes, if people ask me to quantify in euros or dollars what the platform has delivered to us—I tell them to look at the change of mindset, the open information sharing, and how quickly information passes around Bayer. Things that otherwise may have taken two or three weeks to uncover, now take hours.”¹¹

But business adoption of digital tools does not happen naturally. It has to be led. So what do you need to do? It often starts with doing fewer things better. You need to plan for adoption from the start—taking into account people, process, and structural changes. Align the investment required to achieve your intended benefits. It will cost money. Aligning rewards and recognition is good practice. And as we’ve shown earlier, so is leading by example.

Organizations that focus on the business adoption of digital tools get better returns. Your active leadership in adoption will ensure that your digital technology investments benefit the business as intended.

Learn to Fail

With the speed of technology change, your go-to-market and operational processes will often be catapulted into uncharted territory. Not everything you try will succeed. The adage “Fail fast, fail cheap, fail often” is not new, but is very relevant to the business adoption of digital technology. Of course, it’s not about encouraging failure. It’s about promoting a culture where teams can learn quickly and smartly.

Experimentation can steer you in the right direction. Digital technology enables a multitude of ways to experiment with new business ideas, at relatively low cost. With the right control mechanisms in place, it also provides a continuous stream of data to measure, learn from, and enable adaptation. Time to market becomes more important than perfection. Invariably, despite well-executed experiments, some initiatives will fail to deliver as planned. But this is part of the game.

The important thing is to learn from these failures and, in subsequent attempts, leverage the knowledge gained. Kim Stevenson, CIO of Intel, instituted a simple program to encourage informed risk-taking in her organization. She distributes small cards that read: “I took a risk, it failed, and I learned something and applied it.” Each card is a license to experiment and take a risk. When a project fails, team members turn in a card to their manager; managers then decide whether to give the card back.¹² Failure can be a learning opportunity—consider it part of the process.

Institutionalize New Work Practices

Use the power of digital tools to the limit of their capabilities. Encourage new work practices to become the routine way your organization works. Sourcing your internal crowd can both help harness the power of your organization and send a signal that everyone matters, not just the select few on the management committee. Sainsbury, the British-based retailer, runs a panel of more than two thousand employees who give feedback every month about key managerial decisions.¹³ Even the process of innovation is being transformed by new digital tools: crowdsourcing, broadcast search, and open innovation. So you need to institute these tools one by one across your organization in search of productivity and efficiency.

But how do you make these changes stick and become routine? You need to adapt your management and people processes to institutionalize the new practices. This should be a key opportunity for your HR or organization development functions to take a leadership role in the transformation. Unfortunately, our research shows that all too often, the employees in these functions don’t rise to the task. So challenge them and ask yourself, “Do I have the right support for my ambitions?”

You have signaled the change to your organization, you have engaged communities and champions, and you are actively cultivating new behaviors to move closer to a digital business. Your mobilization task should be well on its way.

So what’s new with mobilizing in digital transformation? You can mobilize at scale, whatever the size or complexity of your organization. You can co-design your transformation plans by engaging a wider community. Digital champions who drive the change can be of any age or tenure, not just senior leaders. Even more than in the past, experimentation and tolerance for failure are part of the digital game.

HOW WELL HAS YOUR ORGANIZATION BEEN MOBILIZED?

Table 11-1 summarizes how you can mobilize your organization in three key steps. Look at the central questions at each step, and give an honest assessment of your company’s progress on a scale from 1 to 7 (1 = strongly disagree; 4 = neutral; 7 = strongly agree). For each of the three steps, total your scores across the individual questions.

For each step, we have provided you with a target that places you among the Digital Masters. We’ve also provided a threshold below which you should start taking action now to improve your situation. If your score is in the Digital Master range, you are ready to move on. If your score is in the middle range, reflect on why. Your team still needs to work out a few things in the mobilizing phase. If your score is below the average of the rest of the sample, it is time for remedial actions. If it is well below, we recommend you design and conduct a full mobilization program with your top team.

TABLE 11.1

How well has your organization been mobilized?

For each of the three questions, rate your company, using a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 = strongly disagree; 4 = neutral; and 7 = strongly agree, and find the recommended action for your score.

Scoring: Over 17: you are doing a good job of marketing your ambitions; 7–17: isolate which part is not satisfactory, and work with your team to remedy; less than 7: consider developing a specific program for signaling the ambition.

Scoring: Over 16 : you have built sufficient momentum in the organization; 8–16: you need to look at which component of engagement is below par, and remedy this component; less than 8: you need to design and conduct a full engagement program.

Scoring: Over 16: you have started to shift your organization’s behaviors and culture; 7–16: understand the root causes of your concerns, and work with your team to remedy problems; less than 7: you need to start working to create a cultural shift.