8 Leading and Sustaining a Collaborative Transformation
One day not long ago, the topic under discussion in a Harvard Law School classroom was leadership: specifically, how people motivate others to advance a company’s strategy. The faculty member leading the discussion was Heidi Gardner, one of this book’s coauthors. A student who had previously worked at a prestigious investment bank volunteered some thoughts about leaders there.
“The managing directors,” he said, “would come in and sit down with us analysts and talk about the deals that we’d closed—not the size, but the impact. Like, ‘You’re all aware that we recently helped with the IPO [initial public offering] of a medical-devices company. This was a tough project, and the team really had to pull together to get it done in record time. And thanks to that incredible effort, the company’s new heart stent is going to save thousands of lives each year—mostly older patients, maybe including one of your grandparents. And without the IPO, that stent wouldn’t have made it to market.’ Well, I have to say, that made me proud to be a part of that team.”
“That’s brilliant,” Gardner responded, as heads nodded around the room. “Seriously. And how often did they do something like that?”
“Once a year.”
Once a year? No wonder that student ditched investment banking and headed into law. He was one of those people who really didn’t care about doing deals; instead, he was motivated by playing a role, even a tiny role, on a team that helped bring life-saving medical devices to the market. One isolated collaboration pep talk was nowhere near enough to sustain his yearning for a sense of higher purpose for the rest of the year.
This chapter is for leaders—not only those with impressive titles. We mean anyone who steps up and inspires a group to collaborate toward a given end.
This often goes as a missed opportunity. Some companies treat collaboration as a thing that is applauded once or twice in the early days of an initiative, and then left to fend for itself. But the truth is that collaboration is a process, not an event. It’s not just the kickoff, but the whole game. As such, it needs ongoing reinforcement—and lots of it. In fact, it’s hard to communicate too much about collaboration, and it’s easy to communicate too little. The investment bank discussed that day in the Harvard classroom had decided to treat team-building as an annual event, when what they actually needed was a collaborative culture that was actively supported by ongoing communications.
Why? One reason is recruitment and retention, as illustrated by the law student’s example. But another reason grows out of the timeline of smart collaboration, and where the associated costs and benefits show up on that timeline. Consider Figure 8-1. Implementing smart collaboration incurs substantial startup costs—for example, the time it takes to build your network of trusted collaborators, or to learn your client’s business well enough to tackle VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) problems outside your specialized expertise.
The good news is that these costs drop over time as people gain experience. The less welcome news is that most of the tangible benefits of smarter collaboration—such as increased revenues and profits and higher client satisfaction scores—accrue slowly, which means that in the beginning, the investment can be quite high, in terms of both financial and emotional costs. As the organization gains momentum, the lines cross and return on investment turns positive, giving the business a higher chance of continuing a sustained commitment. But what’s needed before those lines cross—and, to some extent, afterward as well—is strong leadership and communication in support of collaboration.
FIGURE 8-1
Reaping the collaborative returns
Our research across industries shows that companies tend to make big mistakes at three critical junctures, which are indicated in Figure 8-1:
- kicking off collaboration, when people need to take a leap of faith
- building early momentum and sustaining it through the periods of investment and negative return on investment
- institutionalizing collaborative practices and embedding them in the broader culture
This chapter lays out a practical and relatively low-cost approach to addressing the challenges posed at each of these junctures, so that collaboration can take root and thrive long term within the organization.
Sparking Collaboration
One of the most common problems we see in organizations that are trying to implement collaboration is that they treat it as a separate initiative, rather than an ongoing process that is tied directly to their strategic aims. It bears repeating here: Collaboration is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
Your best jumping-off point for sparking collaboration is the evidence and findings from your company diagnostic, as described in Chapter 3. What’s the compelling imperative for change? What are the business and talent cases, including the anticipated benefits for the company and individuals within it? Be sure to back up your claims with your quantitative findings, because research shows that when you’re trying to change people’s perceptions and behaviors, numbers tend to be more convincing than arguments and anecdotes.1 If possible, anchor your proposed prescriptions in the day-to-day experience of the colleagues you seek to win over.
Let’s look at a specific example. Carl Liebert was chief operating officer of USAA, a Texas-based financial services company that provides insurance, banking, investment, and retirement products for US military service members and veterans. USAA is known for its passion and commitment to its customers, whom the company refers to as “members.” When meeting people ranging from junior people in USAA’s accounting department to the company’s most senior executives—many of whom are veterans themselves—a visitor to USAA’s San Antonio headquarters quickly picks up on that strong sense of purpose. “It’s like a special club with five generations of military families,” says Liebert.
But USAA nevertheless has had its challenges, in part due to explosive growth in recent years.2 From Liebert’s perspective, members weren’t always satisfied by their interactions with the company. “They experienced USAA in functional silos,” he recalls, “which frustrated them. We had no choice but to evolve.” As Liebert was well aware, however, many in the organization didn’t perceive a problem. So how could Liebert bring people around to his point of view and thereby kick off a journey to transform the way USAA did business? Toward that end, Liebert called together several hundred colleagues for a town hall meeting. As he recalls,
I wanted an example that would really resonate with the team, so I asked, “Who owns the authentication process?” Four people raised their hands: “I do if they call in.” “I do on an iPhone.” “I do on Android.” “I do from a computer.” They could see the silos straight away.
I reminded them that many of our members live paycheck to paycheck. If they’re in line at Walmart, they need to know their account balance quickly—but our authentication was taking up to thirty minutes. They’re embarrassed if they ring up all the groceries and then can’t pay. That’s awful.
Our younger members are used to instant facial recognition on their phone. They don’t understand a thirty-minute wait. Well, it’s even worse for our older members. When USAA was small, a ninety-three-year-old admiral would call us, and someone would recognize his voice and know it was him. Now we send a four-digit code to his phone, but he isn’t comfortable using his phone that way. The board would get calls from their admirals about authentication. Can you imagine their reaction? The user experiences, bogged down in our siloes, weren’t working for our members.
You need to convince people to go on this journey with you—and with each other. Your challenge as a leader is that not everyone is motivated by the same evidence, so the rousing talk you give to one audience may well fall flat with another. Again, invoking your compelling data will help. So will tailoring your message to a specific listener. Most likely, you’ll need to invest in convincing particular influencers through one-on-one conversations, as described shortly; sometimes, you may need to communicate with the entire organization.
Think back to the seven dimensions of smart collaboration described in Chapter 4, and consider what kinds of messages might resonate for those different profiles. For Risk Seekers, for example, winning is a huge motivator. They are quick to see opportunities and are motivated to pursue them. For these people, data and stories about the potential to grow, win new clients, and change the world through collaboration can be powerful. Risk Spotters, by contrast, will be motivated by hearing about how collaboration helps to avoid losses—as in, “Our competition is doing this, and we’ll lose market share if we don’t keep up.”
Along another dimension, Complex thinkers love abstract concepts, innovation, and new ways of working. They will respond if you paint a picture of the intractable problem that no one in the industry has been able to solve, and of the way your team could embrace collaboration to create that elusive solution. If you are trying to motivate people who are Group oriented, think about stories of people coming together as a team to work on a big idea, and the energy created for those involved.
Think about the age cohorts in your audience. Themes of social impact and environmental consciousness may engage the millennial crowd, for example. Ideas about leaving a legacy might resonate more with employees closer to retirement. Whatever your audience—and you probably have multiple audiences in the same group—look for ways to capture the hearts and minds of as many different people as possible.
Building and Sustaining Momentum
In our experience, this is the most common fizzle-out stage. Why? Most companies fail to persevere through this period—again, as suggested in Figure 8-1, a period of investment—because they lose focus. Collaborative transformation requires leaders not only to communicate frequently and consistently in the early and middle phases of the journey but also to structure the work so that they can capture the power of small, early wins.
In Chapter 6, we introduced the need to set shorter-term goals, linked to milestones along a journey, so that you capture the motivational benefits associated with what Harvard professor Teresa Amabile calls the “progress principle.” Amabile found that when people make even minor steps forward on a project, those successes evoke outsize positive reactions—and the resulting emotions and motivation fuel higher creativity and productivity in the long run.3
Here are six additional tactics for building and sustaining momentum:
- Go where the energy is. Don’t waste a lot of time and effort trying to win over your skeptics in the early stages. In our experience, about a third of the typical organization is highly committed to collaboration after a successful launch; everyone else is noncommittal at best.4 So in this phase, rely heavily on the core enthusiasts. Nurture their fervor for collaboration—by keeping them in the loop and seeking their advice—so that their excitement has a chance to catch on and spread. Perhaps some will become formal leaders of pilots, as described later.
In 2019 the oil and gas giant ConocoPhillips confronted the challenge of prompting and sustaining a collaborative approach across a global team of 170 legal and security staff based in nine far-flung offices.5 Recently arrived senior vice president and general counsel Kelly Rose wanted to create a new mindset within her department. “We need to become both more connected with each other—across domains of expertise and geographies—and more connected to ConocoPhillips,” she told a department-wide conference in April, “because forging those connections will make us stronger and better able to serve our clients and bring us more personal satisfaction and fulfillment.”
Through a series of one-on-one and small-group meetings, Rose identified a core group of people who shared her vision. This was time well spent. The so-called OneLegal initiative really took off when an associate general counsel named Suzanna Blades—working with a small group of other enthusiasts—pulled together a cross-functional, collaboratively minded team. They began to make OneLegal a real and compelling activity, focused on changes like introducing short-term rotations, improving social interactions, and revising the performance management system to include collaboration goals. When those efforts began to take root, the team moved on to developing a OneLegal website, creating a Skills and Expertise Directory, organizing a reading and speaking series about collaboration, introducing collaboration training and development, and measuring the larger initiative’s success with data and analytics. Rose continued to provide high-level leadership and inspiration, but counted heavily on a broadening circle of collaboration enthusiasts to carry OneLegal forward at ground level.
- Find and recruit the influencers. This tactic is related to the energy focus, just described, and is also illustrated by the ConocoPhillips example. In many cases, a company’s true influencers aren’t its executive-level leaders, who are often perceived as “toeing the party line.” In a three-year study of collaborative change that we conducted at a professional service firm, we found that the firm’s senior executives actually had very little influence over how people viewed those change efforts. Our findings are consistent with other studies: real influencers are often found several levels down in the organization, where they hold significant sway based on their reputation for speaking the truth, which earns the respect of their peers and helps them build strong relationships.6 Seek these people out and—if possible—turn them into evangelists for the program.
- Create shared language. Shared language helps people connect to new concepts and “import” those ideas into their everyday work.7 For example, the Smart Collaboration Accelerator uses language like “Risk-Seeking” and “Complex versus Concrete thinkers.” These words are sticky. They have residual power. Not long after we start working with teams of executives, we start hearing people saying things like, “Well, I’m a Concrete thinker, so I’m going to focus my energy on the execution plan”—and others immediately get what they’re talking about.
For Liebert at USAA, it took time to develop and embed that shared language. “At that kickoff meeting,” he recalls, “I started using language like ‘experience design’ and ‘customer journeys.’ But people didn’t get it. They were asking, ‘Wait—what are we designing?’ So I learned to tell stories like the one about the ninety-three-year-old admiral, and they started to get it. Pretty soon everyone was talking about ‘member experiences.’ ”
- Carefully pilot some new collaborative approaches. What’s the difference between a “pilot” and just trying out some new approaches? At least three things: selection, criteria, and performance data. In terms of selection, pick one of your collaborative changes and identify a project or business unit in which you can carefully test out that approach. Referring back to the two-by-two matrix introduced in Chapter 3—and keeping in mind Amabile’s findings cited earlier—prioritize feasibility over the size of the prize.
As for criteria, be clear about why you are choosing a certain pilot. GlobalTech, mentioned in the last chapter, chose the public-sector team for a pilot because the company had strong penetration with one product line, the team could see a path to creating integration across multiple products, and they perceived little risk in trying something new. Finding a pilot leader who is motivated and has bought into the concepts is also a key factor.
Finally, data: the sponsors of pilots need to measure inputs, as well as outputs, and have control groups to which they can compare the pilot. For example, how many people teamed up to pitch for new work in one of your core customers? How many pitches were “monoline,” as opposed to bringing together multiple capabilities to do something differentiated with the customer? Ideally, you’ll also have some results to show, even if they’re interim ones, such as press mentions, published articles, inquiries on the website, progress on new cross-silo products in development, and so on. Remember that you may need these control cases to convince the skeptics that it wasn’t just the market that moved, or some other externality. At GlobalTech, this was a relatively easy challenge: it piloted the change in the public sector and didn’t change anything in the other sectors.
WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS AT ØRSTED
What if you wanted to radically reorient your business—betting your future on the part of your business that currently generates only 7 percent of your profit, while deprioritizing the other 93 percent? And what if that would require an unprecedented degree of collaboration across the company?
That was the situation facing Ørsted, Denmark’s largest energy producer. “In 2008, we alone were responsible for one-third of all Danish CO2 emissions,” says Jakob Boss, former senior vice president of corporate strategy and stakeholder relations. Ørsted’s business model was based on fossil fuels, with only 7 percent of operating profit derived from renewable energy. But the company was under increasing pressure—from citizens, governmental bodies, and nongovernmental organizations—to do something about its negative impact on the environment. Ørsted’s visionary CEO, Anders Eldrup, made a radical decision: to completely shift Ørsted’s core business from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
The resulting collaboration challenge was immense. “It required a complete transformation,” Eldrup recalls, “with global infrastructure to be renewed and changed, new technologies to be deployed, and massive investments to be funded. Thousands upon thousands of people had to bring their professional skills and disciplines to bear on making it all happen.”
To launch the transformation, Ørsted’s leaders focused on winning the hearts and minds of a broad range of stakeholders. They did so by invoking a compelling vision of “a world that runs entirely on green energy.”a Eldrup wrote an op-ed in the leading Danish newspaper, announcing the vision and laying out the benefits for both the company and the larger society. “[Our] vision,” Eldrup wrote, “is to … create an energy supply free of pollution.”b Concurrently, Ørsted aired a TV commercial built around an emotion-laden narrative, and crafted tailored inspirational messages to individual employees to tap into their sense of responsibility and purpose. Across the company, new ways of collaboration ramped up; cross-functional teams were formed to find ways of bringing down costs, and working groups formed to share knowledge about key technology and market challenges.
As usual, the biggest leadership challenges arose during the dreaded middle phase of Ørsted’s collaborative transformation. The investments required in renewable energy infrastructure were huge, and by 2012, Ørsted was facing intense financial pressure. To sustain momentum in the face of these headwinds, the company doubled down on its collaborative efforts. “We had started with a vision,” recalls CEO Henrik Poulsen, “and then translated it into strategic business ambition: to become a global leader in green energy. We set a handful of targets to guide our vision, and detailed that into a set of action items for each and every employee in the company.”
Sustaining momentum on external collaboration was also key: Ørsted needed to team with investors, governments, suppliers, and even competitors to bring down the cost of renewable energy to levels that would ultimately outcompete fossil fuels. Ørsted began partnering with other utilities on a project-by-project-basis, to gather know-how in offshore wind energy projects and share risk.c
By 2020, Ørsted had achieved the tipping point, when its investments in collaboration clearly paid off. The company had achieved its goal of transitioning from black to green energy a full twenty-one years ahead of its initial 2040 target. Since 2006, its carbon emissions had decreased 87 percent, its operating profit nearly doubled, and the share of that profit coming from renewables increased to 98 percent. Ten years earlier, the company was ranked ninety-fifth out of one hundred Danish companies, in terms of the public’s respect; in 2020, Ørsted was ranked the third most respected company in Denmark.
These days, Ørsted’s leaders focus on continuing to institutionalize collaboration. The emphasis on vision, sustained by collaboration, has emerged as a way to attract, engage, and retain the kind of people who are passionate about green energy and will operate in ways that promote the collaborative culture. “Most colleagues who join us are motivated by the company’s purpose and vision,” says Christy Wang, Taiwan general manager. The numbers back this up: employee engagement has increased dramatically over the past five years, with employee satisfaction and engagement up 10 percent and employees’ perceptions of Ørsted’s image (the second-highest driver of employee engagement) up 50 percent.9
Inside and outside the company, the battle for hearts and minds is being won, in large part thanks to the company’s extensive and continuing investments in collaboration—and its successful effort to communicate the successes growing out of that collaboration.
a. “Our Green Business Transformation: What We Did and Lessons Learned,” white paper, Ørsted, April 2021, https://
b. A. Eldrup, “Mod ren og sikker energie,” Kroniken, September 18, 2008.
c. “Making Green Energy Affordable,” white paper, Ørsted, June 2019, https://
- Gamify the effort to create buzz. Henry Nassau, the CEO of the Dechert law firm, created a collaboration-focused contest. He identified ten high-potential clients that were then served by only a single practice group, and challenged the sectors to work together to generate a new business. “I dipped into my own pocket to buy the winning team a prize that they would share as a group,” he recalls. “Something special, like caviar.” Of course, the attention from the CEO was far more motivating than the award itself, and the friendly contest created a real buzz in the firm.8
- Heroize teams. What stories do you choose to tell? When something good happens in the business, who gets credit? All too often, a company’s well-intentioned motivational stories focus on the individual. Liebert recalls,
When I started at USAA, we had high [net promoter scores]. Nevertheless, we still lacked consistent processes, which meant we had to rely on individual human heroics—and then we celebrated the lengths that people went to in order to serve our members.
But that wasn’t sustainable, and over time, our emphasis on the individual completely changed. Instead, we focused on the teams, and the impact the teams had. Our communications changed to focus on the experiences of our members and the teams that made those experiences better. And it began to build on itself, with teams functioning in a team-of-teams way, like the Special Forces.
Liebert’s “team of teams” analogy is telling and appropriate. It underscores the power of collaborating on multiple levels simultaneously—and again, nothing succeeds like success in helping to build and sustain momentum.
Institutionalizing Collaboration
It may seem counterintuitive, but institutionalizing collaboration in the midst of success can represent a true challenge. Even after you’ve stuck the launch and nailed the pilot, and you’re ready to roll out your compelling communications, things can still go off the rails. Psychologists know that under pressure, people tend to revert to their accustomed habits and their comfort zones, which most likely aren’t the collaborative behaviors you’re attempting to embed (for more on this topic, see Chapter 11). The same thing happens at the collective level. If your prior culture celebrated individual heroes at the expense of teams—the USAA example cited earlier—or promoted internal competition, people will find it very easy to revert to those earlier habits and reward systems.
But take heart: culture, if fed and nurtured, is sustainable. When smart collaboration is reinforced by leadership behaviors, performance and reward systems, organization design, communications, and ongoing training—especially of new leaders—organizations can reduce the risk of backsliding.
After multiple successful pilots at USAA, Liebert succeeded in focusing his teams throughout the organization on member experiences. First, they identified eleven thousand associated processes. They then created 650 cross-functional teams to work their way through that extensive list and populated those teams with newly titled “experience managers.” Knowing that they had to move quickly and empower their change agents, Liebert and other senior managers pushed decision-making down to the lowest possible levels of the organization. “We needed to protect them from meddling,” he explains. “In most companies, the CEO calls, and the team says, ‘Yessir, right away.’ Now, people closest to the process make decisions.”
We Need to Win. And …
Far too much of contemporary corporate culture can be summed up in the phrase, We need to win! And that’s not wrong, exactly—but all too often, the competition that this mindset fosters becomes internally focused, pitting individuals and teams against each other.
So this mantra raises the question, Who are you trying to beat? Rather than fostering a culture of internal winners and losers, define the competition as the hurdle you are collectively working to overcome. Yes, maybe it’s a direct competitor, as in, “We’re Coke, let’s beat Pepsi.” But think back to our law student at the beginning of this chapter. Far more compelling—and purpose enhancing—is, “We’re a biotech. Let’s beat Alzheimer’s disease.” If you can cast the mission this way, then everyone is in it together, internally and maybe even externally. Perhaps you now have permission to team up with market competitors, with whom you share the common enemy of Alzheimer’s.
This may sound farfetched, but in fact, we see this happening in pharma quite frequently now. The other examples we will mention in Chapter 9—such as the way Natura & Co collaborated with external partners to establish a plan for achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030—are only possible when a shared goal has been defined and embraced.
Collaboration has to be embraced as your organization’s way of working—from the launch of initiatives, through their associated pilots, and onward. That can only happen through effective and persistent communication. Very often, this means invoking a shared sense of higher purpose. You need to help the team understand that they are all in it together, helping each other and advancing the organization’s mission.
And you can’t remind them too often of that reality.