How to turn 100 “dig-in-their-heels” executives into Change Leaders
A $3B global travel platform was suffering terribly in the marketplace:
- Ranked last among peers
- Saddled with legacy technologies from multiple acquisitions
- Poor responsiveness to customers
- Sales force routinely made promises that IT could not keep
- Product organization did not produce useful technology on time or within budget
The Client's solution? An 8-figure enterprise transformation to agile methods was launched, only to be broadly resisted at all levels: workers, teams, managers, and executives.
Our Solution:
- We chose a two-pronged attack: get the teams and the executives on board, and the workers and the managers would follow
- Design and build high-performance behaviors around personal commitment and collaboration into every agile team when it was chartered
- Harness resistance beginning with the most contrary executives: create a dossier and an influence plan for every one of the Top 100 Executives
- Use in-person, one-on-one influence to gain trust and alignment: position each executive as a transformational leader and support the conversion of their organization
The Results:
The C-Suite got on board, followed by the Top 100 Executives; the most resistant executives became the most influential, vocal champions
Teams progressed from 35% delivery predictability to 90% within first 16 weeks of their chartering
Feature lead-time reduced by 88%
Key learnings emphasize the criticality of team performance and change leadership as key success factors of transformation
Presented at the 2019 global Scaled Agile summit as “… a superior example of successful agile transformation”
A recent Enterprise rebrand leads with the ideas of change and transformation as key competencies