Business Transformation: How To Ace It In 4 Steps

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What are the four secrets to successful business transformation?

There are times when your company decides it’s time to re-launch, renew, or otherwise switch things up. This generally leads to a lot of high-energy meetings, which are usually followed with an inevitable petering out of interest from top to bottom. But what if there was a way to re-strategize your company, be excited about, and accomplish follow-through?

Patty Azzarello has experience working in high-tech and business, having held leadership roles in general management, marketing, software product development, and sales. She's the best selling author of the book Rise and her latest book is Move: How Decisive Leaders Execute Strategy Despite Obstacles, Setbacks, and Stalls. I recently interviewed Patty for the LEADx Podcast where we discussed her secrets to maintaining energy throughout transformations, and how she creates dynamic teams. (The interview below has been lightly edited for space and clarity.)

Kevin Kruse: Move, the title of your book, is actually an acronym you've developed for your system for business transformation. Summarize the acronym for us.

Patty Azzarello: I wrote this book because we've all been in those meetings where the executive management kicks off this wonderful new strategy and everybody in the room is just thinking, "Well, I don't need to pay attention to this because we never do those things. This is the strategy announcement of the day and so many strategic initiatives just stall."

And so the Move model is how to deal with that. ‘M’ stands for the ‘middle.’ What every project program strategy shares is that there's all this interest and investment and excitement in the beginning, in defining what this wonderful new strategy is, and then there's a lot of excitement and clarity about defining what the goals are supposed to be at the end. But then, there's the middle where literally everything needs to happen and so often it's almost totally undefined what needs to happen in the middle

. That's why everybody's skeptical and that's why so many strategies stall. ‘M’ is about defining a course through the middle that everybody can follow and see the progress.

‘O’ is for ‘organization.’ There is no effective antidote for the wrong team. So often I see leaders thinking that their job is to make do with the team they have instead of building the team they need. It is our job as leaders to make sure that we build a team that is fit for purpose. I talk about how to find and recruit, retain, and motivate the right people, and how to get rid of the wrong people because we have to build the right team.

‘V is for ‘valor’ because none of this is easy. Building the right team is not easy. Making resource decisions, trade offs, sticking with strategies through the long middle, and keeping everybody confident and engaged is hard work. So, as leaders we need valor.

And then ‘E ‘is for ‘everyone’ because another mistake I see executives make is thinking that they can implement a transformation from the top. While you can lead a transformation from the top, you can't do a transformation. Transformation requires that everybody is engaged and motivated and doing the new things that the business needs. You have to engage everyone because if they don't go, you don't go.

Kruse: Do you have any tips or words of wisdom on assembling the right team?

Azzarello: Yes. Two ideas. There's a ton of stuff in Move on this in the organization section. But it's really important for a leader to step back and create what I call the ideal blank sheet org chart. Don't start with your current team in mind. Start with your business purpose in mind and how your business needs to evolve into the future. And then draw an org chart that has empty boxes in it and define the roles. Define the roles that you need and define what the requirements and responsibilities the people in those roles need to deliver.

Once you have that ideal blank sheet org chart, that is your guide. That's the right team. Then you start making decisions about whether or not you have people that fit in those boxes. If you do this well, you typically end up, if you do an honest assessment, with some empty boxes and some extra people. And so then you need to seek to fill those empty boxes with the right people and seek solutions for what to do with the extra people.

I'm a big fan of interviewing since those empty boxes are really based on strengths and making sure that when you are interviewing, you are getting people to tell you stories about how they have done similar things to what you need done. And not just interviewing for general skills, but what are those stories? Tell me how you thought about this. How did you make decisions? How did you make choices? And what did you actually do? If they can share that they have done the thing that your future organization needs, that's a really good clue that's a great fit for you.

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