Chapter 6
Step Six: Partitioning the Project and Building Momentum with Early Wins
Far-reaching change initiatives can be hard for people to visualize, particularly if the gap between here and there, between the present and the future seems extraordinarily large. Change itself is hard enough, but a change that seems abstract and far in the future is even more difficult to grasp. Leading breakthrough change often means working toward an end that seems distant and out of focus. As we saw in earlier steps of the Stacking the Deck process, if your people can't visualize the future in real terms, they'll find it difficult to muster the urgency to undertake the journey.
You have to be committed to your ultimate goal, and you must be able to make that goal crystal clear, even when it may still seem impossibly distant, abstract, or even obscure. It's relatively easy to get everyone all fired up in the beginning; the greater challenge to your leadership is keeping spirits high even as the project stretches on. To lead breakthrough change successfully, you therefore need ways to make the immediate steps clear and to help people—particularly those who may not have been involved in developing the vision but who will be crucial to its realization—see the path to the future in real, concrete terms.
Stacking the Deck is all about preparing ourselves and our people to successfully undertake the change initiative. It's a process, and the less threatening, more compelling, and more achievable you make this process, the more likely you are to meet with success. We've previously discussed the importance of creating and maintaining momentum as we work through the often long and arduous process of implementing breakthrough change. The value of the detailed, long-range planning undertaken in Step Five cannot be overstated. The strength and detail of that plan will help you get people on board and mobilized. In this chapter we look at ways to partition the initiative to build in successes, support the bottom line, and keep everyone engaged over the long haul of breakthrough change.
Planning for Interim Successes
One of the best ways to preserve the enthusiasm that you have generated early on is to divide a major breakthrough change initiative into smaller phases, having shorter and intermediate-term goals with specific, clearly defined benefits. Partitioning the change initiative into smaller goals creates a “one step at a time” approach that feels more manageable and thus easier for individuals to commit to. Ideally, each of these smaller goals will take less than twelve months, preferably six months or less. They provide a series of checkpoints where you can celebrate interim successes on the road to a completed change. Initiatives that lack major deliverables in intervals of less than twelve months are much riskier to attempt, in part because it's extremely difficult—financially and emotionally—to wait beyond twelve months for a hint of success. Without at least a few interim successes, you run the risk of dissipating your team's momentum and energy.
As a number of leaders stressed, planning for interim successes has multiple benefits. By delving into the details of a phased approach, you can uncover issues well before they turn into problems. All too often, as Citi's Debby Hopkins points out, “the quality planning that would be required to break things up into a phased approach is simply missing, and the project suffers as a result.” Instead she recommends taking the time to “think about your plan in more detail up front. Doing so makes every other part of it easier—and makes for fewer surprises down the road.”
Taking the time to plan in detail, dividing a large-scale plan into increments, enables you to anticipate and time each phase and measure the core deliverables that indicate success. Breaking a change initiative into a phased approach improves the quality of planning and, in the long term, can also make you a better, more detailed planner.
It also enables you to show results and increase support for the initiative. Without a phased approach, without partitioning your project, you run the risk of employees, team members, or those you report to simply losing faith in the project. If you are aren't producing results—positive results—top management may begin to allocate fewer resources to the project. Cutting back may make sense from their perspective, because without seeing positive results, they may be left feeling they are throwing money at a black hole. It's not pretty when time, resources, and people go into a project and no tangible benefits come out. With careful planning, partitioning enables you to show results on a regular basis.
As we've seen in other steps, when you're leading breakthrough change the work of selling your vision of the future is never really done. In a very real way, you and your team must constantly pitch your change initiative and constantly justify its existence. You have to provide evidence that you're on the right path. Visible, measurable evidence of success can help you overcome the naysayers and is a very potent tool in your arsenal. Progress reports are helpful, as are completed tasks, but the actual interim deliverables that bring interim benefits to the company are most successful in building and maintaining project momentum. As Renée James at Intel notes: “Cultural inertia works against you when you have a whole lot of people looking for evidence of failures. To counteract that, you always have to provide evidence, you have to convince, convince, convince.” There's no denying that “convince” is a key word when it comes to finding and developing interim successes.
Build In Celebrations
“Celebrate” is another key word for the team and the overall plan. It does no one any good to let a success, including a small interim success, slide under the radar unnoticed. Without a sense of accomplishment and achievement within the team, burnout can become a problem. Acknowledging and celebrating small, staggered successes boosts morale and helps with team retention. From both a career and psychological perspective, people need to be seen to have accomplishments. Further, each celebration can reinforce the overall goal. Particularly if that goal is far on the horizon, you should create small celebrations in all phases of the initiative.
In discussing the challenges of moving through a long-range change, Renée James emphasized the vision and the need to stay energized, to have endurance. She brought up the twenty-mile march that Jim Collins wrote about in Great by Choice: “We're going to go twenty miles down this road, and next year we're going to go twenty miles more, and the year after. Five years from now we're going to be in an entirely new place.” Renée understands that “in the days, months, and years it will take to get there, people get fatigued. You have to keep energizing your team.” Looking back, she realizes that in comparing successes and failures the difference for her “has been in how pragmatic the bridge and bridging strategy were. How did we translate the current activity into forward momentum? After two years of progress toward the goal, we want our people to wake up and think: ‘We're a different organization now!’”
When Howard Schultz stepped back into his former role as chief executive officer of Starbucks in 2008 (after eight years as its chair), he knew there was much to be done. This was in the depths of the financial crisis, when Starbucks' financial future was particularly bleak, and Howard understood they were going to have to make significant cuts and tough decisions in order to save the company. He knew everyone needed to be on board and focused on the right goals and values for the business to turn around and thrive again. And convincing everyone involved would take some significant effort.
As Howard told me, “If you are a Starbucks store manager, you know how many stores and millions of customers there are. You might even begin to believe that whatever you do doesn't matter as much because the company is so big.” But he knew that the mentality of language, purpose, and culture do matter—a great deal. He also knew that getting people to believe and having them be all in is critical, that “you can't achieve bold change if there are people within the organization who are doubting the intent and don't feel as if they're part of the idea or the solution, the tactic and, ultimately, the decision.” In creating a plan to reinvigorate Starbucks, he stressed being “personally accountable and that every single customer, every single transaction, every single interaction matters more than at any other time.”
It took some convincing for people to understand just how real the threats were to the company's survival. Ultimately, as Howard explained, “We had to reframe our thinking and say, ‘It's not millions of customers a week. It's one customer at a time.’ And that's something you as a manager feel you can control.” Working with that thought, Starbucks used “a very basic arithmetic that we shared with the managers. If every store manager in the company added five more customers a day, at the average sale of $5 and multiply that by the number of stores we had, think of the difference it could make to our business!”
As Howard described more thoroughly in his book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, once people understood and were thoroughly convinced of the need for change, they began to turn the company around. Starbucks started celebrating every new customer. They also started sharing that information with the field operations every single day—and still do. Through all their efforts, Starbucks is reinvigorated and is now actively innovating for the future.
None of those improvements were by accident or by luck. They required a detailed plan and active involvement. Convincing partners (employees) of the need and then celebrating the interim successes—the new and returning customers—helped to build the needed momentum.
Turn to the Customer
Howard was quick to point out that he views the need for change and innovation as “two parallel tracks. One is customer-facing and one is partner-facing. To create significant customer-facing change innovation you need your company culture to be such that people want to make that kind of effort.” To turn the company around, he understood that “we first needed to restore the trust and confidence within the culture and values of the company. You can't succeed and build a great enduring company unless you are deep in understanding that the culture drives everything. Everything. And to create bold change that endures you must focus on both the customer-facing initiatives and the partner issues in parallel.”
It's all too easy to fixate on the people who are most immediately vital to your project: your team members and your management. Certainly they demand much of your focus. But as Starbucks learned, the customer is even more important and needs even more attention. Without customers, your change initiative may never make it to completion, no matter how groundbreaking and positive it is in theory. If you've recently lost customers, you need to quickly determine why and focus attention on their needs, perhaps by first attending to a part of the overall change initiative that will bring them back. In fact, large changes often come out of some sort of deficiency in the way that your organization is serving the customer. While you're working to correct that deficiency, remember that customers are still experiencing the old way of doing business; you may need to create an improved method of serving them in the interim. You could pull someone from the team to problem-solve, but bringing in an outside expert may get you to the answer quickly and smoothly, and without taking a team member's time and focus.
Fred Matteson joined Schwab in 1996, fresh off a senior technology position at Morgan Stanley. Today he is a partner at Alvarez & Marsal Business Consulting. In 2012 he visited my Executive MBA class to share his experiences and insights. He had been consulting for an insurance company that had sky-high goals, and he inherited a very aggressive initiative that required a totally revamped project approach to be successful. Known primarily as an online insurance provider, the company also does a great deal of business over the phone. But as Fred explained, “Their cost per call is high and they believed many aspects of their phone-based business needed revamping. When we looked at it, we found that resequencing the project phases and putting a few simple changes up front could have a huge impact on the economics and the project momentum.”
Fred described three areas of change and the impact they had. “They needed to change their call tree to put the self-service options up front.” Doing so enabled callers to immediately access all customer options (such as sales, service, and checking their account balance). Customers couldn't pay bills online unless they were past due. Why? “There was no valid reason—other than the fact that it had been programmed years and years ago and no one had ever reevaluated.” He learned that “many requests that people call for could easily be done on the web. But the company's website had a large, obvious customer service number in the top right corner. So what do people do? They call.” Fred explained that for “most web-oriented material, you want to bury the customer service number just a little bit. It shouldn't be ridiculously hard to find. But you want to give people opportunities to explore your website and maybe find a way to solve their problem without having to call.”
These straightforward fixes “cost very little money to do.” By implementing them, the company “lowered the number of nonproductive calls, drove more self-service, and reduced call handle times. That will free up capacity and save money for them to invest in the more strategic changes they need to do that will take a couple of years.”
The changes that Fred implemented for his client are perfect examples of finding interim successes while creating value for the customers at the same time. Anything that streamlined the call center process made life easier for customers. Efficiency is not just a positive for the company's bottom line: customers want efficiency as well. And the goal in all of this is greater customer delight and advocacy.
Buying More Time with Interim Successes
Even if you have management's support, you can always use interim successes to your advantage. With them, you can offer tangible value to the organization to ensure that support stays in place and that your team doesn't lose faith in the project. In the long run, it pays to constantly be on the lookout for small wins and low-hanging fruit, those small interim deliverables that can demonstrate progress, deliver concrete benefits, and prop up both team morale and management support.
Mike Bell has dealt for years with the complex and fast-paced tech market. He is the corporate vice president and general manager of the new devices group at Intel, having been on the executive management team at Palm Inc. and vice president of CPU software at Apple, where he helped bring out the initial iPhone. Mike well knows that as fast paced as tech is, products take years to go from conception to market. Interim successes and celebrations are critical to maintaining project momentum. He shared a story about a very complicated plan to roll out some new technology at Intel. “There were three basic problems that I was trying to solve. The first was a public perception that the technology was simply never going to work in this space, and that Intel was irrelevant. The second was our process for implementation was horribly broken from a hardware, a software, and a program management standpoint. And then the third issue, of course, was that at some point you wanted to make money in this space.”
The question was how to prioritize these issues. Mike knew that “we would never make any money at all if we didn't get the basic implementation issues fixed. And if we didn't change public perception, we would never sell enough to make money. So I had three huge issues that were completely intertwined.”
This required Mike and his team to go “back to basics to fix the whole implementation from the software and hardware up. We changed the way we did road maps and planned the chips to create a successful proof of concept. We used that success to combat the public perception that we weren't relevant in the mobile device market space. And we made sure we were ready for the trade shows and forums where the press and the analysts see who's who in the business and what is being done.”
The trade shows were critical as places for Intel to show progress and ensure that “our product was well understood by the analysts and the press. When I first joined Intel, analysts and members of the press started every conversation by saying, in effect, ‘It's well known your technology can't possibly go into a mobile device or a tablet. It's too big, too hot, too power hungry. What are you going to do to fix that?’” Counteracting that impression was key. Mike knew that “the most important thing at that point wasn't fixing the flaws in the technology, but demonstrating that it was even viable and relevant. Even the best technology is not going to sell itself, unless you show relevance to the customer base.”
As part of his process, Mike “worked to align all of these steps to deal with the technology issue and the relevance issues at the same time. And then I could take the results of these changes and use them to solve our perception problems. Luckily, those changes were working, and they were highly visible. It's not enough to be good. We have to be the best, or we will be dismissed.”
Mike described a partitioned approach to a very bold and difficult change initiative that will take five years or more to unfold. By dividing it and prioritizing the interim steps, he is able to move forward, to make progress that is measurable and that will support the overall success of the initiative.
Breakthrough change is often about a new way of doing business, a new distribution channel, a new product, a new position in the market. As you develop your plan, carefully consider which interim steps you will focus on first. How will you capture what you've learned from those steps and celebrate the interim successes? How will you increase and maintain momentum? How will you fund it all?
If you follow the steps of the Stacking the Deck process, you will be able to anticipate potential delays and prepare yourself and your team for surprises, both of which could add expense and time to the project. Further, sometimes in the process of instituting breakthrough change, you have opportunities to cut costs along the way. This may not be something you set out to do at the beginning of the project, but as you move forward the benefits become clear. When a situation like this arises, you should take full advantage of it. Be sure to quantify the benefit. You can then essentially reinvest in your own project, using the money you've saved or produced with these smaller, incremental changes.
This brings us to our next step, in which we explore the topics of measurement, metrics, and analytics and their key role in supporting the overall plan and reinforcing support for the initiative, both of which must be done continuously.