What does business transformation feel like?
We all know what transformation looks like, let’s talk about what it feels like when you’re the one actually going through it
Very few businesses have been able to ignore the call of transformation over the past 18 months as the pandemic has upended the world economy. Two years ago it would have been unimaginable to expect that curbside pickup would be so ubiquitous that even my local Staples would offer it or that our local yoga studios would go virtual.
For business leaders, whether you’re a Chick-fil-a franchise owner or the CEO of Intel, all those symbols of pandemic-induced change represent tough decisions, rapid redeployment of resources, and big investments made with not enough information.
Business transformation, however, is not new. There are playbooks, there are case studies, there are success stories and legends of epic failure. We often discuss these stories in the context of executive leadership, corporate strategy, value chains created and destroyed. But for those of us rank-and-file staff transformation can be hard to identify and hard to quantify. Often, in large enterprises, we have a hard time seeing the full picture of the organization. We struggle to see the forest through the trees, and as a result we can know intellectually that our company is changing but it can be very hard to attribute our lived experience of that change to the bigger strategy.
So, we know what business transformation looks like, but can we talk about what it feels like?
You feel like you’re failing.
Perhaps the organization has just restructured, or perhaps your goals and KPIs have completely changed. You understand it, you get it, you even know why the changes have occurred. But so often restructuring feels like you’ve remodeled a house - you’ve moved the bedroom to the first floor, the kitchen to the second floor, you’ve added a third car garage, but you didn’t reroute the electrical or the plumbing. The infrastructure itself that undergirds how information flows and work gets done remains undefined. You and your colleagues spend more time trying to understand how to get the work done than actually doing the work. The people you used to go to for something no longer do it, and no one knows who does. Even your email distribution lists are wrong.
Maybe the organization changes its strategy every six months but it can’t move fast enough to implement a strategy and execute against it in that time frame, which leaves you feeling like you never got a chance to figure out how to do your new job well before it gets changed again. Change fatigue is real.
You’re worried about being laid off.
Maybe not consciously, and maybe it’s not something you’ll admit to yourself, but if you feel like you’re failing (or at the very least unsuccessful) it’s natural to worry that you don’t have a place in your organization. You feel that way, and so does everyone around you. This feels like competing for resources- the attention from executives, strategic prioritization of your projects, and ultimately budget.
It can feel like conflict between teams who have competing KPIs that remain endlessly irreconcilable. It can feel like you’re just waiting for the next change and doing nothing really productive in the meantime, or perhaps you’ve heard some early indications of what the new operating model or org structure will look like and you’re trying to get ahead of it.
You start to doubt your sense of reality.
It doesn’t matter how well-planned or well-managed the change is. Inevitably, some teams get told before others, only 70-80% of the message is consistent as its passed down and around the organization, and you’re never sure if you’ve heard the final word, or if your friend on another team knows more than you do.
The expectations set with your team by your executive are not quite lining up to how it’s actually unfolding and you tell yourself that’s to be expected to some extent. Except that it seems really different from what you thought you heard your boss’s boss explain. You wonder if you’re the one who is out of step. You might even start to feel overwhelmed by confusion, which feeds the cycle of feeling competitive, defensive, and discouraged. It could even get to the point where you start to wonder if you’re the toxic person. You don’t really know anymore. This is a really tough place to be.
What can we do?
Even in the best of transformation situations - honest-to-goodness efforts by leaders that are guided by transparency, authenticity, and really business acumen and insight - are really stinkin’ hard. In the worst of transformation situations, say, a malignant private equity takeover or distressed merger or acquisition, this gets even harder as the threat of layoff gets more concrete and more and more executive decisions are unexplained.
If I could go back and give myself advice, these are the three things I’d have my Alexa shout at me multiple times a day:
Bide your time. Be patient. The company is huge, it’s going to work through this at its own pace. I can’t do anything about being laid off except to do my best and be prepared.
Change is hard, it’s okay that it’s hard, and learning how to move through it gracefully is one of the most important career skills I can learn.
Think about trying to care for your colleagues instead of just worrying about myself. We’re all going through it, how can I communicate through conflict better? Can I strive to not contribute to feelings of anxiety?
And lastly, one bonus thought for my past self, let go of measuring success in terms of productivity. When experiencing large-scale change at work, remember the growth mindset: celebrate moments of learning, adaptability, hard conversations successfully navigated, and taking the opportunity of shared adversity to build more meaningful relationships with teammates.
I’m not great at any of those, just throwing them out there.