Embracing a Transformation Mindset: 7 Strategies to Empower Transformations that Start from Within

2. Focus on What's Not Changing

We don’t know how AI or a declining birth rate will impact the economy, business models, or the workforce in five years. That said, certain universal market truths aren’t going away anytime soon. In five years, customers will still want their products and services delivered faster, in a more personalized way, and in their medium of choice. You can confidently plan your transformation on those principles today, and you’ll be able to say the same in 2030.

Some organizations will chase after new technologies to try to stay ahead of those rising customer expectations. But investing in internal capabilities like customer-centricity and change agility will serve you far more effectively over the long haul.

Establishing your transformation foundation on core, evergreen capabilities aligned to a common purpose directly shapes how you design your processes, systems, and workforce. A well-grounded foundation allows you to continuously respond as technology trends come and go (think: NFTs or the metaverse) while being ready to adopt the forces that are here to stay.

Accept that we can no longer map change as simply a “current state to future state” exercise. You will be in perpetual adaptation mode from now on, so solidifying your internal foundation is critical. Having a clearly defined starting position allows you to assess the impact of changes in the marketplace and to chart a new course forward that aligns with your capabilities.

If you go back to interviews of Jeff Bezos from the early days of Amazon, you can hear his emphasis on customer obsession driving its business decisions. Over the past 30 years, Amazon pursued customer preferences above all else, and its relentless pursuit of customer ease and convenience has fueled innovation, growth, and ubiquity.

3. Create Shared Priorities

To lead a transformation, you have to build agility into the organization’s DNA while retaining the ability to effectively set priorities from the top down. Be prepared to live in a world of imperfection as you try to strike this balance.

Setting top-down priorities begins by helping everybody in the organization understand how their work is aligned with the strategy. For instance, at SHRM we are an audience-centric organization, which means every employee should understand how their work serves one of our strategic audiences. Establishing this shared understanding is both an exercise in employee engagement and an opportunity to check for strategic alignment. The more consistent you are with creating this alignment, the more easily you can pivot within that framework when needed.

Identify the organization’s core focus areas once you have a shared sense of purpose. What are the things your organization has to get right to flourish? What are the aspects of the business that would be most affected by a sudden shift in the business landscape? You need to pay particular attention to the part of the organization where those risks and benefits overlap. Many strategy sessions are devoted to defining what offerings are moated or un-moated. Don’t forget to spend time on the offerings that are “in the moat,” meaning those where competitors are making light inroads, and how your priorities account for the potential disruption.

Keep in mind, this process isn’t about prioritizing some teams over others. Instead, you recognize that some parts of the organization need additional agility to perform at their best, while others need a high degree of predictability to achieve efficiency.

From an HR perspective, the talent systems need to reinforce the space for both models and their relative importance. For example, your performance management process should flex to emphasize innovation and transformation while also accounting for the subject matter experts internally who are driving efficiency and consistency.

4. Make Decisions that Matter

Few choices are easy or obvious when you live in a state of dynamic tension between present and future. You’re driven by a breakneck sense of urgency, but virtually all your options rely on incomplete data. Having a framework for stepping back, scoping the problem, understanding your options, and choosing can allow you to emphasize decision quality even in a distracting environment.

When faced with a difficult decision:

Start by assessing its long-term impact—what I call the “materiality” of the choice. Some calls have a long half-life if you get them wrong. You won’t get every choice right, but you want to spend more time on the ones with longer-term implications.

Give yourself adequate headspace to process decisions that could change the entire trajectory of your organization. To give you an idea of how these types of decisions play out, imagine a golf club striking a golf ball. The slight difference of a few degrees in the angle of a club hitting the ball results in 10 yards of difference to the left or right where the ball lands in the fairway.

Next, think about the inherent velocity behind a project. Are you building on existing work? Or is this a new direction, or even a reversal? What cultural or logistical obstacles stand in the way? Are you being clear-eyed about what the change requires? In some cases, leaders perceive their value to be the introduction of new ideas. But piling on “innovation” without giving existing projects a chance to breathe a little bit ends up paralyzing the strategic road map.

Then, consider your organization’s capacity. Every project you greenlight adds to employees’ workload. Overcommitting to too many initiatives spreads them thin and stalls progress. But under-assigning typically results in spending too much time seeking perfection. There are also “fishbowl projects” where the “fish” grows in direction proportion to the space provided. Give the team six months and the project takes six months, but give them three months and the project takes three months. Over time, you’ll gain an innate sense for the amount of slack within the organization.

Be realistic about how long a project will take, in the context of the larger work the organization is doing. Are there competing priorities? Are teams experiencing change fatigue? Assign deadlines that take these factors into account but still push the team to execute with a sense of urgency.

Factor all of this in to your decision-making: When you choose to deploy resources against your transformation, keep an eye on all of these variables. We often say our employees are our most valuable asset, but truly, their time is the most precious resource we have—use it wisely.

Considering these variables will increase the quality of your decisions while calibrating expectations. Having a sense of which decisions matter the most helps you allocate resources and prioritize projects that serve the organization as it heads in a new direction.

5. Know the Power of ‘No’

Too many organizations confuse productivity with agility. In other words, agility isn’t executing the same things faster. Agile organizations create a shared understanding of priorities, which generates more consistent decision-making, which in turn produces deeper alignment.

Increased productivity is a natural byproduct of agility, not the end goal. Simply pushing more tasks through the same system will yield short-term gains, but burn out the teams in the long run. You’re not hurrying; you’re creating more direct routes.

Equally important in the equation will be the resilience to make necessary trade-off decisions as your transformation unfolds. Projects will fail, outcomes will fall short of expectations, market demand will shift. Are you equipped to accept these realities and immediately move forward with your urgency and vision undiminished? Your teams are watching you carefully, maybe most carefully, in these moments. How your leadership team operates through setbacks sets the tone for the organization more than how you celebrate the wins. Swiftly navigating failures with directness and rationality signals to teams how long-term transformation outweighs carrying forward projects simply because they’re on the road map or have budget.

In consulting, you sometimes hear the phrase “zombie projects” as a way to describe transformations that have lost the plot. Teams are carrying on with the work without recalling the broader purpose of why they’re marching toward deliverables and deadlines. To help avoid these scenarios as you’re leading a transformation portfolio, be mindful of places where ego could be a roadblock to shuttering a project. Perhaps teams have grown attached to a project and overestimated its importance. Or maybe there’s reservation to sunset a project that a senior leader initiated. Those are understandable feelings, but they can be misplaced.

Reframe the end of a project as an opportunity to redirect energy in new ways rather than the loss of imagined territory. Capture the moment as an example of courage and intellectual honesty to accept that an idea didn’t pan out as expected. Ultimately, consistent assessment and refinement of transformation will outperform brute force.

6. Add Test-and-Learn Flexibility into Your Plan

Long-range planning can be seductive. A cleanly laid-out five-year road map provides the illusion of accuracy or even perfection because it’s built on the assumption that everything will work as planned. As a leader or strategist, we can fall in love with our solutions when, in our mind, all the pieces fit logically together.

While it’s difficult to hold tightly as a concept, changing the plan along the way is the entire point of your transformation. We are in the business of improvisation rather than scripted and rehearsed performances.

As your plan unfolds, framing both your breakthroughs and setbacks through the lens of enabling your guiding principles gives context for employees as they adjust and reprioritize. Along the way, you’ll find that some employees leave the organization because they prefer a slower pace of change—or perhaps some crave moving faster. You should see those choices as data points for how clear you’ve made your guiding principles. In other words, the speed of change within the organization is one of the best filters for “fit.”

During the pandemic, we watched legions of employees leave their large organizations to join young startups, in part because they wanted to move faster and shorten the distance between their actions and the company direction. In many ways, the trend revealed the underlying demand from employees to rapidly grow and develop faster than their companies were allowing them.

7. Tie Training and Upskilling to Transformation

Supporting an organizational transformation requires you to also support personal transformations to ensure that your workforce is growing as fast or faster than the world outside your walls.

Whether your company is rolling out reimagined processes, next-generation technologies, future-proofing organizational capabilities, or all three, the opportunity to build new, highly marketable skills and capabilities is front and center. Yet, organizations often struggle with upskilling and reskilling initiatives.

The issue isn’t with workers’ appetites for personal development opportunities. Check your most recent employee engagement survey and your recent exit interview data. Undoubtedly, you’ll see “career growth and development” as a top request in both places.

Both organizations and employees seem to want workers to have access to development opportunities. Where’s the disconnect? The issue is that businesses don’t frame these opportunities in a way that allows workers to see how transformation-related development benefits them.

Historically, corporate training was based on seminars and other forms of passive learning. There was rarely a connection between the material being presented and the tasks workers needed to accomplish. Modern workers want active learning experiences that are often not even products of your training team. In a thriving learning culture, managers are presenting day-to-day assignments as skill-building moments rather than simply delegated tasks. Embedding a growth mindset shifts the emphasis from “learning in the flow of work” to “work in the flow of learning.”

The takeaway is to ensure that you are providing learning experiences as quickly as your company wants to grow. Your pace of change is directly related to how fast your employees can develop new skills to drive your transformation.

Successful startups are often great at matching their organizational needs to employees’ need for growth. A small company doesn’t have the luxury of workforce demand planning because it’s making decisions weekly that could change the success or failure of the organization. In that environment, team members quickly decide to acquire new skills and improve execution because they can see how new skills help both the worker and the organization grow.

In those smaller environments, hiding from the work is not an option. Everything rests on activating talent in a way in which a small number of individuals need to push harder for business development, build deeper relationships with customers, and know their product intimately. They do all of this like payroll depends on it, because it does. If you have ever worked at a small company, you likely look back and wonder how you did it all—while knowing you could never develop so many skills so rapidly in a larger organization.

Unlocking Human Potential

The most exciting part of a job like mine is helping organizations achieve their full potential. Regardless of the size or industry of the companies we help, all transformations require leaders who are willing and able to step back from old practices, think critically and analytically about their organization’s future, and understand how to allocate resources in a way that truly propels their organization forward.

But in the rush to embrace new processes and ways of thinking, we must remember that technology is only as good as what it enables. As leaders, we must prioritize atoms over pixels and people over tools. When we’re willing to do that, we can achieve incredible results.  

Andy Biladeau is the chief transformation officer at SHRM. He previously served as the director of talent development at Target Corporation and was a founding member of the Josh Bersin Company. He began his career at PwC, where he led global transformation initiatives for Fortune 500 clients and founded PwC’s Learning Solutions consulting practice.