Strategic Leadership

Transcript

Thank you, Katie, for that wonderful intro. I do appreciate it. I know I’ve wasted a bit of time kind of dealing with the teams. So today we’re going to talk about the power of executive sponsorship. Basically, what is it? Why is it important and how does it impact our transformation? And then I’m going to close with sort of a tactical set of plans to unleash it, if you will. And, you know, as I think this is a pretty small group, I can’t see the chat. So if there are any questions or we want to create a dialog, I’m happy to to do that. I love engagement. I love interruptions. And I also wanted to just sort of start with a quote. So, Peter, Sanjay, he’s the founding chair of the Society of Organizational Learning. He also wrote the Fifth Discipline. And this quote is really about stepping up, you know, embracing the moment you and and taking ownership of of what’s actually happening around you. As with most projects, there are little challenges. And sometimes there’s vacuums of leadership where we don’t know exactly who’s doing what. And so people who step up and step into the fray start to create their own circumstances or new circumstances, or they they create the conditions for success. It may not be guaranteed, but it certainly is something that’s worth thinking about. So it’s sort of a thought starter. And if you’re familiar with his work and I would I would encourage like reading the book or exploring the society of organizational learning at your leisure if you are interested. So going into it, you know, what is it? How do we define it? Over the years that I’ve worked with customers, I’ve always kind of said, okay, well, who should I be working with? Who should I be speaking with? And all it really means is that we’re looking for someone who’s active. They are a leader. They are responsible for some project initiative or strategic goal. At the end of the day, a lot of folks tend to self nominate. They they they say, yeah, I’m the person. I’m going to do this. And you know, the definition isn’t going to really it’s not earth shattering, but it’s just the person who’s responsible at the end of the day to provide the leadership. And we’ve had discussions internally at Adobe where we were thinking, okay, who is this person? You know, what attributes do they have? How do they how do how would they show up? Because we’re kind of always talking to different customers and it’s different at every organization. Some people have you know, some companies are extremely large. They’re global decision making is is made elsewhere. But we still have to make projects happen. We still have to execute on cross solution initiatives. We still need to function. So we boiled it down. We were thinking about like, what are the main three attributes? So the first one is influence. This person can influence in 360 degrees. They they know who to talk to when they have a particular problem. They people generally want to work with them, but they also have a really good network. They’re able to engage all types of stakeholders, not just managing up or vertically or horizontally. They can actually talk to everybody across the organization. The second one is Acumen. Obviously, to be an executive, to be at that level, you have to have either business or technical or both. You need to have industry expertise. You need to have demonstrated, you know, good decision making. You know, there’s an emphasis on being analytical and data driven. So think about that. It’s being strategic, but it’s also all of the other things that come with it. The third thing, which is something that we kind of debated about heavily, which is about customers. Like it’s all about the customer for us. What we’re looking at is this person needs to be not just a customer advocate but passionate about customers and looking at it pragmatically and saying, you know, we’re not going be able to do everything, but what can we do early on or what can we do incrementally to improve their experience? So the next part of it is it they and they take action, like how do they do it right? So if they’re influential, they would nurture and coach, right? They would be able to influence senior leaders. They would be able to engage them and collaborate with them. You know, if even if they have a domain that they’re in charge of, they still need to work with other folks. And, you know, we always hear about people working in silos and that seems to be a big challenge that a lot of our customers face. The other piece of it is just sort of generating the understanding of like, you know, here’s what we’re trying to do when change is coming. People always want to know, well, what what’s how is it going to affect me? And being able to speak to people where they are and sort of keeping things not just like calm, but just say, you know, this is why we’re doing this. This is how it’s going to change, how your job is going to change or how your role it may change. But, you know, I’ve got you. That’s that’s what we’re looking for here. The acumen point of it is, you know, leading by example executives are great at sort of seeing the strategic 30,000 few view of view, but getting into the weeds, They don’t want to be in the day to day making decisions, but they also want to be able to build that skill with their folks. And then obviously removing the barriers to success, you know, and saying, here’s what here’s what I’m hearing here are the main obstacles. Here’s what we need to to focus in on. So it’s like understanding the strategy, communicating the strategy, and be able to say, okay, well, this is going to keep us from being successful. And then the third piece is customer orientation. This taking action in this part looks like having the conversations with customers, you know, talking to them, understanding what their pain points are and actually moving with urgency and prioritizing. That’s it. That’s the big part, like building that road. It may be like five years or, you know, it may be a long term roadmap. But what what’s going to help them today and take a test and learn approach? We’re all about that. So I just want to like break with a with a quick question. Like if you’re thinking about this and you’re you looked through those attributes, ask yourself, you don’t have to share, but you can definitely type it into chat if you’re if you’re interested. But do these attributes resonate with you? Is there one in particular that stands out to you and says, Yeah, I really you know, I’m very influential. Maybe I need to think about the customer a little bit more. You know, I don’t know Katie, if anybody’s chiming in here, but I would I would love to get your thoughts as well. Nothing popping in through the chat. Okay. If you do have thoughts as to where you align, go ahead and pull it in there. It looks like we’ve got one for customer advocacy. Awesome. Perfect. All right, let’s keep going, because I know. So the importance of executive sponsorship, this again, this is something it’s not a judgment made up of, you know, on management versus leadership. But John Kotter said a guiding coalition made up of only managers, even superb managers, are wonderful people who are wonderful people, will cause major change efforts to fail. And it wasn’t necessarily that they are bad at their jobs. It’s that leaders who step into the arena and say, You know what, I’m stepping up, I’m pushing, you know, we’re going to go to a place that might be difficult, but superb managers are just there to keep things running smoothly and leadership helps us move forward. So I’m putting up a statistic that has you know, according to all the literature, digital transformation projects, they fail about 70% of the time. And this is according to McKinsey, it’s according to Deloitte, it’s according to Process Change management and the other authors and thinkers that I mentioned before. And the big question is why and what is the impact to companies? You know, obviously, if you have a failure and a history of failure, it kind of gets a little bit tough to sell change internally and people get change fatigue and it is a real thing. So the value of executive sponsorship is that digital transformation fails because they don’t have an active and visible executive sponsor. So obviously, how does this how does that role support change? Right. If we’re looking at this person and we’re saying, okay, this is an influential, strategic minded person, they have all the acumen, they have the industry expertise, and they are a customer advocate. The chances are, if this person is the sponsor, that that initiative will succeed. Right. But why? Right. Influence helps drive that strong collaboration. Right. It break. They help break down the silos. And if they’re able to build a coalition because they’re influential, if that coalition becomes the steering committee. Right. And we’ll get into sort of the tactical side of this. But from a strategic focus, there has to be a business case and a strategy that makes sense and that you can basically communicate to your folks and say, you know what, this is what we’re trying to do and why we’re doing it and how we know we’re going to be successful. And the why has to be like we’re doing this to help our customers. Right. At the end of the day, it’s we want to serve our customers better. We want to improve the six. We want to do something that’s valuable for them. So but first, executive sponsors need to believe that this is worth their time and be willing to be active, visible and participate. I don’t have a question here, but as you’re thinking through this and reflecting, does this resonate with you? Do you see this as being a valuable perspective, you know, and what might keep executives, sponsors from not thinking it’s worth their time? You know, is it is there are there factors? Are there cultural behaviors that they are sort of afraid of? Because, you know, also with that daunting digital transformation, initiatives fail 70% of the time. There may be other factors that are at play. So let’s get into the impact. We talked a little bit about, you know, how influence helps build the coalition that can then help build the steering committee. But that really just all that does it. It supports transparency and communication. When people work in silos, that means they’re not collaborating and they’re not sharing their knowledge and they’re really not sharing what they’re doing with other folks. I if I had a dollar for every time I went into a customer where they they sat down and said, oh, this is the first time we’re actually in a room together where we haven’t actually spoken with each other, that that happens much more than it should. Right. We have we we have an opportunity to collaborate to move things forward and share information with people to help them be successful. But that also gets them inspired and excited. So that that is a critical impact on the strategic side, you know, removing roadblocks. Right. Every project needs resources. Every project will have challenges and there will be decisions that need to be made. And then you also have teams of people who need to be coached and mentored by an executive to say, here’s what we’re looking for as executives. You’re in a position where you can actually make people more successful. And then on the customer side, engaging customers in the discussion is huge. It actually allows you to not just collaborate internally, but with what you’ve learned, but also say, you know, let’s look at a different let’s look at this problem in a different way, or I hadn’t thought of that. So being able to build a learning organization by pulling in the conversation, pulling in customers with the conversation is is great. So putting it all together the way that I had it before, you know, it’s like basically at the top we’ve got the attribute in the center. We have the activity and the impact. This is not exhaustive. It’s just sort of giving you an idea of how things map together. Obviously, the literature goes way, way deeper than what we’re able to do today in our hour together. But what I what I’m trying to focus you guys on is, you know, the time to value for these types of digital transformation projects takes time and you have to be in it, too, for the long haul. Right. So from my perspective, the next part we’re going to get into is the tactical. But when you’re thinking about your own or your own organization, think about and reflect on how you would measure the impact of executive sponsorship. Think about what it is today. You can look at the rate of success for projects you get with with an executive sponsor, maybe with someone who might be not visible, who may be slightly active. And it’s on a scale. Right. Think about how you would measure that within your own organization. So now we’re going to get into what what do you do? How do we get there? This is a quote by John Cotter from his book and which I which I also really like. Right. Usually what I’ll see is there’s a number of people that get selected to lead initiatives right. Going back to the same number limits your scale. It actually puts strain on them and the organization. So what do you do about it? So when I started thinking about this and researching it, I wanted to think about it like, okay, there’s I focus on Cross cloud capabilities. I work within the content supply chain. I advise customers on their end to end. So it’s multiple solutions working together. It could be the creative cloud also involved. How when we’re in pursuit of these capabilities, we have to start at that level. We have to say, okay, this is why we’re doing it. And then we get into like the WHO. Any change that we have to implement or that needs to take place has a mountain to climb, but also a huge number of folks to pull along with you. And if you’re pulling them, that can be harder. It can be difficult. Right. All of these teams, there’s probably multiple teams involved in each of these sort of capabilities. So think when you’re thinking about it, this is how I like to present it. So I just showed you the capabilities, but now we’re going to get into sort of the WHO right at the top. We have executive leadership. We then we have this bar with the steering committee, and these are just examples of the business capabilities that we work with. And it’s, again, not exhaustive, but just gives you an idea of what we’re talking about. And then at the bottom, there are other folks that are involved. There could be legal, there could be compliance, there could be various other teams that need to be part of the discussion because they might be the customer or they might have a step in the workflow. They might have approvals that they have to review. There are multiple folks at each level. So that’s why we need a holistic strategy for not just approaching digital transformation, but enabling each level on change. So I don’t want to make this a talk all about change, but that’s that’s effectively what we are looking at. So from my perspective, we have leaders who, if we have an executive sponsor, that executive sponsor needs to build that coalition, right? They need to be able to articulate the vision, the objectives of it, and be able to influence, to drive the outcomes that we’re looking for. The the next layer is the the other stakeholders right across these disciplines are who are involved in each of the business capabilities, who they absolutely are essential for the success of whatever effort we’re trying to accomplish. They can provide their expertise. Their involvement will help speed up decision making. And of course, you know, they have their own teams, right? They understand exactly what needs to happen. And they absolutely deserve a seat at the table. And then you have the functional and subject matter experts. In the beginning, we were talking about influence. You know, there could be an executive leader, executive sponsor who has a go to subject matter expert across the the solutions or the capabilities and say, you know, this is exactly what we want to do. And that person may have some feedback to to share. And they must absolutely be involved right in the process. So I want to go through this. We’ll spend the rest of the time really talking through leveraging the power of executive sponsorship and sort of approaching it programmatically and the first step, obviously, is to engage, right? Like if you are saying, you know, I I’m I’m this person, I’m going to step up, this is this is what I would like to do. And there’s a particular project or initiative that that really excites me. You’re already bought it, but if you’re looking at your organization and you’re saying, all right, we we have to do something, I don’t have maybe I don’t have the influence, but I have the customer advocacy. Who can I get that has that right? So you kind of have to think about like, okay, who are we looking for? What does that role look like? What are the behaviors that we want them to display right there? If there’s an explicit ask around a specific use case or initiative or whatever it is, you can you can tailor it to that. And you and you need to be able to say like, this is exactly what we’re trying to do. And the second step is assessing the current state. Right. If if you’re saying, you know, there’s there’s all of these executives, you know, there’s five five executives and these folks have the acumen and the customer advocacy, but maybe one one has that level of they they have they’re the influence that can get everyone else on board. It’s the person who’s like listening and when everybody says, you know, whatever, like when this person speaks, everybody listens. It’s that type of thing that you’re looking for. The other, the second part of it is looking at the cultural behaviors, right? What are those norms? What are the orientations of your specific organization? Because everybody’s different. All you know, organizations have different values. They have different ways of approaching things. So making sure that you understand and can navigate is great. And then the third piece is really evaluating what are the processes, right? What are standardized processes that we have to adhere to for managing these projects and initiatives? And there might be some that are not written. So being able to say, like, what are they? And actually assessing it and making sure that you understand it. And then the last piece is, you know, I know that employee experience has talent development. They have executive leadership. The coaches, you can often go and see like, okay, do you have this function within your h.r. Do they have a sponsorship program? Do they have any any tools, any assessments available? Right. That you could you could adopt? So once you do that and you say, okay, well, here’s here’s what we have, we’re good on this, We probably have some gaps here. Then you could say, all right, this is what we want to do. This is these are you know, this is the direction we want to identify these specific areas where we can move the needle and we can make improvements. Right. So we’re going to prioritize those and then we’re going to measure. Right. If we’re saying this is this is it’s this today we want to improve or exact our completion of projects. And we have we’re definitely saying that it’s an executive sponsorship role that will help drive success. How are we going to how are we going to know? How are we going to measure it? So having an effective measurement strategy is key and you can always develop a phased approach, right? You don’t have to do everything immediately. You can just do that. The other dimension is factoring in what you need for steering committees, right? Like I said, if you’ve got people with the Acumen but they might not be able to influence at up, down and all around in the organization, but they’re still important. Right. You can put them into the mix with the steering committee and say, What is it that we want to do for these folks? Now, fourth is really writing down what you’re going to do. You know, establish a training and mentoring program for sponsors. This is a little bit, you know, on the on the maturity scale. It’s a little bit up there, but it’s where you would I would want to go, right, Like, how do we how do we start to build this out? How do we recognize that new sponsors may have functional expertise, but they may be really great in one area, and we think that they would be great as an executive sponsor if with just a little bit extra coaching. And then if we’ve got steering committee members who are, like I said, you know, great, they’re fabulous. How do we develop a pathway so we can move them into sponsorship, right, and help them be successful? And the fifth one, we’re learning organization. We test, we learn, we’re data driven. So really having a succinct way to review, not to point fingers, not to not to criticize, but to say, you know, hey, this is this is what worked really well and this is what we should think about in the future. We probably could make these improvements. And then you just kind of keep optimizing it. And then obviously you look at projects, right? What’s that measurement strategy? We had this many projects. These ones did well. This one kind of struggled. How do we how do we optimize that and how do we effectively build out the future? I would love to pause and, you know, get any reactions from the audience, any comments? Does anything stand out to you? Does anybody is anybody disagreeing? Katie, what do you think? I think coming through in the chat so far. All right. I know this has been great. I’m still trying to process that comment of 70% of digital transformation fails. That’s like overwhelming. Yeah, it’s it is a staggering statistic. So for me, from my perspective, I you know, I kind of wrap things up and sort of like, you know, take action, Right. What do you do today and all you can really answer? Do I want to be an executive sponsor? If you are if you’re not, if you you know, it’s people always kind of talk about networking, which is tough for people who are introvert introverts, but it’s it’s not really networking in the way of, you know, oh, I’m, you know, selling myself. It’s more of like, who do I know? Who would I want involved if I had to do a big project and why. Right. And get to know them, you know, learn from them. Looking at your organization’s current state is something that is a great place to start. And, you know, figuring out like, okay, do we really need a sponsorship program? Maybe our organization, it doesn’t really make sense. Or maybe we have something that, you know, we have the change management organization and we can leverage them and collaborate with them so we don’t have to do all the work, but we can definitely propose it, right? We could say, Oh, this is the first use case we want to test. Here are the critical factors for it. Here’s why it’s really important and looking at the team structure and highlighting what roles you really do need. So again, I do appreciate everybody’s attention and I don’t know if we have any questions. I think we’re a little bit early, but be happy to discuss. Questions that we can touch on. So one note that came through was if you have any characteristics regarding that 30% of digital transformation that is successful and maybe you’ve folded in here, but is there anything that you’d highlight is really critical to be part of that 30% that is successful as they go through change? So the 30%. So this is what the literature says and process I I’m a I’m a change practitioner. The basically the one factor is having an active and visible executive sponsor who is communicating why, you know, what’s changing, how is it going to affect them, why we’re doing it and being visible when when you have like a massive change that comes and, you know, obviously there’s probably nuances to this. So I’m I’m kind of paraphrasing, but that is the one difference. So process I did this exhaustive research. They have their own research team and they went and they surveyed across industries, across companies, around their digital transformation. And it was the 30% that succeeded, had an active and visible executive sponsor. That was the one change and it was the right person. It was the person that participated that communicated the vision, that developed a a network and a coalition. That was the other piece. It’s like actually not just being active, invisible, but doing the activities. That’s exactly what they did. I don’t know if I answered the question clearly, but that that’s what that’s, that’s the main thing. I think that definitely led to it. So I’ll give it a minute, see if there’s any follow ups to that. No. And again, if there are any questions that you guys have, feel free to put those in.