Change and market disruption continue to abound and accelerate. Organizations recognize that transformation, innovation, and the ability to adapt are imperative to their future competitive positioning and profitability. Realizing the value promised by a future, transformed state remains elusive for many. Fastcompany's 2017 World's Most Innovative Companies includes the following among the top 10: Amazon, Google, Uber, Apple, Snap, Facebook, Netflix, Twilio, Chobani, and Spotify. Which of these were household names 20 years ago? Think about how products from thees companies have disrupted markets and companies serving those customers. Can you name many other players in these markets?

The Challenge

The book Reengineering the Corporation was published in the early 1990s and became a New York Times Bestseller. The book presented the need for comprehensive change and offered case study examples. However, in practice many reengineering efforts focused on a much narrower scope, often a single department or sub-process.

Transformational programs pursued in today’s business environment are fundamentally different in at least two ways. The desired impact is much more significant and this drives a broader scope. Transformation programs seek to positively impact stakeholders across multiple internal departments. More importantly, these transformation programs also seek to benefit stakeholders outside the company (customers, partners, and shareholders). The expanded scope creates increased complexity of managing a change effort across departments, business processes, and, increasingly, internal and external stakeholder communities. Appropriately energized and tailored change management approaches are required to successfully navigate through these higher complexity challenges.

“Buy-in” vs. “Advocacy”

For many years executives and consultants have talked about change adoption using terms like “resistors”, “fence-sitters”, “early-adopters”, “champions”, and “executive sponsors” to characterize the personas involved in and affected by a program. The stated goal was often to secure “buy-in” from these constituencies and then move to the next step in the project plan. This seemed appropriate and may still fit well with many smaller scale improvement programs.

The expanded scope and complexity of change efforts seeking transformational outcomes raises the bar for executive sponsorship. What does “buy-in” mean? If we associate “buy-in” with “acceptance” or “compliance”, then this level of personal commitment is likely not enough to accomplish both break-through results and persistent change. This type of “buy-in” could easily become “lip-service.” Transformational programs demand a level of sponsorship which goes much farther.

To shape our thinking about this higher level of required sponsorship and personal engagement, we can draw upon lessons from the pursuit of customer satisfaction. Fred Reichheld wrote about “Net Promoters” in the book The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven Worldand we learned that we could aspire to a higher level, one where customers advocate with other prospective buyers on our company’s behalf. This concept elevated the thinking from “satisfaction” to “advocacy”. The larger the desired transformation, the more likely the executive sponsors must be among the best and most effective advocates. We expect these leaders to consistently, persistently, and persuasively advocate for the change process and outcomes of the transformational initiative. This requires significantly more active personal engagement than may have been expected from someone who merely had “buy-in.”

Below are behaviors which must be expected from senior executives in the roles of “Advocate” and “Champion”.

Advocate:

• Voluntarily puts their own skin in the game by associating themselves so directly with the program that the results reflect on them personally and professionally.
• Demonstrates personal conviction to the desired outcomes.
• Masters the vision, scope, and solution details.
• Maintains detailed understanding and awareness of the program execution status.
• Provides frequent guidance and empowers the delivery teams, while also holding each member individually and mutually accountable.
• Communicates effectively, at every opportunity, a view of desired outcomes in a compelling manner that answers the question “what’s in it for me?” to varied stakeholders.

Champion

• Leads by example in:
• Developing personal mastery of the new process and enabling technology.
• Using the new solution as soon as possible, leveraging features and functions as they become available during phased rollout.
• Collaborates across teams by:
• Actively engaging in working sessions to review status and plans.
• Pressing the team to deliver preferred features and enabling technology capabilities.
• Holds everyone accountable – the delivery team building the solution, the training team rolling out the solution, and the user community in adopting the solution.
• Communicates effectively a personalized and compelling perspective of vision, desired outcomes, and ways individuals should engage.

Achieving transformational results is dependent on several elements. Many organizations can hire or buy some elements, such as domain expertise. A compelling vision is a key ingredient, but too often we hear that “there is no shortage of good ideas.” The best ideas are the ones that are implemented well to yield meaningful results. Managing change is often a differentiator between those change efforts that realize desired outcomes and those that fall short. The extent to which leaders feel personal conviction to achieving the desired outcomes can be a key indicator to the health and likely success of the initiative. Is your company ready? Do you have passionate advocates to persevere on the journey?

About the Author

John Catalfamo is part of Salesforce’s Innovation and Transformation Center, a Cloud Services offering that helps customers achieve their most ambitious goals. As a Program Executive, he partners with customer executives to collaboratively create innovative ideas and implement them in transformative ways to propel organizations forward.