Case Study: Unleashing The Mind of a CEO at T-Mobile

Picture a large sales organization grappling with poor performance, internal strife and division, and team distrust. Now, add the pressure of HQ slashing headcount, all while your targets remain unchanged. In a remarkable turn of events, this very organization transforms itself within months, emerging as one of the company's most customer-centric, cohesive, accountable, and high-performing divisions in the company.

Sounds too good to be true? Yet, this is precisely what our team, including my longtime colleague and mentor Carol Sanford, accomplished when I joined this sales organization within T-Mobile as a consultant some years back.

Remarkably, none of this was achieved by typical organizational change approaches, such as skills training, feedback, coaching, inspirational visions and mission statements, reorganizations, new incentives, or changes to performance management. Nor was it driven by a heroic leader or consulting rockstar wielding their own charisma, agency, or brilliance.

Instead, our success was rooted in a developmental approach that cultivated the capacity and capability of ordinary people at all levels of the organization to think from the mind of a CEO. In the process, they transformed themselves and their business by transforming their relationship with customers. This story is a testament to what transpires when a business successfully awakens the will and agency of its people and grows their capacity to apply creative energy to improving customers’ lives as a way to supercharge business growth.

I feel fortunate to have been part of this change effort, and I share this story on behalf of the many people who jumped in with both feet to make it happen. To make more explicit why we were successful, I’ve organized the story around five “first principles” that guided our thinking and work.

1: Design for potential, not problems

Principle: Instead of trying to fix problems, behaviors, and people, aim for something bigger than the problems, something that’s important to customers and the business and offers an exciting growth opportunity for all. (The problems get fixed as a by-product.)

When I began working with it, the T-Mobile Northern California (NorCal) retail sales organization was about 1,000 people in size. Hardened by an old-school hierarchical sales culture of stacked rankings, internal competition, and short-term thinking, they were, in the words of one of the leaders, a “ragtag bunch”. There was little trust or accountability within the leadership team and different factions were pursuing their own agendas, with plenty of finger pointing and blame to go around. As one would expect, this dynamic was affecting the rest of the organization, and the business was underperforming as a result.

I was warned by some of my colleagues that working with salespeople would be challenging: “They are narrowly focused, they have short attention spans, and they only care about their commissions.” But I have always chosen to believe that people are people regardless of their profession, and that everyone ultimately means well and wants to do a good job and make a difference at work.

Lo and behold, once I had a chance to know the people, it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with them. Underneath the accumulated problems and dysfunctions, it was clear that they loved their teams, they loved what the company stood for and the change it was leading in the industry, and they wanted to make a difference at work. But they struggled to get out of their ruts.

It is typical in a situation like this to lead with a behaviorist, “arrest disorder” approach that focuses on fixing attitudinal, behavioral, and cultural problems through some combination of coaching, feedback, training, team building, and disciplinary action. In my experience, even if there’s a temporary improvement, such approaches are patronizing and infantilizing because they fail to recognize that people can and should manage themselves and think for themselves.? ?Ultimately, attempts to coerce or condition people’s behavior, no matter how subtle or benevolent, just end up perpetuating unhealthy dynamics and frustration throughout an organization.

So instead of fixating on the shortfalls of who we were, we leaned into the potential of who we (and the business) could become. We held a series of developmental working sessions where we engaged in honest and non-judgmental reflection and self-assessment on how the teams were engaging with customers, each other, and work overall. We worked with a simple but effective framework that introduced rigor and shared language to our thinking process by inviting participants to learn how to distinguish among reactive, ego, and purposeful modes of behavior.

The big a-ha moment came when the teams realized that most of the time, they were operating in one or the other of the first two modes. They were either reactive order-takers who were polite to customers and followed procedures but showed little initiative. Or, they were proactive in service to their egos, pushing sales aggressively to gain recognition and financial reward. In the long run, neither way of working was satisfying to the salespeople, beneficial to the organization’s culture, or contributing to customer delight.

These insights, generated as they were by non-judgmental reflection and self-assessment, were liberating for the group, and I witnessed the participants breathing a collective sigh of relief. Suddenly they felt like they’d opened a space to try something new, and to do so together. We began to explore the potential of developing an entirely new and more purposeful way of serving customers. What, we asked ourselves, if we could stop being “reactive, go-with-the flow” or “pushy, ego-driven” salespeople? What if we could instead become purposeful, mobile communications strategists on behalf of customers?

The good news was that the strategic context couldn’t have been more energizing. T-Mobile was leading a David-against-Goliath revolution in the largely outmoded mobile telecom industry. Customers loved the disruptive changes that the company was pioneering, and the business was growing fast. The context was ripe for a group to innovate regarding sales, and thereby to make a unique contribution to the company’s overall momentum.

Starting from those early developmental working sessions, we could clearly see people’s will and spirit rising and their differences softening. Buried deep down, agency and initiative could be found at every level in this organization, but it was fragmented and often unproductive. We were off to a good start, but what we needed was a coherent, overarching direction to enable us to access and coalesce the latent power and creativity that we were discovering.

2: Work with wholes, not fragments

Principle: Engage and grow whole people to work on the whole of a business to serve the whole of customers’ lives; this builds caring, ownership, accountability, and cohesion. Restrain fragmentation that leads to narrow-mindedness, silos, personal agendas, lack of alignment, and wasted energy.

Most change efforts get fragmented from the start, with different levels and functions of an organization taking on different tasks. One group works on strategy, another focuses on people and culture, another takes on the operating model, etc. The result? A hodgepodge of fragmented initiatives that generate a lot of busy work but, because they don’t really evolve the business or its people, fail to create systemic change.

By contrast, at T-Mobile NorCal we adopted a wholeness principle:

• Have the whole organization
• Working on evolving the whole of the business
• On behalf of the whole lives of customers

Together with all of the participants, we generated an agenda and framework that focused on evolving:

• Customer caring
• Operational agility
• People development

First, we aimed to dramatically improve customers’ experience by shifting from being merely skilled salespeople to developing a deep understanding of and caring for their lives. We committed ourselves to exploring what it would mean for customers to be able to “simply connect” (T-Mobile’s intent at the time). We imaged them always able to connect effortlessly and reliably to what was important for them in any context and committed to finding ways with each customer to make this real.

Second, we recognized that the company was moving at a breakneck speed, constantly innovating and experimenting with new products, services, and ways to engage customers. It was crucial that we grow our capacity to change and adapt with agility and speed, while introducing our own localized innovations to respond to shifting conditions on the ground.

Lastly, rapid business growth demanded that we develop a strong bench of ready-to-lead individuals at all levels. To emphasize how serious we were about growing people, Adrian Van Hooser, who led the NorCal business, made a public commitment to fill 95% of manager and leader roles with internally grown talent. This required that we learn fast how to grow leaders.

3: Engage and develop everyone; everyone a leader

Principle: Everyone has the potential to lead and evolve the business, thus everyone must have an opportunity to be developed as a leader. Use every challenge, stretch goal, and inflection point as an opportunity to grow leadership.

It’s common for a change efforts to be led by a small group of top leaders and consultants who define new behaviors, systems, and structures and cascade them down organizational levels. As a result, the majority of an organization’s members experience change as driven by someone who “knows better”, a sure way to generate apathy and resistance.

At T-Mobile NorCal, we aimed to include the whole organization in shaping and leading this effort, which meant developing everyone as leaders. We started by forming a “diagonal” leadership cohort of about 80 people drawn from all levels and functions within the business to serve as a microcosm of the whole. We established a rhythm of meeting with this cohort once a month for a daylong work-development session, using our time together to evolve a new culture and ways of working, while challenging members to bring what they were learning out to the entire business. This approach ensured that we had one conversation that included all voices and perspectives, and this allowed us to build agreement, alignment, and commitment quickly. It also ensured an immediate connection between those who participated in the leadership cohort and their respective home teams, thus accelerating and deepening the change naturally and organically.

We rotated 10-20% of the leadership cohort members every 2-3 months, so that others could experience first-hand what it was like to undertake complex change on behalf of the whole business. Over time, we engaged and developed over 200 leaders at all levels as part of this effort.

According to Adrian, the inclusion of (and investment in) frontline employees was one of the most crucial and consequential aspects of our approach. It sent a powerful message that title and seniority didn’t matter; what mattered was the will, agency, and creative intelligence that each person brought to this important endeavor. Also, it turned out that frontline employees, most of whom were very young and early in their careers, generated boundless enthusiasm, agency, and creativity for the effort—enough to inspire some of their more skeptical managers and leaders. In many ways, they were the ones who carried the transformation, especially during the hardest and most challenging moments. Finally, these frontline employees were forever changed by this experience. They were no longer willing to stay quiet, acquiesce, and accept ready-made answers handed to them by experts and superiors; they found their voices, agency, and unique ways to contribute, and they were not willing to go back to the old ways of doing things. This was initially confusing (and challenging) for managers who weren’t directly involved in this change effort. They watched with amazement as the youngest members of their teams become able to exercise reflection, think on their feet, offer great ideas, and solve problems in innovative ways, often engaging senior leaders several levels above in ideation and vetting of new initiatives.

4: Indirect approach: Capability development, not training or behavioral manipulation

Principle: Foster change through the development of will, character, and critical thinking abilities in everyone; these qualities are also the biggest contributors to innovation, agility, and performance.

When leading change, most companies adopt a direct approach: they announce new strategies, shift organizational structures, proscribe new behaviors, and re-align incentives. While this may create an appearance of change, it doesn’t transform the most crucial aspect of the business: the will and agency of its people.

By contrast, we adopted an indirect, inside-out approach. We sought to awaken self-responsible agency, whole-business thinking, and genuine caring for customers in every person and team, while surrounding them with a developmental culture. Our premise was that if we did this, then the outcomes we were after—a caring, agile, high-performing, and developmental organization where everyone leads the business together—would follow naturally and without external pressure or manipulation.

From the start, we asked hard questions and introduced systemic thinking frameworks and structured reflection processes that invited and challenged everyone to think like CEOs, to take ownership, responsibility, and accountability for the business and its evolution. This unleashed a tremendous amount of will. People were in over their heads, but they dug in, they sweated it out together while supporting each other, they did it with laughter, and they absolutely loved it. Many described it as the growth opportunity of a lifetime.

Gradually, they learned to apply the systemic thinking frameworks they learned everywhere they went. They asked good questions that evoked reflection and invited greater discernment and judgment, among themselves and with their peers. They learned to manage reactivity, ego, and attachments in the moment, focusing on improving the quality of their thinking and understanding instead. This transformed their meetings and interactions into creative yet coherent jam sessions, accelerating decision-making while steadily increasing the quality of ideas, decisions, and solutions. They learned to ideate, agree, commit, choose self-determined roles, and hold themselves accountable for executing with excellence.

The barriers between different levels of hierarchy disappeared. The higher-ups no longer needed to translate, simplify, or dumb-down complex ideas, strategies, and concepts for the people below. They all became thinking partners, with systemic frameworks providing a common language and a shared way of thinking about the complexities of the business. They learned to work as one cohesive and leader-full business team.

5: System-actualization drives self-actualization

Principle: Grow people by challenging them to lead the evolution of the business

This transformation was successful because, at its core, it was about enabling everyone to plug into something larger than themselves. Deep down, people want to grow and contribute because they understand that meaning in life comes from being part of something larger than themselves. At T-Mobile NorCal, we accessed this sense of new meaning by inviting everyone to step up and innovate on behalf of the company, based on finding new and more meaningful ways to serve customers.

On the ground, this meant discovering ways to convey and manifest the spirit of the rebellious and tenacious “Un-carrier” (T-Mobile’s rallying cry) in every store. Each team member looked for ways that they could turn every customer interaction into a caring, personalized, strategizing engagement that fit the customer’s life perfectly. At the same time, each team member was responding and adapting to the never-ending stream of new products, services, and Un-carrier moves coming from headquarters, finding ways to plug them into a meaningful customer engagement.

The demands were multi-faceted: ongoing reimagining of stores and regenerating of what was possible for customers, while at the same time managing ever-changing operational realities. They required new ways of thinking, working, and leading from everyone in the organization. This placed a special burden on the frontline associates who were interacting with hundreds of customers each day. Supported by the developmental working sessions and immediate applications of what they learned in stores, these frontline workers discovered how truly creative and resourceful they could be, thinking on their feet while working as members of cohesive and highly intelligent teams. It wasn’t about merely learning new skills or doing things differently, it was about seeing themselves as members and leaders with responsibility for advancing the corporate whole—customers, company, and the evolution of their industry. It didn’t take long for this group to realize that what it was pioneering wasn’t only about the NorCal organization; they increasingly sensed that the thrust that they were creating could ripple out to affect the company as a whole, and this fueled their will and agency even further.

A real game changer

The results of this initiative were impressive and far reaching. The organization experienced significant leaps in customer sentiment and overall sales performance, in large part due to the development of the frontline sales associates. According to Adrian, agility, adaptability, and responsiveness to rapid changes improved dramatically. The teams became imperturbable, even during the challenges presented by the COVID pandemic.

In addition, NorCal became a talent factory known for growing people and preparing them for leadership roles. As a result, there were no external hires into NorCal leadership during the subsequent 6-7 years—all were filled with internal talent.

According to Rich Garwood, Region Vice President and Adrian’s boss, the changes he witnessed in the NorCal team were nothing short of amazing, some of the most impactful in his career. Rich was particularly struck by the transformation in the NorCal leadership team; the quality of their interactions and teamwork and the level of ownership and accountability they developed were phenomenal, a real game changer.

Conclusion

Reflecting on this lifechanging experience, it becomes evident that the initiative's success hinged on activating the will, agency, and creative intelligence of people at every level, especially the frontline employees. Fired up and rising to the challenge, they brought their deepest creativity and passion to the game, encouraging and supporting each other to surpass what anyone thought was possible. This wasn’t a case of bottom-up or top-down change—it was a tidal wave, deeply transformative for everyone involved.

This case story would be incomplete if I didn’t mention one crucial factor: the courage and unwavering commitment that Rich and Adrian brought to this endeavor. Investing in the development of people, and especially non-managers, was not the norm at T-Mobile. Budgets were tight and headwinds were strong. Fortunately, both Rich and Adrian believed in and loved their people, thought that investing in them was the right thing to do, and trusted that if we focused on their growth the results would follow. There were pressures, doubts, and questions along the way, especially from other company leaders who didn’t understand what we were doing and who doubted that it was worth it. I am grateful to Adrian and Rich for holding strong and steady, protecting and funding the effort so that it had an opportunity to bear fruit.