Exploring One Proven Process for Successful Transformational Change

Barbara Frankel is the CEO of Coaching Initiatives LLC. She collaborates with C-level executives and their teams to synchronize leadership and foster thriving cultures. In her essay, “Transformational Leadership: Focus on People and Culture,” which she contributed to the book, The Secret Sauce for Leading Transformational Change, for which I am lead author, Barbara recounts her experience with a senior executive and his efforts to transform his organization’s existing “top-down transactional culture” into a culture of ownership where people felt valued and respected.

“The more employees feel connected to a sense of purpose,” she quotes this leader in her essay, “the safer they are, the more creative and innovative they are, and the more results the company achieves.”

Below are key takeaways from her essay about this leader’s approach to successful transformational leadership.

Context for Transformational Change

Upon his promotion to Senior VP, Bob Schimmenti recognized the importance of evolving the culture and improving employee engagement. His industry was changing, and the foundational elements of transformation needed to be right to meet current and future challenges.

To signal this change, Bob set up his office more like a living room (with sofa and chairs) to encourage dialogue rather than presentations. He committed a significant portion of his time to mentoring, sponsorship, and career development. He believed that creating a culture where all employees feel included, engaged, and valued was critical to the company's success.

He developed an experiential learning process where the team felt empowered to innovate and solve issues collaboratively, while also promoting the value of diversity of thought and perspective.

As a result, Bob's team achieved top-quartile safety performance, received safety achievement awards, and was recognized as leaders in customer experience by J.D. Power. Additionally, Bob’s organization scored highly in safety, employee engagement, alignment, and agility in an annual employee engagement survey, highlighting their success.

Four-Step Process for Transformational Change

Over the years since, Bob has managed many change initiatives, developing a simple four-step process for leading such initiatives:

Step 1: Create a vision and use capstone projects to communicate it. Cross-departmental teams working on key business initiatives use experiential learning to demonstrate the vision for the new future and to encourage new ideas.

Step 2: Use sponsors to communicate and gain acceptance of the vision. Assign members of the leadership team to act as advocates (especially in the early phase of the process) in key areas, such as safety, diversity and inclusion, customer experience, business cost optimization, strategic career development and sponsorship, and operational excellence (resiliency).

Step 3: Reinforce and support changes by sticking to the plan. Drift is typical when day-to-day operational issues compete with the need to practice new ways of learning and collaborating. While it’s difficult to unlearn old ways and stay focused on foundational culture change initiatives, deep leadership coaching and periodic pauses are often needed to maintain engagement and momentum.

Step 4: Train, teach, and engage all leaders. Train all leaders and leverage middle managers in their roles as change agents to build diverse teams and collaborate.

By tying business-related issues to the new approach, dedicating time to it, and assigning culture ambassadors from various levels throughout the organization to support others and their initiatives, this approach has proven highly successful in sustaining organizational cultural change efforts.

Bob’s approach demonstrated that successful change happens when you foster engaged and inclusive teams, with diversity as the success enabler. This was Bob’s focus in introducing and enlisting others around the importance of diversity, inclusion, and engagement. He saw things that other people did not see and envisioned a future where the potential of all is unlocked and everyone is valued, respected, and appreciated.

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The Secret Sauce for Leading Transformational Change, from lead author Ian Ziskin and with contributions from dozens of senior business leaders, HR leaders, experts, coaches, and consultants, shares insight, vivid stories, lessons learned, and best practices for what it takes to lead, survive, and thrive in periods of transformational change. Available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats, you can learn more at https://www.transformationalchangebook.com.