The ship that wouldn't sail

I remember the sinking feeling - a weight bearing down on my shoulders - as I realized the team was not going to deliver on the commitment I had made to the business. I had been hand-picked to lead a transformational project in which we were shifting from a traditional call-plan based approach to delivering service through a more data-driven model. I had secured the funding, assembled the team, and designed the plan, but we were struggling to deliver on the milestones. Worse, many days felt heavy and hard - for both me and the team.

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What went wrong? Let me shine some light on what I learned.

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CRUISE SHIP VS. CREW BOAT

"You have to set and sell your vision for the team." This was some of the early coaching I got many years ago as a new people manager, and it is still considered a foundational tenet of leadership.

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Setting the vision was one of my first areas of focus when I set out to lead the transformational project. I painted the possibility of what our future could look like and sold that vision up to get funding. I shared it with the cross-functional team tasked with helping me bring the vision to fruition, and I thought I had great buy-in.

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But, when I realized our project team was stuck, our boat still in the marina, I started looking into the research on leading digital transformation. Some of the most compelling work I came across was from Linda Hill, a leadership professor at Harvard Business School. Among her many findings is that successful innovation leaders enroll teams not with a vision, but rather behind a purpose. Instead of painting a picture of where you're going and the roadmap to get there, successful innovation leaders engage teams in identifying and rallying behind the purpose - the "why" behind the work. That awareness and alignment to a common purpose is what allows the team to work collectively to figure out how to apply new thinking and new technology in service to that purpose.

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The language may seem nuanced - purpose in place of vision - but the implications are meaningful. It's the difference between acting as the captain of a cruise ship and being the coxswain in the boat. It is a pivot from command to collaboration - or even better, co-creation. Why is that important? Because technology is accelerating so quickly that it's hard (impossible?) to have a clear vision of the future. We have to be structured in way that supports learning and creative adaptation of the plan.

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DATA-INFORMED VS. DATA DRIVEN

The hype is everywhere, with headlines like: AI Poses 'Risk of Extinction,' Leaders Warn, AI Is Not a One-Time Bomb but a Slow Burn of Devastation, and Is AI Coming for Your Job? The possibilities enabled by AI are both promising and petrifying. But, regardless of how you see it - it means change.

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When I shared my vision for the transformational project to the team that would be most impacted - the team that would be responsible for shifting from a traditional call-plan approach to a more data-driven model - I didn't show up with enough empathy. I thought the promise of more personalized service and a more efficient model would win everyone over.

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What I didn't reflect on was that a data-driven approach meant CHANGE. Humans don't like change: it makes us uncomfortable, uncertain, insecure. The natural instinct for most will be to fight it or freeze, and while I was pushing to get our boat out of the harbor I had team members holding tight to the ropes that held us at dock.

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In reflection, I could have shown much more empathy and been smarter with my language choices. The concept of "data-driven" is a threat to the value that team members bring with their own historical knowledge: it's suggestive that data > human. A pivot to "data-informed" may have softened the threat and quelled fears that machine-driven models would supplant the humans doing the work. A stronger curiosity on my part about how the team was feeling certainly would have helped. And co-creation of the narrative and the plan for new ways of working may have been enough to loosen the ropes on the cleats.

CHANGING COURSE

We all know it, most of us dread it: the yellow - or, worse - red box on the project plan. It is just a color-shaded box, but for someone who places a high value on accountability (like me) it can feel like a mark on your character. The value I place on personal accountability comes into tension with my intellectual understanding that growth and innovation come with unknowns, pivots and missteps.

What if - instead of squirming in my seat - I had done more to own and celebrate the red and the yellow as signs of learning - or as invitations for help? Sure, some of those reds and yellows were due to challenges I had in getting the team to move forward. But many were legitimate learnings. I could have brought more benefit to the organization and the team if we took pause to celebrate, and then to rework the plan. In the past, I've used a "Courageous Penguin" award with teams (borrowed from Google) to celebrate individuals or teams who took the first leap - regardless of whether it led to success or a pivot. I think it's time to bring it back!

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LIGHT ON THE HORIZON

While I've shed light on some of the mistakes and learning from this project, it wasn't a failure. Sure, it moved more slowly than I had hoped. Sometimes it felt hard and heavy. But we did get the boat out of the harbor. We launched a pilot - with a learning plan and a commitment to iterate and co-create. And that took us one big step towards a brighter future for patients.

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

• Leading Innovation: https://www.exed.hbs.edu/insights/leading-building-culture-innovation-linda-hill-maurizio-travaglini
• Leadership for a New Era: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/new-leadership-for-a-new-era-of-thriving-organizations
• Culture Hacking Innovation: https://community.thriveglobal.com/culture-hacking-5-examples-you-can-borrow/