Building Great Teams for Transformation
In reflecting on the recent Fireside Chat with Rachel Lockett and FlexPoint Founder & CEO Michael Daehne, I keep coming back to Rachel’s comments about the transformation team. She described how Carousel Motor Group built a great team to roll out their pre-owned car-buying experience, Carousel Online.
There are a lot of decisions bound up in the transformation team – employees or contractors? if employees, which ones? should they be dedicated or partially allocated? the list goes on – and each set of questions has their own set of tradeoffs.
As a companion resource to the fireside chat, here are some of the team considerations that FlexPoint Consulting has compiled based on experience with a variety of transformation initiatives. We hope these will give you greater confidence in approaching the people side of transformation.
Vision, Skills, & Allocation
Rachel mentioned that Carousel built a team with a compelling vision, relevant skills, and largely dedicated resources. Let’s start by unpacking those elements.
With Carousel Online, the vision began with leadership putting themselves in customers’ shoes: what are customers looking for in buying pre-owned cars online? This was shared throughout the organization, so team members could connect the dots between the overarching vision and their potential contribution to it.
In the absence of a clear vision, you risk assembling a group of people really wanting to do the right thing but not sure what that is and how to accomplish it. On the other hand, if the vision and goals are too rigid, you risk missing the opportunity to empower people doing the work. We recommend having the initial goalposts in place for the transformation team to coalesce around and then empowering the team to evolve goals based on lessons learned.
Transformation initiatives often call upon a different mix of skills than may be required in supporting everyday operations. Knowledge of the underlying business translates reasonably well from business-as-usual to transformation; understanding where the industry is going and how advances in technology can unlock new opportunities may be a supplement to tried and true expertise.
We recommend mapping out the skills that will be needed to deliver the vision, then comparing them to the skills across the organization. Some potential team members will be easy to spot: the people who everyone turns to for guidance and/or who have excelled in a variety of roles and efforts are a great place to start looking for transformation team members. Please don’t stop there. Keep asking team leaders who is hungry for a new challenge, who can step away from a “this is how we’ve always done things” mindset, and who is energized by solving business challenges without clear boundaries. These folks are likely to excel on the transformation team if given targeted support ramping up on the functional and/or technical areas being transformed.
With great people identified, it can be tempting to partially allocate them to the transformation team and ask them to continue covering their day job. This often goes poorly, as trusted resources are asked to do more and more, without giving anything up. We recommend fully allocating key team members to the transformation effort and backfilling their everyday responsibilities. Key team members are those responsible for delivering analysis, specifications, solutions, etc. through the transformation initiative. Those providing subject matter expertise without the responsibility for synthesizing or delivering on it are candidates for participating on a partial allocation basis.
While it can be nerve-wracking to dedicate top talent to a transformation initiative, we prefer to think of this as a unique talent development opportunity. You can provide a new challenge to tenured team members while making room for emerging leaders to contribute at a higher level.
In the case of Carousel Motor Group, Rachel mentioned that they had an impressive depth of talent to draw upon, so a team could be assembled for the transformation effort and their ongoing responsibilities transitioned to other teammates. This organizational strength doesn’t just happen; it was certainly the product of hard work before the official transformation effort. As Michael remarked in the fireside chat, healthy transformations are a sign of healthy organizations.
Employees and/or Contractors?
It can also be tempting to resource most of the transformation team with contractors. They’re a temporary infusion of expertise, effort, and expense, which seems to fit the need at first glance. However, we warn against relying on contractors for the entirety of the team, with the following guiding principles.
Meaningful swathes of the transformation initiative will benefit from existing employees with a deep knowledge of the business and with relationships throughout the firm. This could include product owners, business analysts, enterprise or solution architects, and more. Prioritize these roles first to make the best use of full-time employees’ contribution to the effort.
For expertise that you don’t have in-house that you won’t need to use going forward, contractors work well. A good example of this is someone with broad knowledge of the various technology options you’re considering. You won’t need the far-reaching solution knowledge after you’ve selected a tool; rather, you’d be better served by someone with knowledge of the selected tool.
For expertise that you don’t have in-house that you will need to use going forward, work toward building the competency on your full-time team (even if you jump start the process with contractors). Since the solution or process will likely be in use for quite some time, you’d benefit from hiring or training up expertise in-house to steward the solution going forward.
This could include areas where you need more of a certain role to create a solution than you will need to maintain it. Use the transformation initiative to hire in or train up employees on the tool and fill the remaining slots with contractors. For example, you will likely want an organizational change management team to drive adoption and effective use of the new systems and processes, but you may not need the entire team in the long run. Take advantage of contract help for the medium-term roles.
Ultimately, freeing up team members to do the strategic project leaves behind a body of work to be covered. This is likely well-defined work that can be transitioned to others, either ramping up employees or contractors. If you expect the body of work to continue beyond the transformation initiative, backfilling with an employee likely makes sense. If, however, you expect a role or function to be less strategic after the transformation effort completes, consider supplementing with contract help in the meantime while you map out the specifics in to-be processes and systems.
Here’s to Building Great Teams
We invite you to read more about the Carousel Motors’ digital transformation in this LinkedIn Pulse article by Rachel Lockett. In it, she shares even more of what contributed to the team’s success.
Delivering an effective transformation initiative requires lots of hard work – and it will be more rewarding and frankly more fun with a great team by your side. If the FlexPoint team can be of help in thinking through how to approach your transformation team, please reach out to us at info@flexpointconsulting.com.
