SERVICE: ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN + DEVELOPMENT
Helped a Top Global Consulting Firm Successfully Accelerate a Digital Transformation
Case Study Summary
As part of a digital transformation strategy, a top global consulting firm launched a series of initiatives to update technology. To speed up implementation, leadership decided to flatten the management hierarchy and redistribute decision-making authority to teams overseen by a group of senior technology executives, who were given leadership and tactical training to carry out their new roles. But the projects didn’t move any faster. The firm engaged Turquoise Consulting, which successfully identified the obstacles hindering the transformation, including ambiguity about the mission and vision, uncertainty over roles and responsibilities, a lack of collaboration, communication and other “soft” skills, and a failure to embrace a spirit of experimentation and risk-taking. Turquoise tailored bespoke team and 1:1 coaching programs to overcome these challenges.
The Challenge
Client: A Top 5 Global Consulting Firm
Identify and Resolve the Obstacles Hindering A Digital Transformation
As part of a digital transformation strategy, a top global consulting firm launched a series of initiatives to update technology. The projects included new financial, communication, analytical and security software, and the integration of cloud computing and other frontier technologies. The multi-faceted project supported the backbone of business operations and was crucial to maintaining client service and the firm’s competitive edge. To accelerate implementation, leadership decided to flatten the management hierarchy and redistribute decision-making authority to teams overseen by a group of senior technology executives, who were given leadership and tactical training to carry out their new roles. But the projects didn’t move any faster.
Analysis & Diagnosis
Leadership Roles Changed, But Culture and Skillsets Lagged Behind.
The firm engaged Turquoise Consulting to identify obstacles hindering the technology projects, and tailored programming to overcome them. Through review, research and a series of deep discovery interviews, Turquoise uncovered significant underlying issues in the implementation of the leadership change:
The re-distribution of power was never clearly articulated, so none of the technology leaders were 100% clear where their responsibilities started and stopped.
The training failed to address organizational development and “soft skills” required to foster collaboration and communication. These human skills were essential to advancing the initiative, because integrating the old and new systems involved massive ambiguity. Getting to the finish line would require disparate teams to work effectively across multi-disciplinary silos.
To be successful, leaders and teams needed to embrace a test-and-learn paradigm, iterate, fail quickly and try again. But the company’s culture had historically valued perfection and mastery, accepted internal competition, which diminished trust, and defined mistakes as failure rather than part of the innovation process. This stifled a spirit of experimentation and cooperation and discouraged risk-taking.
Although people said they valued transparency, in reality there was a persistent “verbal static” undermining the sense of trust required to communicate and collaborate effectively.
The leaders had never articulated the vision and mission in their own terms or delegated strategic initiatives in an effective way.
Senior partners valued the outcome, but not the process required achieve it. As a result, there was tension between this layer of management and the senior technology leaders. Whereas the partners tended to adopt a command-and-control leadership model, which suppressed the curiosity, divergent thinking, and creative ideation needed to explore multiple solutions quickly, the senior technology leaders moved to embrace it.
Meetings, which consisted of updating the group on different workstreams with no feedback or discussion, were largely unproductive.
The Solution
Coach Leaders and Train Teams in the Tactical and Human Skills Needed to Accelerate Progress
Turquoise delivered its insights to leadership to confirm they resonated, before shaping the direction of programming. Once insights and goals were agreed upon, Turquoise devised a series of workshops and one-on-one executive coaching to shift both the operating environment and leadership competencies. Turquoise worked across different departments and multiple levels of management, to ensure issues were addressed both horizontally and vertically across the organization.
Turquoise focused on moving leaders from a classic “knower’s mindset” to a “learner’s mindset” to encourage more experimentation, inquiry, acting on intuition, and testing and learning to find solutions -- rather than requiring a perfect answer before moving forward.
Turquoise worked with leaders to reframe failure as part of the learning process and create a psychologically safe environment that encouraged risk-taking and creative problem-solving.
Turquoise helped the leadership team build a culture of trust by clearly articulating its mission and vision; establishing a team charter; and creating an interaction model, so they understood what to expect from each other and how to work together to achieve optimal performance.
Turquoise helped the team identify key strategic initiatives in the project and effectively distribute responsibility for outcomes across the group. Turquoise worked with leaders to redesign OKRs and KPIs that better reflected desired outcomes.
Turquoise completely revamped meetings, changing them from check-ins to collaborative work sessions that broke down silos. The new structure allowed people to feel heard but prevented tangents from sidetracking progress.
In one-on-one coaching, Turquoise helped the leaders develop the behaviors, methodologies and skills to more effectively lead their teams and deliver impact in new ways.
Turquoise coached leaders to improve ‘storyselling’ skills to help them enroll, inspire and influence the teams working on the projects.
The Impact
Accelerate Digital Transformation and Expand the Model
Ultimately, the engagement helped the technology leaders and teams accelerate digital transformation by clarifying priorities, eliminating confusion, articulating a clear plan forward for all departments and moving from siloed endeavors to true cross-functional collaboration. Colleagues who had worked together for ten to twenty years gained a new appreciation for each other and learned to play to their strengths.
The outcome was so constructive the client asked Turquoise to help it expand the program to other parts of the organization. Turquoise developed a “train the trainer” program to help embed the model throughout the firm, positioning it to maintain its competitive advantage.
Illustrations by Tara Jacoby