The Mission to Transform
A member of the leadership speaks during one of those full company meetings and shares the mandate – transformation, or worst still, one of those PR people crafted email from the desk of senior leadership to announce a new transformation effort. But to the people who are doing the everyday jobs that need to be done, how does that impact them? What does it really mean to them? Is it just another of those passing rouses of senior executives because this is the strong buzzword to say? Is it really going to change the way we do our everyday work? Or is it just another empty talk?
At SpringPillar, we believe in helping corporates land the transformation they envision through these key principles.
- Framing transformations to be brand-centric creates greater purpose
- Creating excitement towards brand-centricity
- Collaborating across business units to empower key initiatives to support the transformation purpose
- Harnessing the power of Internal Champions for sustained transformative efforts
From transformation to consumer-centricity, digital transformation, to transforming towards a new culture of innovation and collaboration, we share some of the highlights of realizing transformations beyond the CEO speech and new decorations to create the new culture of change.
While many brands are chanting the transformation mantra, one of the questions that comes to mind would be: what is the core purpose of the transformation?
Framing transformations to be brand-centric creates greater purpose
Creating a purpose is an essential guiding post for the tactical actions for any form of transformation initiatives. Purpose creates greater support and adoption. For instance, a digital transformation should serve the greater purpose of what the brand wants to achieve to create greater internal adoption.
Changing from “The company is going to go through ‘digital transformation’” towards “The brand purpose is to ‘Bring Happiness’ (Coca-Cola) and we will be driving some key initiatives to reach this goal.
Those who have fun together, grow together and work well together. We learnt and appreciate the value that people who enjoy one another’s company tend to find better ways to work together. It doesn’t have to be just locking people together in the same room with post-it notes, flip charts, and smelly pens. Sometimes, it’s about going on an adventure together, whether it is a physical team bonding session going through obstacle courses and challenges together, and ending the day with a nice meal and a couple of drinks to create bonds that will proliferate into the working environment. While these seem simple enough team-building activities, adding a layer of brand-centricity helps participant live and breathe the brand, with trained facilitators that guides and encourages the teams as they move through the challenges.
With the established dynamics and a deeper level of understanding of the brand, it helps the team to contribute towards the efforts and the kind of company culture they want to live and breathe.
Collaborating across business units to empower key initiatives that support the transformation purpose
While transformation usually come as a mandate, the first initiatives can incorporate ideas from across the organization. Regardless of job functions, employees can contribute ideas towards initiatives that they would like to have or lead. We’ve had finance department, IT department actively participating towards how the brand would better serve its customers as part of a foresight building project. Who would have thought to invite these supporting teams, when usually brands invite engineers, marketing folks, and product teams, rather than unleashing the power of voices from other departments who can see outside the limitation of the box to bring in fresh, inspired thinking.
Having employees at different parts and levels of the organization championing the cause and being the ambassadors for the transformative efforts would encourage more people within the organization to adopt and support the transformative efforts in their everyday job regardless of who they are. Transformation while a C-Suite initiative, also needs to cascade to every part of the organization to bring the engine together behind the initiative.
SpringPillar empowers organizations to land transformation through a suite of programmes designed to catalyze meaningful collaborations within the organizations to fulfill the brand purpose.