“What got us here, won’t get us there” is the sentence that keeps leaders awake at night, especially in a transformation situation. Organizational transformation addresses this concern head-on and from a positive angle: Taking into account appreciation for your successful past, it’s time to think of different ways to lead and to be led.
We believe any successful transformation is a leadership challenge. We collaborate with you to explore organizational transformation through multiple lenses. By approaching it from a leadership angle, we are able to influence your organization’s collective mindset and company culture. In the end, transformation requires a community that is willing and able to do the hard work of innovation, and we believe it all starts with leadership.
Digitalization, complexity, and uncertainty are not addressed by different technologies and processes — even if they might be part of the answer. They require a different way of collectively sparking ideas, experimenting and sometimes failing, and coordinating and cooperating on all levels of an organization. This is the real challenge of transformation: How to establish and role-model a new collective mindset, in which everything above becomes the “new normal”.
Transformation is about leadership in the actions of individuals, teams, and larger groups of leaders. We at Egon Zehnder have created an entire repertoire of diagnostic tools and advisory approaches aimed at organization-wide systemic impact. Our Transformational Leadership Diagnostics allow us to identify how transformative actual challenges are and how best to orchestrate the journey. The Innovation Quotient Diagnostics (IQ), co-created with Linda Hill, a leading scientist on innovation at scale, surfaces an organization’s ability and willingness to innovate and evaluates its organizational design and collaboration model.
Together with your organization’s concentric circles of leaders, radiating outward from the CEO to the top 300 executives, we co-create the key elements of the transformation journey with a goal of quick, visible impact. An organization’s mindset starts to change when the new process allows for mastery of difficult and highly business-relevant tasks. Once the organization starts to observe not only “what” is happening, but also “how” it is achieved and “why” it is embarking on the journey, the transformation gains momentum.
Our ongoing dialogues with many change leaders around the globe have equipped us to build the tools and practices to orchestrate these new transformation journeys. We leverage the personal repertoire of each leader we have the privilege to work with, as well as the inherent potential of the organization to unleash transformation. And we build on our established practice of Leadership Development to help leaders to grow into truly transformative role models.
Our co-shaping of transformation journeys allows us, in turn, to diagnose the transformation needs of top leaders in a unique way. We help boards and nominating committees identify CEOs who have the right repertoire for their companies’ upcoming challenges. This has shaped our unique approach to CEO Succession.
For the executive team, we have developed specific diagnostic tools and working formats to help them leverage their full potential by creating alignment and trust. We design and facilitate team off-sites as well as ongoing coaching, based on our Team Effectiveness diagnostics and framework.
We believe organizational development is a critical component of any transformation. The organization design must be both aligned to the strategy and a source of competitive advantage. The right organization design will enable collaboration, agility, and growth for both the company and its executives. Also critical is the organization’s governance, decision-making process, and the design of its incentives.
